5.6 Handle With Care Katherine has her own stuff to deal with, after basically being murdered last week while our heroes looked on. She’s no longer the cure, given that Silas drained her of all that blood, but she is slowly decomposing now that she’s a dead human – is this where Vampire Diaries delves into zombies? I sure hope so and, with Katherine blackmailing Dr. Maxfield into helping her figure out why her hair’s turning grey and her teeth are falling out, I guess we’ll find out what kind of mixed-up creature Katherine has become pretty soon. I really hope she’s a zombie, because that would be awesome. Elena and Damon, apparently not caring that they just fed a human being to their mortal enemy, have a moment’s cuddle time before heel descends on the Salvatore manor once more. This hell comes in the form of a now-mortal Silas, who agrees to bring Bonnie back to life in exchange for their help finding the anchor and destroying the other side (still with me?). As Stefan later says, we still need to be drunk to understand this story. With the addition on an anchor, the original Doppelganger and the involvement of travellers, this just got a little too complicated for my taste. It’s not just boring now – its borderline nonsensical. As all of this was going on, we got to see an unusual team up between Katherine and Caroline. Because Katherine is both desperate and a heck of a lot more proactive than Elena, instead of doing a runner from college, the two of them confront Dr Maxfield, drain him of vervane blood and ask him useful questions about his secret society and vampire experiments. This was probably responsible for the episode’s best moments simply because Katherine got to be the scheming supervillain she was always meant to be, and I hope she leads Caroline astray more often. At least they got something done! Information we learned – the Whitmore secret society is called Augustine, and they have their own vampire. This Augustine vampire is what killed Caroline and Elena’s roommate in the first episode and Maxfield faked the death certificate to cover it up. This will be the new villain now that Silas has been slain and Katsia’s life’s work has been completed, and who bets this vampire is some sort of uber-vamp that’s come about through the experiments of the Augustine society? Do I smell another Buffy rip-off? With Silas basically being The First last year, Stefan being thrown to the bottom of a lake and the anchor being a person, it’s just getting silly now. But Paul Wesley now only has one character to play and, as Katsia has given him his memories back as a weird form of torture, we’ll get our male lead back at last. I was kind of enjoying amnesia Stefan, and hoping his lack of memories would bring his latent feelings for Caroline to the surface, but this works too. Next week we’ll be dealing with that, along with Katsia’s new master plan, Bonnie’s ghostly presence and the new “crazy pants” Doppelganger in town. And still nobody cares about Matt. Way to be a good friend Jeremy. See you there! Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, Monster’s Ball, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
