Therefore, thoughts on Neal’s inner angel and demon after the jump…

…the angel being Peter and the demon being Moz, I think. On the one hand, that seems like exaggeration – Peter’s not perfect and Moz is certainly not evil – but on the other hand, they’re playing those roles more consistently than they have in previous seasons, and it interests me how they’re being used to sway Neal’s plans and emotions.

Peter is obviously Neal’s shining light, the person who believes he can be a law-abiding force for good in the world, and he has lost a lot of what might not have appealed so much to Neal at the start as we’ve gone along. A lot of that has been slow-burning, with him slowly unbending more and more regarding the rules, Neal’s criminal tendencies and general spontaneity when working a case, but ‘Veiled Threat’ tweaked a part of Peter’s character that’s always irked me into something much more pleasing and much more Neal-aligned: his behaviour around women who are not Elle. They haven’t totally rewritten his character, but watching him approach the speed-date as a case, scouting out weaknesses beforehand and presenting a much more appealing picture than Neal’s shallow charm was deeply enjoyable to watch. Having him as someone who does not lack charm but simply does not rely on it as much as Neal does makes him a much more interesting foil, to me. So here we are, in a position where he is not quite someone Neal would ever aspire to be - still rather strait-laced, enjoying the simple pleasures of life – but definitely someone he can respect and whose good opinion matters deeply to him.

Moz, on the other hand, is being very cleverly written and played such that he is clearly pushing Neal in the wrong direction, but has not gone so far as to be unlikeable. He’s misguided, certainly, but he’s doing what he thinks is best for his friend. It’s hard to tell where there is a little bit of selfishness in there too – whether he simply wants Neal as his own friend with no other loyalties – but he’s certainly not letting himself care about Neal’s issues with leaving or suggest any compromise. (Surely an obvious option would be to wait another year and a bit until Neal is free of his tracking anklet? That would make immediate pursuit considerably less likely, and allow him to keep his own identity so long as they could keep themselves far enough removed from the fencing of the stolen items that nothing could be proven.) His irritation with Neal half-confessing he doesn’t want to leave was clearly played to put him in the wrong as far as the audience is concerned – he just doesn’t want to hear it. He says that ‘this isn’t who we are’ but doesn’t offer an alternative other than ‘we are people with money on a Pacific island.’ Which sounds nice, obviously, but doesn’t help Neal in the slightest with his current dual identity, neither of which is that person (yet).

So where does that leave Neal? Stuck between the two of them, swinging back and forth a bit like an erratic pendulum with some sort of magnetic charge that varies according to the time of day. He seems to follow Moz mostly out of habit, with a goodly helping of loyalty thrown in, and probably underneath it all an unstated certainty that being a con-man is his calling. If he had stayed in prison until the end of his original 4-year term, I don’t think there’s even a hint that he wouldn’t immediately have picked up where he left off – just with a little more caution and cynicism, perhaps. If asked to his face, I think he’d still aver that he’s a natural criminal and is merely held in check by his tracking anklet. (Can you tell that I just really wanted to use the word ‘aver’ there? It’s a nice word.) But his inner conflict has certainly ramped up a gear this season thanks to the possibility of imminent escape and millionaire-dom, and it’s beginning to show on the surface in intriguing ways. On the one hand he goes along with all Moz’s plans unquestioningly, he seems not to notice when he describes his current existence to Jones as the definition of having it all, and he tells Peter to his face that he never hit rock bottom and by extension has never wanted to stop being a con artist. But on the other hand… well, he does that last one. He has been flagging up to Peter that something is not right all through these episodes, making occasional meaningful statements about how it’s hard to say goodbye and generally acting like someone to whom every little reminder that he and Peter work well together is a little saddening. It finally crossed my mind last week, as he sat across the table from Sara cueing up the treasurecam, that Neal wants to be caught this time. His actions over the last three episodes in particular make that evident – that he would honestly try to convince Scott to turn himself in, that he would make it quite so evident to Sara that he’s thinking of running (and that he would keep the knowledge that Sara now definitely knows too much to himself, not telling Moz as far as we know), that his only moment of enthusiasm regarding the treasure was when he realised Peter still had a copy of the manifest and it became a simple contest of wits for him to find it – all actions pointing towards a Neal whose found family is far more important to him than the lure of money and the high life. If there was a way for Peter to catch him and take away temptation without putting him back in prison or implicating Moz, I honestly think Neal would breathe a sigh of relief and be subconsciously grateful.

The question in my mind is whether the show will let him get off that lightly. I’m hoping it doesn’t – I’m hoping it forces him to face himself and admit consciously that, given the choices he has in front of him right now, he’d rather stay and serve out his time than betray his friends and uproot his life again. The phone conversation between him and Peter at the end of As You Were had me almost punching the air with joy for the tiny step it took in that direction. Obviously it was lovely to hear Peter haltingly offer to be there for him, to help him if he can, because Tim DeKay can make Peter super-adorable, and Matthew Bomer also absolutely nailed the guilt, uncertainty, regret and confusion on Neal’s face as he was forced to confront exactly what he was doing, but above and beyond that we finally had Neal taking some responsibility, some agency for his criminal actions back from Moz. Choosing to withhold information from him – it’s a minor thing, really, but it shows Neal wanting this to be his choice, wanting to stand independent of his two competing mentors and decide which person he wants to be. Unfortunately for him, neither of them is going to let him forget that they both see themselves as the person in the lyric I’ve quoted as the title of this blog (from ‘Being Alive,’ a song from Company which is rather more about love really but hey – heterosexual life partners count too), and he’s not going to have spare time to sit around on his own and ponder the choice.

Whether he’ll choose right? Well, that’s where it comes down to more pragmatic television concerns, I suppose. There’s no show if Neal’s a) back in prison b) in hiding on a Pacific island or c) a tame FBI puppy-dog. There’s particularly no conflict for the end of next year as he approaches the end of his sentence if he completely sides with Peter now, so I don’t expect that. I expect some form of halfway house solution, involving returning at least some of the treasure (the obvious option would be everything on the manifest), and probably using Sara to grease the wheels of doing so. But I’ve never been great at predictions, and honestly I’ll allow the complete opposite of that so long as Neal is conscious of the choice he’s making and faces up to the consequences of it.

Thoughts on relationship re-adjustments and the perils of over-familiarity after the jump…

White Collar has undergone a subtle shift this season. The midseason episodes are doing their best to keep it in the background, but Peter and Neal are undeniably now at odds in a way we haven’t seen them since the very start of season 1. Neal wants to do something criminal; Peter wants to stop him. I’m generally very happy with this shift, as I think it breathes some new life into their friendship while also addressing questions that had to be addressed before the end of Neal’s 4 year sentence. I think the way it plays out will teach us more about the characters of both Neal and Peter, and I’m very much in favour of that as they are of course the main reason I watch the show. They’re the strongest characters, the strongest relationship, the glue that holds the show together, and so far this arc is doing its best to deepen both of them.

Neal cannot resist a challenge. We know this about him. It’s interesting that Peter phrases the question as whether Neal can walk away from pulling off the biggest heist of his life, since I don’t think that’s exactly the lure to Neal – and I don’t think Peter thinks it is either, or he wouldn’t choose to attack that angle. Neal loves matching his wits with people whose wits he respects in turn. The lure of finally outwitting Peter – when Peter has got the better of him twice in the past – will be strong. The show did something very clever, though, in making the paintings be stolen by Moz (even if I’m still very fuzzy on how he could have done it) – it gave Neal an additional reason to go through with selling the paintings, and certainly a reason not to delay in doing so. Because delay is exactly what I think he’d do if left to his own devices here. I feel that Neal would be perfectly happy to serve out the rest of his time with Peter, then dispose of the art when he is freer to do so. But Moz is forcing the issue, and Neal’s loyalty to Moz is pretty strong. Neal’s loyalty to all his friends is pretty strong, at least when it comes to endangering himself for their sake, and the show has commented on this before. This is the first time though that I think Neal is willing to seriously endanger his out-of-prison status and Peter’s friendship for the sake of someone who isn’t Kate. It’s also being nicely played that he’s not entirely willing, that Moz keeps having to tell him how good things will be to distract him from something he doesn’t really want to do. All of this is adding more depth and uncertainty to the charming confection that is Neal Caffrey.

