Love You to Death Season 5 - excerpt!

episode guide: Home (5.22)

Bonnie: Do you think it’ll hurt?

Damon: I don’t kn—.

5.22 Home

Original air date May 15, 2014

Written by Caroline Dries and Brian Young Directed by Chris Grismer

Edited by Tony Solomons Cinematography by Michael Karasick

Guest cast Matt Davis (Alaric Saltzman), Lennon Harrison (Sign Traveler

#2), Arielle Kebbel (Lexi), Trevor Scot Schliefer (Passing Traveler), Jarred

Sonnier (Sign Traveler #1), Cornell Austin Willis (Van Traveler)

Previously on The Vampire Diaries Ian Somerhalder

The gang saves Mystic Falls from the Travelers. The Other Side collapses.

And so it ends. Season five closes with a heartbreaking implosion (and an impressive explosion) that leaves our characters unmoored — some loved ones lost, others returned. Home is where the heart is, as the saying goes, and in this finale, the Mystic Falls gang proves willing to go to the ends of the earth to be together and to protect each other, even when that means risking not only their lives but their eternal existence.

While Markos and the Travelers may not rank on the list of most compelling antagonists this series has seen, their single-minded mission to take away the place the characters call home provokes a similar single- mindedness in the ensemble of characters. As the episode opens, Markos and the Travelers (with all their half-sensical, mystical mumbo-jumbo) have managed to destabilize the entire universe as these characters know it: Mystic Falls is a no-spirit-magic zone, meaning vampires will die, witches are powerless, and its inhabitants have been either evacuated or killed (after being used as meatsuits for the Travelers). The Other Side is on the brink of collapse because of Markos’s return, and that means all the dead supernaturals who’ve made that purgatory their home are either headed for Oblivion or in a race to find that ever elusive “peace.” The ship, to use Sheriff Forbes’s metaphor, is going down.

In an act one scene that nicely pairs with the final one, Damon and Bonnie — the gang’s de facto leaders — have a charged conversation about the stakes of their situation. Not only is this one of the least annoying recap-the-previous-episode scenes we’ve had in a while but it demonstrates how neither one of them needs any help being “motivated” (though Damon smashes some stuff for good measure). All that matters to these two is saving the ones they love — Stefan and that ever-growing list of Other Siders, saving their home. From start to finish, the characters make choices in “Home” that serve that one clear purpose: to save, to protect, to die for one another.

While it may be in her job description to serve and protect the people of Mystic Falls, Sheriff Forbes steps up, playing a key role in orchestrating Project Kaboom. When Markos’s suspicions keep her at the Grill despite the ticking clock, Liz doesn’t waver in her resolve to oust these interlopers from her home, even if she won’t live to see it happen. The captain goes down with the ship, and she chooses to stay, knowing that she’s moments away from an explosive death with no safety net of an Other Side to be rescued from. The last Mystic Falls parent sees it through alive, thanks to Damon and Alaric stopping to save her — and risking their own passage back to the Land of Living in doing so.

Another matriarch willing to risk herself for her loved ones, Sheila “Grams” Bennett may not have succeeded in teaching her grandchild not to  rush her elders, but she has instilled in Bonnie the most important Bennett family value: she protects her own. Grams doesn’t try to stop Bonnie from making the sacrifice she’s committed to making — she respects her granddaughter’s choice — but Grams has made a selfless choice of her own. Somehow Bonnie has been taken care of, and combined with Grams’s comment that she’s not the only one in her family who knows how to make a sacrifice and that slow pan over the graves of other Bennett witch ancestors, Grams may not have been the only Bennett working to protect Bonnie from the pain of Oblivion.