The Vampire Diaries S07E20: "Kill 'Em All"

On average, how many ancient poltergeists do you accidentally unleash every week? Although there was a time when I would accidentally unleash anywhere from 1 to 4 ancient poltergeists each week, in recent years I have unleashed next to no ancient poltergeists. It's a conscious decision on my part: If I can avoid unleashing an ancient poltergeist, I WILL. The problem is, you never know where ancient poltergeists are being stored. Obviously priceless urns or buried crates are prime ancient poltergeist storage, but I swear to G one time I accidentally unleashed an ancient poltergeist that someone had trapped in an old Cheetos bag. WHO would put an ancient poltergeist in an old Cheetos bag and WHY? Sometimes I will never understand what ghost busters think they're doing. Anyway, sometimes unleashing an ancient poltergeist is an honest mistake but in my opinion we should all be more careful about unleashing ancient poltergeists into the world. Ancient poltergeists are bad for the ozone layer, among other things.

"Kill 'Em All" contained a lot of vampire murder and it also lead to Bonnie getting a new soul (that comes with a major asterisk) and also the unleashing of an ancient poltergeist from the haunted vault. For those reasons plus a few others I liked this episode. Let's talk about it!



We began with a very sick witch hanging out in a public restroom inspecting her scabs. After some careful assessment, Bonnie realized she was not feeling great. Still, she had a mission, and that mission was to visit her former psych ward bestie and get her to spill the deets on that haunted vault sitch.

After about 2.3 seconds of pleading, Bonnie finally got the girl to tell her everything! It turned out the vault was really just a cave with a door on it, and sometimes when you go inside, a supernatural force turns you into a psychopath.

Like this one old timey guy walked out of the vault and murdered his friends for no reason. So basically the vault is just sort of an all-purpose Big Bad generator. Step into it nice and normal and then presto! You're a dick who is not fun to be around. Sort of like a Dave & Busters.

Although, it was highly amusing that the big threat of the vault was that it creates remorseless killers... And then we immediately cut to A BUNCH OF REMORSELESS KILLERS WHO ARE THE MAIN CHARACTERS. Here's Damon not only murdering a vampire, but really going overboard with it.

Because, like, aren't these actually HUMANS? I mean like vampire souls in human bodies? For example, Stefan had a human body with no vampire powers. I don't exactly understand why they need to be staked in the heart or have their hearts ripped out. They aren't physically vampires, right? Oh well. Anyway, Enzo and Damon were just leaving piles off flaming corpses at truck stops throughout the nation. Good thing nobody notices things like that. And they weren't the only ones getting in on the carnage...

Caroline and Alaric hired babysitters to look after their twins so that they too could help out with Rayna's list. (Stefan and Matt were also teamed up somewhere). But this was another example of TVD's VERY QUESTIONABLE internal morality. We were lead to believe that these mass murders were justified because the vampires were somehow deserving of it, yet should I point out that at one point Damon and Stefan themselves were unjustly trapped in that poonstone? And Bo seemed chill, he probably did not deserve to be murdered. And this entire show is an argument that vampires are people too. In other words, all our heroes have become remorseless killers, and that's just something we had to accept. (It was still pretty fun though.)

I thought it was cute that anytime another murder was committed, Rayna would throw a scribbling into the fire like some kind of scorekeeper. On the other hand, she looked mighty tired of the entire situation.

She was waiting for the grim reaper like a child might wait for Santa on Christmas Eve. Hang in there, girl! He's coming!





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