Peter, on the other hand, does not so much gain depth but continues to be… fleshed out. I think that is the better term. He is a solid, reliable character who I do not expect to ever learn any surprise revelations about that will suddenly change all his motivations or character. He is not the sort of character who could survive that sort of entire rewriting. (Witness my hatred for the ring reveal at the s1 mid-season finale.) However, over the course of every season so far he has had his competence, his loyalty and his downright sneakiness built up to the point where I now absolutely believe that he can catch Neal. And, more to the point, where I believe that he believes it sufficiently to leave Neal reasonably free while he’s under suspicion. And where I also believe that he likes and trusts Neal enough to want to leave him free to make his own decisions, even if they’re the wrong ones.

What’s most interesting, of course, is that both of them now know all those facts about each other. This is no longer a mismatched buddy cop pairing having to adjust to each other, this is an incredibly strong working relationship between two people who know each other very well indeed. Neal knows better than Moz just how difficult it is going to be to stay out of Neal’s reach, and Peter knows better than Diana or Jones just how risky a game of trust they’re playing with each other. Not only do they know each other personally, they know each other’s support networks, resources and approach to problems. Has it given either of them an edge over the other? Should Neal actually manage to take the paintings and run, my money would be on Peter winning the game in the end. But then, my money would have been on Peter by the end of the pilot too. But… will Neal try to run?

I still don’t want to call it.

Sundry observations:

- I do love how successfully they’ve kept Neal and Peter being friends despite Neal’s criminal leanings and Peter’s suspicions. I think the first few episodes of this season did a great job of straining their friendship and allowing it to spring back into a new shape. Now they not only trust how the other will act when they’re both on the same side, they’re beginning to be open as enemies. That look that Peter gave Neal when he’d managed to outwit him with the DC Art Crimes woman’s flight – oh, game on. That was a beautiful moment of ‘I know and I know that you know that I know, now what are you going to do?’

- Moz is being interestingly villainous without actually being a bad guy. He’s talking Neal into committing crime, persuading him to abandon Peter’s friendship, talking them both into betraying the trust of their friends and chasing the imaginary castle in the sky, but you can look at him and see how he does all of that out of a belief that it is the best thing for both of them. Much as I didn’t like ‘Dentist of Detroit’ much as an episode, I feel the ending of Moz choosing to face his past rather than run represented an unusual moment of nobility from his character. Maybe he too might have second thoughts as the season progresses? Probably not, but I’m not sure how we come out of this season with all the friendships intact at the moment, and I really hope we can…

- I really quite enjoyed the brothers’ relationship in Where There’s A Will. Have I seen either of them in something before? *checks imdb* oh! They’re actually brothers! Oh, well that plays into what I was going to say – they had what felt like a really believable relationship, despite the typical antagonism the plot forced on them. The moment when they started to reconcile was really nicely under-played. Also, one of them played the oldest kid in Malcolm in the Middle. That would explain that, then.

- Diana was very well-used in Deadline. Now, a similar storyline for Sharif Atkins, please (though I did enjoy Jones getting taken hostage in the first episode). So far they’re also using Sara well (i.e. not too much, and believably).

- Neal and Peter’s spur of the moment ‘you’re fired!’ fight made me smile in very much the same way that their one in the bank vault in last season’s premiere did. It somehow makes me very happy that they’re both smart enough to use real-life grievances to make an argument sound realistic, but that their friendship is strong enough to actually make that a safe way to express them. Also loved the little bit of pushing it too far in this one – Peter got to make the funny face at Neal’s insinuations about Elizabeth, but I also raised an eyebrow at Peter’s accusation that a con is all Neal will ever be. Nicely played, boys.

This review marks the first time I’ve tried to spot a theme in an episode for a while, since I’ve been trying so hard to catch up that all my previous posts have been focused more just on remembering what happened and finding anything at all worth saying about it now that I know what happens next. But I’m writing this sitting on a train, staring out at the somewhat uninspiring red-brick environs of the bottom middle bit of England, and my brain has leisure to turn things over and join the dots.

The dots it has found go like this: everyone sacrifices everything for love. Except for those who don’t love, who therefore win. At least for the moment.

Of course, this has been a theme of the show throughout, right from the moment Stefan succumbed to the ‘need to know’ Elena and laid her open to being discovered/destroyed by Damon (and, as it turns out, Klaus too), but I’m not sure there’s ever been an episode so thoroughly and clearly focused on it as this one. Last week, Elena attempted to sacrifice herself out of some sort of love for her family and friends (even if she forgot the rather obvious problem of the additional sacrifices required), but it got so muddled up by Klaus enacting personal vengeance and everybody else attempting to upset the ritual in whatever ways possible that you couldn’t clearly blame any of the eventual consequences on Elena’s actions alone. This week, however, all three main characters – plus a couple more – put themselves in danger or ignore the consequences of their actions in order to act purely out of love for their friends or relations. (Well, technically not all three in this episode, since Damon technically faced the danger two episodes ago and has now got the consequences, which is kind of the point, but his actions still absolutely fit the mould here – he just got there sooner.)

Stefan, of course, makes the biggest conscious sacrifice of anyone this week. Whether it quite matches Elena’s determination to let Klaus kill her I am not sure, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Stefan would have done almost anything in exchange for that cure, up to and including his own death. (Going to Klaus does, after all, carry that outcome as a fairly high risk.) What Klaus eventually gets from him is probably even more repugnant to sober, sensible Stefan (ooh, alliteration) than death would be – yet he barely blinks as he essentially signs his soul away in delicious Capri-sun bags of blood. Where exactly this will go next season, however, is something that I’m in two minds on. It could become the driving arc of the first part of the season at least, forging new alliances, expanding the world of the show, sending Stefan into a far deeper spiral than we saw in season 1. I hope it does – I’d like that show, I think, and I’d particularly enjoy the changes it would force on a lot of the other relationships on the show. Many, many people owe Stefan some loyalty, and I’d be interested to see how they’d come together to attempt to save him. I’d also like Stefan to do something to really deserve that ‘ripper’ title and make me stop thinking of Rupert Giles when I hear it. But… I’m not sure this show is willing to commit to making its romantic hero quite that dark – quite apart from other factors, of course, such as it seeming unlikely that there will be too many plots set outside Mystic Falls, or the usual plot speed making it seem probable that this will all be resolved within an episode or two. The very setup of the show makes Stefan and Elena true love forever, and given the audience demographics I’m not sure it makes smart business sense to alienate those viewers who like the sweetness-and-light good guy. But, I don’t know. Stefan has always been refreshingly ruthless and badass when he’s needed to be, and it’s one of my favourite things about his character – so maybe they could pull off a full turn towards darkness. Or maybe they’ll keep the touches as light as they have before. I will watch with interest, either way.

Elena, on other hand, makes the biggest unconscious sacrifice this week – being there for Damon, openly admitting that she knows he loves her and that he is important enough to her that she feels it natural to curl up on his deathbed beside him and cry for him. And kiss him. That kiss, incidentally, felt perfect to me. It didn’t feel like a ship-tease (although it undoubtedly was), it didn’t feel like a declaration of love on Elena’s part, but it also didn’t feel completely meaningless. It was a pure gift of friendship and acceptance, and a nice bookend to the start of the season and her insistence that she wouldn’t do something like that… but the problem is that it was only a pure gift if Damon was about to die. With him cured – and with him being, you know, Damon – it becomes a liability, an opening for future problems and heartache and neck-snapping to arise from. That moment of Damon sitting up, of Elena looking back at him, of them both exchanging a glance of ‘what now?’ did a really good job of showing that, I think, and of balancing the sacrifice with the consequences waiting round the corner for them.

