The Vampire Diaries Season 4 Episode 12 recap
“Dad ,There’s A Dance Tonight!
“Not Anymore”
I mean, these words made me really hope this was going to be a Footloose tribute – and you did too, what with the 80s music taking you back. What we got instead was a little more directly murderous on Elena’s part, but I mean, the sentiment is the same, right? Good girl has way more chutzpah than we bargained for? And the pure of heart get to have their pride at the dance, even if they don’t get the guy? (Can’t you just see Rebecca screaming “No! What about prom?” I now need to see that before I can successfully die happy.)
Unfortunately, there was a little more bad acting from Bonnie than I had originally calculated, and call me crazy, but did it run in the family a little bit? Like Mom seemed like she couldn’t lift her head up straight, and if I didn’t know better I’d say some of her lines were badly ADR’ed. For the ninety-eighth time, Bonnie’s story was so separate from the others -- even though Jeremy was at her house for a split second (“Can Bonnie come out and play?” “NO”) -- that I couldn’t get behind it. Also, shouldn’t Bonnie, who’s been basically parentless for seasons, be laughing at her parents who are trying to physically hold her in the house? Like why is she even entertaining them? Why do we have to be subjected to the teenage whining of “What, did you read that in a book somewhere?” I mean, Bonnie practically pays a mortgage, that’s how not a teenager she is.
The rest of the show moved along nicely. That trope of Rebecca wanting to be a real girl not only doesn’t get old, it also served an actual purpose tonight when she got to be the noble one giving everything up. She wants a cure, too, because she wants a shot at being human for real. Of course, she was the one I felt for, most of all, and she was the one who had actual sadness that Kol was dead.
He was fun, wasn’t he, Kol? He, like Rebecca, liked the modern world, and I think he kind of liked Elena – not romantically, I mean, just kind of got a kick out of her, which I haven’t seen in the longest time, Elena as person, as sidekick. I enjoyed it. And I enjoyed Elena even though a bunch of you were all losing your minds last week now that she’s a murderer, or something.
I am not going to bore you by telling you that I can’t get it up for Jeremy Gilbert still, but I am going to tell you that I wish we could have a scene with Caroline shut up in a dungeon somewhere as well as Damon. I miss that girl two weeks in a row, and while I know it’s about cast costs and all those kinds of important things that have to be dealt with, I miss Mary Sunshine way more than I expected when she’s not around – she adds something to the show, and I’d almost even take April if I could have my girl around. Do I have a fever?
So that leaves us with Stefan, and whether the fact that Rebecca didn’t manipulate him into trying to feel something made him feel something. I do think, in regular, awful teenage boy tradition that he’s more interested in her given that she wasn’t actively trying to seduce him back into her. She played it a little cool, and Rebecca can be an aspiring teenager all she likes, but that’s the kind of skill acquired over decades and decades, and when she gets to school, I hope very much that she starts a cottage industry of giving dating advice out of her locker.
Stefan as unfeeling douche is no fun because he’s not having any fun with it – or wasn’t. But something about being so easily able to impress a girl who knew nothing about the 80s and wanted to be swept off her feet…there was something there. I didn’t appreciate when he and Damon and Elena got all high school again with “oh and guess who HE slept with”, but Stefan and Rebecca, in the gym, with her damned hat? I looked up. I was interested. Something about it mattered.
It’s a start.
