Thanks for watching Thursday’s episode, “Live Through This,” written by Rebecca Sonnenshine. Rebecca is most famous as the writer responsible for the Klaus-Caroline birthday speech in Season 3. The speech that launched one very passionate and eternal ‘ship. I told her that as a result she’ll get invited to conventions for the rest of her life and will never be bored in retirement.

Director Kellie Cyrus spent her first four years with TVD as the script supervisor. There is not a single person involved in the show — including sometimes the writers — who knows it better than the person in charge of continuity. After years of studying the visiting directors and learning the craft, Kellie was more than ready to take her turn in the director’s chair, and is now a family favorite director on both The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. People talk a lot about the lack of female directors in the television landscape. In television, directors are often plucked from the ranks of the artists on the crew. Editors, camera, script supervisors, writers, ADs, line producers … the opportunity is there for women to come up through many different paths if someone is willing to support it. People who don’t support that are jerks, in my opinion, and should be sent in a time machine back to the Neolithic period where they don’t have to feel threatened by awesome women.