Bonnie’s love for Jeremy forces her to accept unknown consequences for saving his life, which she does without question – and without apparently even wondering what they might be (or trying to look it up in a grimoire). Will Jeremy thank her in the end? There’s no hint yet as to whether seeing ghosts (I’m assuming ghosts, and I’m hoping ghosts of humans as well as vampires, or vampire girlfriends) will be a gift or a curse, but… it’s going to be a curse, right? Or at least difficult for him to deal with. I look forward to Jeremy having an actual storyline that is unique to him – I hope to find him far less boring when he isn’t just worry-about-Bonnie-or-Elena guy.

Klaus and Katherine, on the other hand, come out smelling of roses. (Maybe roses dipped in blood and ashes.) Elijah’s sacrifice of his vengeance in favour of love for his family turns on him in spectacular style, and Klaus is free and invincible. Though if I were free and invincible, I can’t see why I’d want Stefan hanging around with me, but whatever – we know Klaus is a little strange sometimes. And Katherine manages enough fellow-feeling to bring Damon his cure – which is interesting, but also kind of required by the plot since she couldn’t stay in Alaric’s flat forever and nobody else was around to deliver the antidote – but otherwise gets free and clear thanks to Damon’s gift to her (and Klaus letting her go despite knowing about that, apparently – also intriguing). I suspect she’s not as free as she’d like to think, partly due to Klaus being determined to give her that 200 years of suffering, partly due to her own desire to keep tabs on Stefan, and as such she’s an interesting halfway house of someone who is in no way willing to sacrifice herself for others, but will perhaps take an occasional risk for them if she can’t see a consequence waiting to descend upon her. She’s not Klaus, at least, and this episode did a good job of making that clear (and making Klaus scarier as a result).

And the consequences? Well, as one of my other favourite vampires once remarked, those are always fun. We’ll be waiting a while yet to find out what they are, but I have no doubt that they’re going to make life ever more stressful for the remaining inhabitants of Mystic Falls. This has been a strong season overall, and I hope the changes they’re signaling here make enough of an impact to refresh the show ready for a similar run of brilliance next year.

Sundry observations:

- a strong season overall, perhaps, but I do have some issues with the pacing. Occasional episodes were guilty of imbalance too, but looking back at the season arc it is very clear how slow the whole seasonal arc was going in the middle section before this hectic rush towards the end of the last 5-6 episodes. I feel like a lot of the material in the final two episodes in particular could have landed with more weight, meant more to me, if it had just had a little more time to breathe amongst everything else that was going on. I think that was my problem with Jenna’s death last week, and it’s my problem with Stefan giving himself over to Klaus this week – there wasn’t a quiet moment in which to properly absorb what was happening before it had happened and was past and the next problem was looming. It didn’t completely spoil my enjoyment or my appreciation of those storylines, but it did mean I didn’t feel them in the moment when watching and had to think about them later in order to really feel that they’d happened.

- Caroline and the Sheriff: so are we done with that plotline? That too was rather abrupt. However, I’m all for keeping the Sheriff alive and bringing her into the main character group on her daughter’s side, so I’ll allow it as the only sensible way to wrap that story up without having to spend a whole episode again on how much she hates and distrusts vampires. I really wasn’t convinced by how quickly she and Caroline reconciled, though.

- I find it interesting that Katherine understands and sounds like she both resents and respects Stefan sacrificing himself for Damon. She sounds a little like she doesn’t believe Damon is worthy of it and wants him to feel guilty about it, doesn’t she? Intriguing, as ever, Katerina.

- the best way to bring Damon and Elena together? Endanger Stefan. Good job, show.

- but one question that I’m not sure was fully answered here – is Damon’s arc over for this season? Is he still a work of progress, living on a knife edge and likely to snap at any moment, or do the twin epiphanies of his whole life not being Stefan’s fault and Elena liking him just the way he is mean we might see a Damon with a more even keel next year? I wouldn’t be averse to that, though I hope he keeps his spontaneous bad planning skills at least.

- was that a whole storage unit full of Originals in coffins that Klaus left Elijah in? If it wasn’t, the repetition of the comment about reuniting him with their family is weird. If it was… then what the hell? He carts his family’s inanimate corpses with him wherever he goes? I hope he compels the removal companies good and proper…

- but seriously, what does Klaus want with Stefan? I can’t quite believe it’s just the amusement of having an out of control manic vampire buddy to haul around the country with him. Because Stefan is not who you’d pick, seriously. No matter how bloodthirsty he gets, I still can’t imagine him being fun exactly. I’m about 50% sure something else is going on here, something else which might perhaps be related to Katherine, or perhaps even more promisingly to that long-ago Petrova sacrifice that (I’m assuming) sealed Klaus’ curse in the first place. Here are the dots I’m joining to make the giant leap to that particular conclusion: Klaus never seems to have loved Katherine, as Elijah did (he was fine with her dying, much as he was fine with Elena dying this time – they were just things to break the curse with), yet he killed her whole family in revenge for her self-vamping despite surely knowing that would destroy the possibility of there ever being another doppelganger. Elijah confirmed that Katherine reminded him of someone else, so Elijah knew the girl who was sacrificed for Klaus’ curse, therefore Klaus presumably knew her too. And they knew her not just as a random person who was killed by the witches to bind a spell but as someone whose face they would recognise 500 odd years later. (And they didn’t have sepia photos to leave lying around their bedrooms in those days, either.) And so I’m certain the original Petrova is crucial to understanding Klaus, Elijah and perhaps the rest of the Originals if we ever get to meet them. With that in mind, Klaus’s simultaneous hatred of and obsession with Katherine becomes interesting – does he hate her not just because of the betrayal but because she resurrected some old wound? With that in mind, how would he feel about the person Katherine declares these days she loves? I wonder. Does Katherine – if she loves at all – love noble Stefan, or bloodlust Stefan? I don’t remember her ever saying that she watched over bloodlust Stefan, whereas she did admit to spying on him at a Bon Jovi concert. And unlike Damon, she’s never tried to force him to face what he is… I don’t know. This is entering the realms of ridiculously wild speculation now. But it’s all I’ve got for the next few months, so I’ll take it.

p.s. note on blog scheduling – by the time season 3 starts up again, I will be off travelling around the world (hopefully – there’s a lot of planning still to do). I won’t be back with regular internet access and spare time to ramble aimlessly about tv until Christmas. I’ll be here until August talking about other shows (yay, White Collar’s back soon) but Vampire Diaries coverage will be on hiatus until the new year at least.

Having finally admitted to myself that I would never get all outstanding reviews written before the season finale, I am nonetheless writing this one before I have seen the finale, so it’s written from the correct point of view. I will delay posting it until I’ve done episodes 19 and 20 to go up before it, but I’m making the effort to write this one properly when I am still unspoiled and can still enjoy all the speculation of going into the finale when I get to see it tonight…

The main theme of this whole episode – even of this whole half-season, really – is sacrifice. Sacrifice of others, sacrifice of self, the willingness to put others before yourself or the determination to put yourself before others. And although the focus has changed from week to week, we’ve still had some interesting aspects of selflessness that becomes selfish because it doesn’t think things through to the end, or selfishness that achieves an essentially selfless outcome. Elena doomed Jenna (or someone else in Jenna’s place) the moment she so selflessly decided to sacrifice herself. Damon saved Caroline and Tyler and incurred a fatal wound all so that Elena wouldn’t hate him forever. Those have both been played down in terms of obvious consequences of their choices, but for an episode that had perhaps some very obvious good/bad contrasts amongst the sacrificial choices of its protagonists, it makes me wonder just how pure – or how evil – any of our characters are supposed to be.

