The Vampire Diaries S06E19: "Because"

The only thing moms love more than carpools and peace and quiet is going through your stuff. It's like, sure, they want to make sure you're not doing anything harmful to yourself, but also, come on, it's a whole bedroom of secrets just begging to get the Indiana Jones treatment. While you are at color guard practice your mom is discovering all sorts of precious artifacts and gems hidden in your hollowed-out book or improperly closed lockbox. But what if your items were literally magical? Could you blame her for being nosy? And what if one of your special items had the power to change the entire course of your particular supernatural soap? At that point you're pretty much just BEGGING for your mom to find it, especially if you're Damon Salvatore. He's in his second century, yet was dumb enough to store his most valuable item in a shoebox? How many seconds did it take for Lily to find that vampire cure? Four seconds? Five seconds? Come on, guy.

"Because" was this week's episode of The Vampire Diaries, but it wasn't ALL about moms rifling through your sh*t. It was also about Caroline's journey back from the brink! The episode was simple yet heart-wrenching and continued Season 6's winning streak. Let's talk about it!

We started with one of those weird "already in progress" plans where it's intercut with the same characters discussing what they're planning to do WHILE we see it happen. In this case it was Stefan plotting to turn Caroline's humanity switch back on. The plan was hilariously simple—"let's torture her back into being chill again"—and involved an impromptu stay at a remote bed and breakfast, because going to those are what humanity-free vampires are into.

A big element was that Stefan had to pretend that his flip had not been switched back on, so he was pretending to be a dick still. So he called the front desk for "a snack" only to open the door to this guy:

That's when Damon tranq'd Caroline and had to also tranq Stefan as well to keep up the charade. So the next thing we knew they woke up three days later with a lot less blood!



Again, the idea was to force them to become desiccated so that, I don't know, Caroline would feel emotional again? Is that how that works? Seems like the rules for proper humanity switch maintenance change every time. But anyway, suddenly the bed was disgusting and Stefan was NOT getting his room cleaning deposit back.

Meanwhile at Whitmore, Damon brought Bonnie coffee in the hopes that the caffeine would make her be more chill about the fact that he'd given the Ascendant to his mom. But as it turned out, the caffeine did not make Bonnie more chill!

She was mad because her main thing was that she didn't want anyone under any circumstance to go back to the 1903 prison, for the very reasonable reason that this is TVD and such a thing would guarantee that Kai would return and Bonnie would be the first one murdered. I actually totally sided with Bonnie here, her sudden rage at what Damon had done was absolutely supported by these characters' histories. Bonnie is the #1 death victim of every villain, and that would go double in the case of Kai. So yeah, she was ticked. Which was a bummer because after all the bonding and BFF-ing she and Damon had done, their friendship was now back in a bad place. Very sadface.

Back at the B&B, Alaric and Jo were watching over their vampire captives, and because he's a man Alaric was grumbling about the wedding logistics and because she's a woman Jo was like 'wedding wedding wedding'! Hahaha, have you ever noticed how different men and women are? It's like they are from different planets sometimes. And then they started kissing on the mouth and grinding on each other and Elena showed up to perv on them, but I'm pretty sure it all somehow just reminded her about how sad she is to be a vampire all of the sudden. Really, every scene in this show was meant to somehow make Elena pine for humanity again. The thoroughness of this universe in pressuring her to become human again is almost hilarious. We get it, everyone, relax.

The main weapon Stefan planned to use against Caroline was a letter that her mother had written intending to be delivered after her death. She couldn't possibly remain humanity-free after reading that, right?

Except, uh, she didn't have her humanity switch on? That was problem they maybe didn't consider with this plan. Bye-bye letter!

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