Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Thursday Nights Bite


Hellloooooooooo, people! Say hello to our guest blogger for today, Peanut Em&Em. Clovis and I have known Madame LePeanute for more years than we care to admit to, and she's graciously volunteered her services to blog for our squirrel friends here at TV Sluts. Peanut Em&Em has prepared some peanut buttah for us, in the form of a Vampire Diaries review. Enjoy!


It’s 8:30 Thursday night and my house is silent.  The boys are in bed and my husband is downstairs on the elliptical.  I sneak into the family room, turn on the TV, and quickly mute the volume.  My God, I don’t want to get caught.  Breathing a sigh of relief, I see that my DVR has successfully begun recording one of the worst shows on the CW (Ok, I admit that’s not saying a lot).  I guess it’s time to come clean. Hi, my name is Emily and I am addicted to The Vampire Diaries.

If you are unfamiliar with the series, let me take this second paragraph to catch you up on the first 3 seasons.  The series revolves around Elena Gilbert, a human high school student, and her vampire admirers, brothers Damon and Stefan Salvatore.  Elena is not just your average high school girl though.  Oh no, she has some supernatural blood in her as well; she is the doppelganger (twin) of Damon and Stefan’s first love, the vampire Katherine.  What an amazing love…square?  Add to that that in each season someone different is trying to kill “poor” Elena while Damon and Stefan try to save her.  And with that, you’re all caught up on the first three years of TVD.  Welcome to the Vampire Diaries family!


There’s enough of me to go around, boys.
           
I hope by now that you are thinking the same thing that I have been thinking for the last three seasons.  If someone is always trying to kill Elena, and she’s hanging out with vampires anyway, why didn’t one of the Salvatore boys just turn Elena into a vampire?  Well, thank God at the end of season 3 they finally did just that.  With fragile Elena now a rough and tough vampire they had to step up some serious evil this season.  In season 4 we have seen the return of just about every baddie that wanted to kill Elena over the years with the addition of our new super baddie, Silas.  Silas is the first immortal ever created and also happens to be stronger than any other supernatural creature in the Vampire Diaries universe.  (Where the heck are they going to go from here?)

The Season 4 finale finds Elena and the boys facing off with Silas.  Elena’s best friend Bonnie, the witch, (Of course Elena’s best friend is a witch!  Oh and by the way, her brother is a vampire hunter.  Take that willing suspension of disbelief.) is attempting to put a spell on Silas to turn him to stone so that the boys can drop his body in the lake effectively ending Silas’s reign of terror.

Certainly things could not go according to plan.  Enter Emily’s favorite vampire Damon, played by Ian Somerhalder.  I’ve loved Ian since he was Boone on Lost.  He’s pretty.  Unfortunately, somewhere between Lost and The Vampire Diaries he forgot how to act.  He has taken a page from the acting style of Joey from Friends.  Remember that episode where Joey was explaining to Rachel how he acted in the emotional scenes on the soap opera?   He used the “smell the fart” technique of acting.   He would by squint up his eyes and pretend he smelled a fart, that way he looked like he was feeling the emotions of his character.  That is how my boy Ian plays too many of his scenes in TVD, including the scene where Elena finally confesses her love for Damon (well, for this season anyway).

You’re my brother and I (takes a deep breath) love you man.
            
So where does that leave poor Stefan?  He is left to deal with Silas’s body.  Season 4 ends with Stefan about to throw Silas into the lake wrapping everything up with a nice bow.  Or not, because we quickly find out that the blanket containing Silas’s petrified body contains only rocks.  What?  You’re kidding me!  Oh no, it gets better.  Silas shows up and goes on to tell Stefan that he is his doppelganger just before he locks Stefan into a safe and sends him to the bottom of the lake.  Not possible, Stefan is a doppelganger too?  No, you read that correctly, we now have two sets of twins.  This reminds me of a lesson I learned early in my writing career.   If you write yourself into a corner, don’t have your character’s phone ring in order to dig yourself out of the hole.  It’s too obvious.  Really, 2 sets of doppelgangers?  The phone’s ringing TVD and it’s on the bottom of the lake.  Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but I will be tuning in this fall to see how you dig yourselves out of this one.

4 comments:

Clovis said...

I admit, I watched season 1 of this show after a lot of hesitation. It's clear the CW was trying to cash in on the Twilight money, so I didn't want to give it too much credence. I had heard a lot of people talk about how it had grown beyond that idea, though, so I gave it a chance.

I liked it, but just couldn't keep myself interested in it after the first season. That said, I occasionally will read updates about it and one of the things that I keep hearing is how the show often defaults to the wackadoo finale gimmick to create a WTF reaction from its audience, rather than trust the strength of its stories. Sounds like the season 4 finale continues the tradition.

Also, I'm reaching the end of my "sympathetic mopey vampire" rope. Anne Rice does Anne Rice better than a lot of other folk, after all.

Unknown said...

Points to Clovis for using "wackadoodle" in a sentence.

Maggie Cats said...

Actually, I am going to defend Vampire Diaries and say that it is one of the best paced dramas on tv. I don't see the WTF moments as gimmicks or laziness but actually a credit to the writers who are clearly working from a solid road map. The finales and shocking moments never feel to come from nowhere; the groundwork is laid if you look for it and they always progress the story.

Unknown said...

I have never seen it, but based on the premise, I'd be disappointed if it weren't at least a little ludicrous.