Klaus is at the heart of this. He is the most obviously evil character we’ve had on the show since Katherine, and appears to be equally selfish, equally ruthless, equally vicious – and much stronger. And yet he doesn’t feel like Katherine redux because a) Joseph Morgan and b) brother Elijah. The parallels were drawn clearly enough with Damon/Stefan two weeks ago that I cannot help but watch Klaus and wonder if there is more to his actions than we are seeing. We know that witches don’t always act for the greater good of nature (indeed, behold Greta). Was there more to the reason his werewolf side was repressed by them than we have been told to date? (From everything we know, surely it would have been better for the world to repress his Original vampire side anyway? Unless Original werewolves are similarly superpowered compared to their modern relatives.) And this is fueled by the moment of Elijah releasing him – whilst it was a necessary plot step in order for there still to be a bigger badder Big Bad out there next season, it makes no sense if Klaus is utterly evil. Because if he is, and if he was lying to Elijah about their family, then the very first thing he’ll do as soon as he’s recovered a little bit of strength will be to kill Elijah. And if that were going to happen, it would have happened on-screen at the moment of Elijah’s hesitation, I think, for maximum drama and immediate payoff. Therefore… I find myself believing that maybe he wasn’t lying, that maybe what we were seeing there was the equivalent of Stefan staking Damon in not-quite-the-heart as payback for killing Lexi because he knew there was more to Damon than that. If that’s the case, I await developments with interest.

Stefan’s decision to attempt to bargain for Jenna’s life with his own was, on the face of it, noble and selfless. And perhaps it truly was. Yet it was noticeably useless and doomed, as well. And it showed that Stefan too had not thought through the choice he was letting Elena make as regards who else was going to be sacrificed – would he have also offered himself as a swap for Caroline? I think he probably would have, and that just shows how stupid he’s being because in that case he should have gone with Elena from the start and faced his death as openly as she’s faced hers. Alternatively he could have done a Damon and just attempted to keep messing things up until eventually something sticks. But no, he needed Elena to see that he wouldn’t leave Jenna to die, and so he made a stupid gesture which had no effect whatsoever. (Note: I actually kind of like him for doing it, I just think he’s a naive fool sometimes.)

John’s self-sacrifice was the one with least fanfare, least need for others to know what he was sacrificing, and worked the best of any of them. There’s not much else to say about that really except that I’m going to miss David Anders on this show a surprising amount.

And Elena… well. Do we think she takes full responsibility for Jenna’s death? She should. Even given the fact that a thwarted Klaus would have undoubtedly wreaked vengeance on everyone Elena knew, Elena’s heartbreak at seeing Jenna there shows she really didn’t think the sacrifice through further than ‘I’m going to die.’ She’s always known that another vampire and werewolf had to be killed too, she even knew that Katherine created Caroline and Tyler for just that purpose, and yet it didn’t occur to her until she got to the quarry to wonder who was going to be filling those roles? She didn’t think to, say, phone Caroline and check she was okay (which she wasn’t)? Much as I admire her backbone and her determination to do things in what she considers to be the least of all the evils available, I am not sure I can easily forgive her for overlooking these additional members of the sacrifice she chose to be part of. And I’m not sure the show is even letting her really register how responsible she is for them. She grieved at the end, undoubtedly, but it seemed to be a self-contained grief, a sadness at those she’d lost, not an uncontrolled misery at the fact that it was all her fault (Jenna and John, and partly Damon too when she finds out about that). That annoys me more than I would like. I’m all for heroines making tough choices and sticking to them, but I’d like the consequences to hurt them deeply when they get it wrong. Just because she’s Elena doesn’t mean she has to be perfect.

Hmm. That’s probably enough about that. I just found it an intriguing connection between the actions of half the cast this week (and you could argue Damon attempted to sacrifice himself last week too, to add another data point to the graph).

Sundry observations:

- is Katherine still stuck in Alaric’s apartment until Klaus releases her? Because that’s going to be Awkward.

- the Caroline/Matt/Tyler story was nicely executed but I kept screaming at Caroline at least to remember what was going on that night and the whole reason why she and Tyler had been captured in the first place. She couldn’t have phoned someone to find out whether her best friend was being killed?

- there was a similar lack of urgency in the Bonnie/Jeremy scenes at the dilapidated dead witch mansion. Okay, it made perfect sense that they had to stay there until the last minute, but they should have been much more on edge, desperately wanting to go and help before they actually could. They shouldn’t have been joking about Emily Bennet having a crush on Johnathan Gilbert, at least.

- Damon’s wolfbite was kept fairly in the background but was nicely dealt with in the few scenes where it came up. Damon is reacting exactly as I would expect him to – attempting to be stoic, cynical and uncaring about his own imminent death, but bubbling under it all there’s this 5-year-old kid who just wants to tell someone who can hug him and say it’ll all be okay. His scene with Stefan was an excellent mix of the two.

- Meh, Greta. Meh, Jules. At least the cast is being thinned out a little. Rather unfortunately, there’s now no-one left in the regular cast that I can stand them killing off who I think can actually be killed off (the two I’d be okay with would be Jeremy and Bonnie, and yet somehow they feel totally safe).

So I shall do it.

But I’m going to do it a bit differently. Given that it would be hard for me to evaluate the episodes without hindsight now anyway, and given how much time has passed, I’m going to lump them together and consider them from the point of view of the end of the season. (Spoilers up to 2.22, therefore, ahoy.) These two episodes are full of people trying to avert the seemingly inevitable, convincing themselves they can fight Klaus, survive their own self-sacrifice, stand a chance of winning Elena’s love, etc.

So was any of it worth the effort?

…no, not really.

Elena seems, on the surface, to be taking charge of her life in these episodes. She at least does a better job of surfing on the tip of the catastrophe curve with enough confidence that you almost believe she can come out on top. She brings Elijah back and convinces him to be on their side. Now, as it turns out that they do need him to kill Klaus even on top of Bonnie’s super-witch powers, that’s a pretty good thing to have done. Of course, the fact that he then chooses to betray them for the sake of family ties and brings the catastrophe crashing down on them is unfortunate. Perhaps Elena should have spent longer letting him sip tea and exposit all the reasons he has to hate and distrust his brother. It’s easily the best thing she does in terms of giving them a chance to beat Klaus, though, so kudos to Elena. Unfortunately, she then gets so wrapped up in what the whole sacrifice means to her personally – especially after Damon force-feeds her blood – that she clearly forgets all the other implications of the choices she’s been making recently. By deciding to go through with the sacrifice, in opposition to the Salvatores and anyone else who’s thinking straight, she inevitably dooms one werewolf and one vampire. Yet no-one thinks to send Tyler a text telling him to stay away from Mystic Falls? None of the vampires decide to stay at home in Elena’s carefully un-invited house that week? As far as I can remember, it was never even discussed – it might be logical to believe that he’d use Katherine as the vampire, and I could have gone with that if they’d openly assumed it, but to have just apparently forgotten that two other people also have to be sacrificed is unforgiveable of Elena, with all her self-righteous speeches about protecting family and friends.

Stefan, on the other hand, loses almost all pretence at agency in his eagerness to be the anti-Damon and support Elena in her determination to do the stupidly noble thing. I’m glad I believe Elena would never sit back so easily and allow Stefan (or Damon, or anyone else) to hand themselves over so meekly. Love means you let people make their own choices, sure, but it doesn’t mean you don’t fight them tooth and nail beforehand to convince them they’re wrong. His devotion to Elena also blinds him to everything else going on, and if anyone’s to blame for not seeing the Jenna-vamp sacrifice coming, it’s him. He was there as Klaus enjoyed threatening her and he just left it at beating up Klaus and getting Elena to explain vampires to Jenna? No, not good enough. Jenna is an obvious target for anyone wanting to include some poetic cruelty in Elena’s self-sacrifice, and she should have been kept in the loop on every way Klaus might try to trick them into doing things his way.

Of all of the characters, Damon is perhaps the one best suited to adapting to a chaotic situation where the odds are stacked against him, applying targeted violence in specific doses and somehow emerging unscathed. I’ll at least give him the credit of understanding just how doomed all their plans are at this stage and refusing to believe Elena’s happily-ever-after version of the story where Klaus is easily defeated and they all survive. It’s that desperation that drives him to do everything he can to just cause more chaos and upset everyone’s plans in the hope that something will trip up the inevitable. I don’t think his actions are particularly more selfish or reckless than anyone else’s – Elena doesn’t think through her self-sacrifice, Stefan goes along with everything so long as he still gets to look like the perfect boyfriend – but they’re undoubtedly a bit further out towards the crazy end of the scale. Feeding Elena his blood, trying to get Katherine on their side, picking a fight with practically anyone to cross his path – they’re all extremely reactive actions, but at least he has the grace to recognise that and give it a wry smile. He doesn’t really have more or less success than the rest, though, and if anything the moral of the story as seen from his viewpoint is very backwards – feeding Elena his blood leads to John’s sacrifice, which was probably the most waterproof way of preserving her life and also disposes of one of the least favourite human liabilities in Damon’s life. On the other hand, his one fairly noble and unselfish gesture of going to rescue Caroline and freeing Tyler too backfires in rather impressive form to leave him facing imminent death. Though I guess it turns itself round again as it results in Stefan finding a new way to be noble and sacrifice himself, saving Damon’s life and leaving him and Elena to team up next season. Then again, Damon could probably take losing Elena about as successfully than he could take losing Stefan, so… lose-lose.

It’s inevitable in the run up to a finale, I suppose, but it’s noticeable how none of the characters apart from those three make any attempt at all to control their own destinies during these episodes. Caroline and Tyler are off in a separate storyline, sure, and Alaric has an excuse since he’s got a lot to catch up on, and Jenna has even more to process, but essentially they are just being swept along by the events set in motion by Elena and co. Even Elijah doesn’t attempt to interfere with their actions beyond making sure they serve his ends as well – but as they do, all he really has to do is sit and wait. And needle Damon. Which is always appreciated.

Sundry observations:

- Elijah does, however, get to be absolutely badass whilst expositing over a tiny porcelain cup of tea. Which is a measure of just how incontrovertibly badass he is. Badass but misguided and far more vulnerable to being played than he’d like to think. Yep, he should join Damon and Alaric’s ineffective buddy cop team next season.

- Wow, Tyler got hot at some point. He’s just extra… wolfy… now. Or something. Either way, Michael Trevino’s cheekbones did some stellar work there.

- At least now I’m certain that someone on the writing staff has seen Buffy, given the ‘close your eyes’moment. Cheesy (and unearned) as that was, it oddly reassures me that at least they know when they’re copying stuff and it isn’t just cultural osmosis that’s likely to make Buffy look bad by association.

- I liked that the Damon/Stefan fights in these episodes were fairly underplayed. They were fore and centre in the scenes where they happened, obviously, but it didn’t come across as a big deal in the Lives Of The Salvatores like it used to in the early days. It’s no longer big bad mean Damon twisting the knife (sometimes literally), but just brotherly bickering and alpha-male stake-claiming between equals – at vampire levels of violence. I still feel like they’re pretty indestructible as brothers, which reflects on how well this season has built up their relationship.

- I wish Tyler had had even a little scene in the following episodes showing he was aware of having bitten Damon and was somewhat interested in the outcome. I know he was off in a purely Caroline story that ignored everything else going on, but he seems like the sort of person who might have some emotion worth knowing about there, and I’d have liked to see what it was. Guilt at having (apparently) killed someone? Satisfaction at having accidentally avenged Mason’s death? Pretending not to care at all? I’m not sure, and I think it could have been an interesting window on his new wolfy self.

- Favourite understated moment: the confirmation that Elijah and Klaus did indeed know a previous Petrova (what’s a word for proto-doppelganger other than ‘original,’ which clearly doesn’t work in this case?), and that she was in some way important to them (or at least to Elijah). Yay, more cool stuff for Nina Dobrev to do some day.

Okay, so can I say firstly: Matt Davis is great. Not only was he acting a character we’d never seen before, so we didn’t know what he was copying but he had to live up to the real thing in the immediately following episode, but he was also playing a character somewhat different than I think most of the audience had been expecting. Klaus, surely, was in our imaginations a sort of Elijah squared – cold, ruthless, utterly single-minded when focused on his goal. Turns out, though, Klaus isn’t like that at all. Ruthless maybe, but fickle, vain and more than a little tempted to do things in the most entertaining or grandstanding way possible. I applaud the show for doing that – it makes the Big Bads a lot more interesting and entertaining when they’re all as different from each other as they have been to date – but for Matt Davis to sell it to us first took some balls, on the writers’ part and on his. And yet, it worked. From his first scene with Katherine, where a handy sort of early-Damon shorthand was used to establish that he likes looking good and causing other people pain, right through his scenes at school, a wonderful sense of Always Chaotic Evil permeated the whole performance. Great stuff.

(Even better, having seen Klaus in his real body later, there was perhaps an extra layer of recklessness in Matt Davis’ performance to reflect the fact that Klaus was endangering someone else’s body and really didn’t care in the slightest who knew he was there or what damage they tried to do to him.)

I also, as always, loved how quickly the show set up plot points and knocked them down. Elena now owns the Salvatores’ house. Elena toys with them for a few moments about that, and especially Damon, because she has Petrova blood in her and if you chopped her in half it would say ‘tease’ through the centre. But Klaus walks straight through the defences as Alaric almost before we’ve even had time to wonder if it would work on him in that form. (Side note: who else is still uninvited? Have we seen Caroline there since the deed swapped hands? Katherine certainly knows nothing about it and would be shut out if she returned…)

Bonnie being set up to die left me very uninterested. I’m beginning to feel the beats of this show far too well to be surprised by most of the deaths, and I was fairly certain that this one was fake. There’s something in the pacing of exactly when in the episode certain things are revealed about the person’s chances of survival which tells you whether they stand a chance or not (more on this when I get to episode 21). In this case, I knew it was too pretty to be a real death scene and I knew as soon as Damon said Klaus wasn’t going to win tonight that Bonnie couldn’t die as part of his plan. So I enjoyed it for the bizarre ways in which witchcraft seems to affect the world around it – fluorescent light bulbs exploding in showers of sparks? Really? What’s even in them to make sparks? Also, as someone else’s recap pointed out I think, where did all those flyers even come from? The very few Mystic Falls kids who are still alive and actually go to school must console themselves for how lonely they are by printing hundreds of the things and sticking them all over the walls to pretend there’s actually stuff going on that doesn’t involve getting eaten by monsters.

Good subtle work on some of the relationships in this one. Matt almost being unable to be around Caroline and yet grudgingly starting to recognise that she is still Caroline was beautifully done, and I was both surprised and not-surprised by Stefan so easily tagging Damon in to dance with Elena while he went off to talk to them. You don’t have to spell out trust issues and friendships for them to be clear and fascinating, and in both of these cases the show did a very good job.

At the end of the episode, though, I punched the air and cheered. I’ve seen commentary online saying Elena was stupid to bring Elijah back, that there was no reason on earth he wouldn’t just turn round and kill them all – which is at least partially true, he has no reason to keep anyone but Elena alive – but I was so pleased that she looked at the immoveable object of Klaus and Bonnie’s inevitable death and thought ‘what I need is an unstoppable force, and I’ve got one in the basement if I can just figure out how to use it.’ Also, I love Elijah, so there’s that.

Stray observations:

- I always love Damon making his own plans and doing his own thing if no-one else is around to consult. I’m particularly happy that they occasionally let it work when he does that, like this week.

- Damon telling Klaus-in-Alaric he wasn’t that impressed by Klaus was funny.

- I was obviously a fan of the ‘I will always choose you’ scene, but I think what I liked about it was that both of them were honest when it would probably have been easier for them not to be. Damon is used enough to Elena hating him that she didn’t really have to apologise, and choosing Bonnie’s death over Elena’s would be much easier if Elena didn’t know that’s the choice you’d make. But something compelled (heh) them to tell the truth despite those things, and I like that angle of unwilling honesty that their relationship has.

- The product placement this week was hysterically awful this week. Hee. But at least it made some storyline sense… sort of.

- Oh, and one thought that I couldn’t escape when watching Klaus-in-Alaric teach a class: funny as it was, there’s no way a class speaks up to tell a teacher what they’re supposed to be learning about. Especially in a school as unengaged as Mystic Falls. If your regular teacher comes into a class and goes ‘er… and what are we learning, again?’ you just stay silent and enjoy their deep, painful embarrassment. A student immediately piping up like he might not know and it was a perfectly normal thing to tell him = deeply wrong. (Unless, of course, Alaric is just always that absent-minded. Which would be funny.) That said, I did appreciate the fact that they made Elena blunder and call him Ric and thus give a semi-believable reason for the class to focus their amusement on someone else instead of noticing how out of character their teacher was being.

Firstly, then, let’s tackle a minor and a major complaint from Cindy McLennan’s recap at Television Without Pity.

Minor: The title is grammatically incorrect and should be ‘Know Thine Enemy.’ Not so, says google – or at least not categorically so. I am not the greatest expert on English grammar, and I accept the idea that a noun that starts with a vowel should have a possessive term not ending in a vowel before it, but a) English never likes to stick with its rules for very long and b) the ‘y’ sound is used to bypass this in other situations now. We would no longer say ‘know mine enemy,’ even if that usage was common at one time. Just because ‘thy’ is an archaic form to begin with does not mean it has to be bound by the most archaic rules around, in my opinion. But as I said: I’m an engineer, not a grammaticist, so I went to google to check up on things. In the blue corner with Cindy, we have the King James bible, which exactly states ‘love thine enemy,’ along with most other translations of the bible using the ‘thou’ form. Fair enough. But in the red corner, we have Samuel Johnson’s dictionary quoting various other luminaries such as Milton and Shakespeare who put ‘thy’ in front of a noun starting with a vowel. So the final verdict here, I believe, is: inconclusive.

Major: Katherine is far too trusting of Isobel in this episode. Hmm. Equally debatable but this time I have no google to back me up and am going to have to put the argument together myself. How inconvenient. Whilst I would agree that Katherine’s capture comes about as a result of trusting Isobel, the amount of ‘trust’ she was showing there – just going to a place where Isobel has said she will meet her – isn’t really excessive trust, even for someone like Katherine. Isobel would probably have been able to have her captured that way even without Katherine’s trust. The trust part that is maybe less believable concerns Isobel capturing Elena for Katherine’s benefit. On the one hand, I agree that trusting someone to capture their daughter such that they can be killed is probably a bit much. But on the other hand, Isobel shows no signs of caring for Elena in the slightest (or at least none that Katherine would have seen). Also, I can recall Katherine trusting Pearl to a reasonable degree, even though in the end Pearl was wrong to trust her in return. The same is true of her witchy friend earlier this season, who turned out to have every reason to turn on Katherine and did so once the Bennet connections became clear. I guess what I’m saying is that Katherine seems to have an over-inflated sense of her own importance insofar as how much other people must be loyal to her because she’s just that great? Something like that. Her assumption that both the Salvatores are obsessed with her would also fall into this category, I think. So… perhaps it makes me wonder how she’s survived as long as she can, but I don’t think it’s out of character for her to trust people to do what she wants them to do.

Two other questions that I have seen in multiple recaps and discussion:

Minor: Damon would not have that many pretty soaps. Rebuttal: oh yes he would. This is the same guy who wears designer shirts and has a surprisingly stylish bedroom/bathroom setup in the house he only visited every few decades to eat his relatives.

Major: what is going on with the ruined house on the site of the witches’ murder? That seems very strange. Some people have assumed that the witches were killed in the house, but if that’s the case then… well, it just seems rather odd. Isn’t burning the standard method of witch-killing? Or at least hanging/drowning/exploding. None of which are easily done inside a mansion, nor can I see why you would want to. So either they were killed on open ground and the house was built over it later, in which case it’s kind of weird that the dead witches have so much power to fry Damon within the walls of the house, or else they really were killed in there and some Mystic Falls family or other had a really weird tradition going for a while (if Emily was later taken there too).

Sundry observations:

- Yay, Isobel’s dead. She was always more interesting off screen than on.

- Could David Anders really turn out to play a well-intentioned guy on this show? Surely not. I actually felt a little sorry for him at the end…

- Loved Damon getting caught out by forgetting what people knew when he was telling the Sheriff and Mayor that John would get better from his neck snapping, then just shrugging and going with it.

- speaking of which, poor Sheriff at the end. And poor Matt. Sniff.

- I unfortunately got spoiled for the Alaric thing by someone using the ‘Klaularic’ portmanteau on twitter and me figuring it out before watching. It’s a shame really because that would have been a nice shock moment otherwise, I think.

Eh, that’s enough. It’s particularly tough trying to write about The Vampire Diaries after a delay of several weeks, because the plot has already moved on just so far from here…

But I’m getting awfully behind on this blog and need to pick up the pace again if I’m going to stick with my intention to re, so here goes. First on the menu: some long overdue thoughts on the season 2 finale of White Collar.

I think the reason I put off writing about this for ages is because I was deeply unimpressed by it. The majority of the episode was just one long exercise in the plotholes in which White Collar specialises, but this time the writers clearly weren’t content with one or two plotholes underpinning an otherwise plausible story, but went to town creating a whole minefield of them. Adler himself was potentially a believable villain, and I had no objection to Alex (or others of Neal’s criminal acquaintance) being dragged into the plot, but beyond that the whole thing was just… well, quite ridiculous. I think the best thing I can do is to bullet point all the things that struck me as stupid and attempt to get them out of the way as quickly as possible…

- so we have to believe that Vincent Adler is so desperate for this treasure that he would manipulate Neal’s escape from prison using a corrupted Federal Agent and Kate (who Adler knew himself, let’s not forget) because of his belief that Neal had the music box? That’s a bit of a stretch.

- even allowing for that, in this version of the story, why on earth did Kate have to die? By this point, Alex has had the music box and the key, taken a copy of the encoded equation and returned it to Neal to give to Fowler, right? Adler presumably wants both Kate and Neal dead at this point, hence (somehow) having the ability to remote detonate the plane. Why does it make any difference if Peter shows up to say goodbye to Neal? Even if the closeness of the FBI is a risk, Neal is surely much more of a potential problem than Kate given that Kate has never even set eyes on the music box, so why would you draw attention to yourself by blowing up the plane on the runway when only she was in it?

- and even allowing that, why then would Adler, once he has located the sunken treasure and brought it up from the seabed, fixate on Neal as the only person in the whole world with the skill set to pick its locks and defuse its explosives? That’s a ridiculous risk to take given how much Neal already knows and how closely Peter is monitoring his every move. I am willing to accept that Neal is one of the best all-rounder criminals there is where forgery and conmanship is concerned, but I am not willing to accept there weren’t other people better suited for this kind of job. (And even the writers had to acknowledge this by having Alex’s random knowledge (that Adler didn’t know she had, right?) be the key to defusing the trap.

- speaking of which, what the hell was an Enigma machine doing as the code entry device? Yes it’s cool and all but you could just have rigged up any typewriter or data entry device of any sort. Did all U-boats routinely carry Enigma machines to encode their transmissions? I suppose they may have done. I really should visit Bletchley museum some day, you know – it’s only about half an hour away from me and I’ve never been. Okay, going somewhat off-topic…

- dumping bodies in a dry dock and flooding it. Really? Even accepting that Adler is enough of a Bond villain to do this, you would shoot them first, surely? I mean, dead bodies found in a dock later will surely be considered suspicious deaths anyway, so you might as well put a bullet in them to be sure. And I can float even with my hands tied, I think.

- I simply cannot believe how willing Adler was to have Peter along for the ride. It’s an incredibly stupid move for someone who’s been working from the distant shadows for the last two years. I accept you can’t leave him free to search for Neal, but again I don’t see why you don’t just kill him straight away.

- the explosives were apparently volatile enough to go off at an unintended touch, but had survived the whole disintegrating u-boat being dragged up off the ocean bed somehow? No.

- how on earth did Adler even find it on the seabed if the signal from the antenna wasn’t strong enough to be detected in Manhattan until they boosted it?

…okay, I’m into technicality plot points and I should know not to go there with this show (or any procedural, really). Remember that bible that was somehow a book of hours as well? Yeah.

Having got that out of my system, let’s dwell on the things I did like.

- it may not have been earned by the plot, but Neal and Peter’s little moment of ‘in case this doesn’t work’ before opening the hatch was nicely heartwarming, as is usual with those two.

- Diana and Jones having to work with Mozzie was, of course, entertaining.

- The final confrontation between Adler and Neal was well executed by the actors – you could really see the moment at which Neal realised Adler was unhinged enough to just shoot him for his perceived betrayal – and I did enjoy that Peter just shot him without warning. (Is he dead? I assume he is, but they didn’t really dwell on it enough for me to be certain.)

- and, of course, the loss of trust between Peter and Neal at the end. Well played, even if quite a lot of contrivance with painting recognition was required to get us there. But it’s a low-key version of the scenarios I was envisaging in my previous review, and as such works well to drive the two of them apart without making their differences irreconcilable (yet). I do like how strong the characterisation is on this show, and particularly of these two characters, and although I might quibble with the plot that got us there, the reactions of both of them were spot on. Peter has never been able to bring himself to fully trust Neal where it concerns the idea that Neal could be tricking him, pulling a ‘victimless’ con behind his back – and rightly so, in some cases. But as a result he did the one thing that will drive a wedge between them more surely than anything else – he didn’t trust Neal not to tell him a direct lie. Both he and Neal have relied on that trust several times this season as a safety net to resolve problems before they occur, and now it’s gone. Peter doesn’t believe Neal, and as a result Neal has no incentive to tell him the truth any more. That should make next season interesting.

Note: I have seen people doubting whether Neal was actually telling the truth there, or whether he really is responsible for the stolen paintings somehow. I have no doubts on that – what we saw of him receiving the warehouse key and then looking around at his new loot looked to me like a very real and honest reaction to surprises. Who actually did pull off the heist? No idea on that one. Not sure either of the obvious contenders (Mozzie, Alex) had an opportunity or would have executed it like that if they did.

I do find myself wondering whether this is going to have something in common with other White Collar cliffhangers, and be resolved by halfway through the next episode. I’m inclined to think not. If Peter hadn’t suspected Neal, I’m reasonably certain Neal would have told him about the warehouse and handed over the paintings without too many qualms (though one or two might have been ferreted away, perhaps). But I can’t see him going to Peter now and risking the chance that Peter will continue not to believe him. I can also see him being hurt enough by the accusation that he half wants it to be real, wants to prove that he can keep this stash – and sell it, and benefit from it – under Peter’s watchful eye, in defiance of him.

Huh… it’s a bit worrying how well I remembered all that, if I’m honest. The episode aired, what? Two months ago? Hmm. Well, at least it’s now less than two months until the show is back. Hurrah. Never let my nit-picking convince you I don’t care…

White Collar has, in my opinion, done a very excellent job balancing the characters of Neal and Peter against each other over two seasons so far. There have been a few mis-fires, such as Peter’s early complete incapability around women, which thankfully got toned down to ‘just not very comfortable turning on the charm and likely to over-compensate,’ but on the whole the two characters are equals, and have more in common than the set-up of the show might lead you to believe. The show has relied on it since the pilot episode, since Peter first said ‘you know how much I like smart’ and destroyed the idea that these two are opposites, replacing it instead with the thoroughly enjoyable truth that they both see something admirable in the other. I remember thinking at about the s1 mid-point that I’d better enjoy their partnership while it lasted, as surely it would inevitably be destroyed sooner or later for the sake of drama. Because doesn’t every tv show have to do that to every friendship sooner or later, especially one as clearly predicated on the conflict as this?

These days, I’m not so sure. I have built up an odd amount of confidence in the character writing of this show, and it is beginning to feel like we have come too far now for Peter and Neal ever to fail to understand each other again. However… however, I do think there is likely to be change ahead. It is perfectly possible to understand someone and still be their enemy, after all – certainly to understand them and not entirely like what you know.

In the latter half of this season, the show has been more obviously drawing attention to the possible life choices Neal is going to have to make at some point. Moz and Keller have both drawn attention to how he is starting to sound a little like Peter at times, Peter himself has openly brought up the topic of who Neal wants to be when he grows up, and Neal himself seems like he’s walking a bit of a tightrope, trying to convince himself he can be certain things without giving up other parts of himself. This latest episode was the most blatant so far, making Neal fully assume an FBI agent role while Peter got to be in the midst of the lying/thieving/not-being-in-the-van. It was completely true to both characters how comfortable they were in each other’s roles, but that’s exactly what it felt like – roleplay. They both enjoyed playing each other’s roles, but take that out of the equation and Peter doesn’t get the same joy out of sneaking around as Neal does, just as Neal doesn’t get the same satisfaction out of doing things by the book and with the correct paperwork in place that Peter does. The show is very good at covering up that gap between them for the sake of an enjoyable plot, giving them both reasons to enjoy swapping roles – not least the obvious one-upmanship inherent in their little game of ‘I can be a better you than you’ – but the gap has been getting smaller over time, and something’s got to give eventually.

Fundamentally, I simply cannot see Neal ever becoming an FBI agent. Reality aside – there’s no way the FBI would even consider such a thing, right? – he just couldn’t. It is as plain as day that if Neal came up against a criminal something like himself, who steals with style, doesn’t kill people and generally doesn’t harm victims on a personal level, he’d never want to actually arrest them. He’d just want to challenge them, not necessarily in legal ways. It is equally plain that Peter would never enjoy forgery, undercover work or breaking into banks just for the sake of monetary gain and taking on the world. He will only do any of that in the cause of protecting others. Therefore, the trajectory that their two characters have been on towards each other since the pilot has to break down at some point, and I am beginning to think that this might be the point.

In supporting evidence, I give you the timescales of Neal’s 4 year prison term. We know he can bide his time for the sake of not having to be on the run, and he’s survived 2 years in quite a companionable working relationship. With Kate gone, and every bit of normal logic saying he should now stay the course in his ankle monitor, the show loses any tension at all of the ‘unpredictable Neal’ variety – and that’s one of its best and deepest wells to return to, since he is dangerous when he breaks, and it’s one of the few bits of real drama this set-up has. If I were writing the show, I’d do my best to keep wild-eyed, hot-headed Neal on my list of available characters.

I also think there is a good mine of potential storylines exploring the real differences between them more than has been done so far. If we can accept now that Neal and Peter are not only friends, they are pretty much family and nearly admittedly so (Peter offering full immunity for past crimes just to get Neal to work with him, Neal giving up a $2.5 million link to Kate just for proof that Peter’s alive), then there are a lot of fairly meaty dilemmas that you can now throw at them without completely breaking the friendship (and the show). What happens, for example, if one of those case files on Peter’s desk turns out to be a con that Moz has pulled? What happens if Neal ignores the law at a point when it matters and destroys the case against someone as a result? Again, if I were writing the show, I’d want to play with those ideas, because they look like the sort you could get a lot of mileage out of. I don’t want the two of them to be at loggerheads every week, because that’s no fun, but I think it would be rewarding to more fully examine the ways in which they will always disagree on some things.

And I just feel like we might be approaching that tipping point, what with all the heavy hints that Neal is reforming in recent weeks and all the perfect harmony between the two of them since mid-season. It feels like solid ground from which to take our next leap into the unknown.

Sundry observations:

- that said, as I observed last week, I’m still very wary of their cliffhangers. So whatever happens at the end of the finale, tell me off if I get too annoyed about it, okay?

- I’m surprisingly on board with Neal/Sara. I tend to think that Sara is actually the role model that a reformed Neal could follow (Peter will always be too high a standard to live up to), what with her job outwitting criminals and collecting large paychecks when she does, and the writers have done a good job bringing her around from the antagonistic shrew they introduced her as to someone who could actually sympathise with Neal’s situation. For a show I consider rather weak on the female character side, I was particularly pleased with the ‘I’m sorry’/'don’t be sorry’ moment because it just seemed… right. For both of them. That she’s as uncertain of herself as that, and that he would reject such a pretence.

- Peter grimly pouring a bucket of sugar, and no cream, into Neal’s ‘cream, no sugar’ was beautiful. As was every moment of them using each other’s role to highlight how wonderful they are (‘had it not been for Agent Burke here, I’d still be in prison. Rotting.’/'I know Neal seems intimidating, but he’s very useful in cases like yours. In fact I think he’s the single most valuable asset we have here at the Bureau’).

- I appreciated how very little effort Neal put into making his FBI badge. Nice grace note there that says Peter will be much less annoyed with him about it if it isn’t a good fake…

- I said I didn’t have time to write a lot, didn’t I…? Oops.

*disclaimer: no, I have not read/watched/otherwise engaged with Twilight, nor do I plan to. So please correct me if I’m wrong here but from what I understand of the storyline – and Twilight fans I know online who still love the extra energy and kickassness of TVD in comparison – I don’t think I’m too far off.

This ethos also seems to extend to its plot points, and is perhaps a partial explanation for how the plot on the show continues to move crazily fast without ever apparently running out of steam. In theory, many plots have already been re-used even within the one and a half seasons to date, but in actuality it doesn’t feel like that because the show keeps moving forward such that when we see an old plot point it feels new again, because the context has changed. There are multiple examples of this, but the obvious one coming to mind right now is Vicki vs. Caroline – technically the exact same plot, so much so that they had to have Damon point it out within the show, but boy oh boy did it feel different due to their different characters and the different slant within the show by this point on the different ways to be a vampire. And so old is made new again, and several episodes of heart-wrenching pain and joy are wrung out of a storyline that we thought we already knew.

Rather than adopt my usual approach of looking at each main character and seeing how their actions fit into the theme of the episode generally, then, I’m going to look at each of the main plot developments instead this week (so brace yourself, this could be a long discussion) and see whether they fit this mould of having your cake and eating it too.

Plot point 1: Telling Matt (and potentially Jenna) the truth: definitely yes. Although it’s been a long time since we saw someone with no knowledge have the whole concept of vampires explained to them from scratch – in fact, the only example I can really think of is Elena, where a whole episode was devoted to Stefan slowly explaining everything in a nice, calm tone. The show has managed to take a shorthand route with exposition for everyone else since then: Elena explained the situation to Bonnie when Bonnie was already aware of supernatural things, Jeremy had many gradual introductions to the idea, and Caroline came pre-packaged with helpful memories. None of that will apply to Matt or Jenna. I’m not certain we will see both of them brought into the secret at this stage – it’s looking like Caroline may have to resort to compulsion to prevent Matt from spilling her secret, and it might be possible for Elena to come up with semi-convincing lie to explain Isobel – but I hope at least one of them is. When Elena found out about vampires, the exposition was for the audience as much as for her, covering vampire mythology and Salvatore history. She was special and central and given as much time as she needed to process all this new information, and to her credit she had basically figured it out herself. The audience, however, now belongs to those in the know, and seeing the circumferential humans brought into the game at this stage cannot be the same – neither Matt nor Jenna will be over the first shock before they are inevitably dragged into the last Salvatore/Petrova/Original plot, I am sure. And so we get to see the same storyline, probably speeded up a little, from the opposite viewpoint – from the side of those who have lied and betrayed and kept those they love in the dark for months. That’s definitely making the most out of a repeat plot point.

Plot point 2: Katherine being out of the tomb again: in a more low-key way, this is also an example of plot/character recycling. Since we last saw her on the loose, she has been demoted from Big Bad to merely a Supplementary Bad, and her behaviour in this episode reflects that. Obviously she still has a hidden agenda, is still manipulating people and will probably turn out to be Elena’s enemy (which Elena, at least, has not forgotten), but she’s putting her plans on a back-burner for a while. As such, while she is still definitely herself, her behaviour is also strongly reminiscent of Damon’s around episodes 5-9 last year. Stefan overpowered him and proved him fallible, some of his backstory and motivation was laid a little clearer, and without any immediate plan for releasing Katherine from her tomb he settled down to enjoy toying with the human who looked like her and a little mild Stefan-baiting on the side. Similarly, Katherine is getting as much useful info on the Salvatores & co as she can, whilst indulging in a little everyone-baiting-but-particularly-Damon on the side. I approve. This allows her to fit into an expected mould on this show, so without making her a particular focus of this week’s episode (despite its title) she becomes an established part of the world and we know roughly what to expect of her.

Plot point 3: Gilbert journals: er, definitely an example of something we’ve seen before. Though this time it looks less like they’ll be used to elucidate bored teenagers on matters of the supernatural and more as plot gizmos which will reveal whatever is needed from 1864. But it’s an excuse for more flashbacks, which can only make me happy.

Plot point 4: Luka and Jonas’ deaths: only partially a familiar plot. Luka and Jonas are, in some ways, a retread of Anna and Pearl, but the specifics of their deaths were specific to this current plotline. With Elijah rotting happily in the basement, they stood in the way of the need to resurrect him – they knew enough about his plans that the Salvatores & co could feasibly act without him. With the Martins gone, however, even given Bonnie’s new knowledge, I’d say they need someone with inside Klaus knowledge who they can even partially trust – which comes down to Elijah or Katherine. I know who I trust more. So I guess their deaths were inevitable for the sake of bringing Elijah back at some point (which the writers must want as much as us, right?) and since I found them kind of boring I’m not too worried. (As plenty of commenters have pointed out, killing off the magical coloured people is hardly new ground for this show, sigh, but as actual characters there was less precedent for their arc on the show.) In specifics, also, being burnt to death is a new one for non-vampires on this show.

Plot point 5: Isobel returns: well, the clue is in the description. Will Elena be able to stop Jenna issuing an invitation to a vampire and repeating that particular mistake for the hundredth time? Who knows.

I think that pretty much covers everything important that happened. So to conclude… yes, I think my assertion has been validated. We saw almost nothing last week that we haven’t seen before on this show in some way or other, but it was all retooled and seen from new angles that made it exciting and unexpected nevertheless. So long as the show can keep pulling off that trick, I think it can sustain its plot momentum. (Even with evil hiatuses to interrupt it. Grrr.)

Sundry observations:

- what did Damon find in that journal that he was keeping from Katherine but sharing with Stefan? We know he probably already knew Emily’s place of death simply by being around at the time, which means he knows where the other witches were burned. Is there any other piece of information they know they need which they haven’t currently got? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just the specifics of Emily’s death (I can’t imagine Johnathan Gilbert not recording that event, after all), but I hope it’s something new and interesting.

- is Katherine playing Damon? Again? Her admission that she knew he’d die and considered it worth the price of her own escape felt true enough, but her later ‘explanation’ to Damon that John allowed her to choose one of them and she chose Stefan… no. I’m not convinced. Firstly, we didn’t see John visit Katherine until after he’d already given Damon the dagger, though obviously there could have been previous meetings we didn’t see… but even so it makes no sense. Katherine gets out of the tomb if Elijah dies. With John in possession of the dagger, who cares which Salvatore brother she nominates to die? John would give it to whichever one he wanted dead anyway. Similarly, if Katherine had told Damon what she knew last week, she could still have played it such that Elijah died but Damon did not – after all, if Elijah dies then no matter what ‘deal’ she’s made with John, she gets out of the tomb. All in all, I see that little speech as Katherine just having fun messing with Damon’s head some more, trying once again to drive a wedge between him and Stefan, just taking the situation and having fun with it to exploit other people’s weaknesses.

- As much as Candice Accola has a lovely singing voice, and I approve of the song choice, I felt that scene went on just a tiny bit too long. If it were possible to product placement an actor’s voice, that’s what that felt like to me – an audition tape for the actress, rather than a heartfelt moment for the character.

- Loved the throwaway comment that Elena and Stefan keep forgetting to go to school. Heh. Along with everyone else. When was the last time we saw an actual lesson? Middle of last season sometime?

- Now that I’ve had a reasonable quantity of Matt and Alaric in recent weeks, I’m missing the Sheriff instead.

- I’m glad that both Stefan’s and Damon’s first instincts re Katherine/Elena in the first scene were correct, and that they only doubted themselves once Katherine played the confusion to her advantage.

- It still makes absolutely no sense to me that John and Isobel and Katherine are apparently all working together. None whatsoever. Any theories?