The Vampire Diaries S07E06 “Best Served Cold” REVIEW

Airing in the UK on ITV2, Weds 11pm
Writer: Darren Genet
Director: Caroline Dries

Essential plot points:

• Flash forward three years to Damon talking to Alaric about his fiancé… who is revealed to be Caroline (!?). Damon is concerned that whoever is hunting Stefan will use Caroline to draw him out. Caroline comes on TV as a news reporter with a bleeding head and a message for Stefan.
• In the present Lily invites everyone to a party to introduce them to Julian and try and secure a truce. Stefan wants to use the opportunity to kill Julian for killing his unborn child; Damon wants Julian to stay alive for six months so it hurts Lily more when he is killed.
• New Jo is struggling in her body; because she is a vampire in a human body it rejects the soul and starts to decay. Alaric has to say goodbye but it gives him closure.
• Valerie taunts Caroline about Stefan not telling her Valerie’s secret. Caroline wants Valerie out of Mystic Falls
• Enzo goes to the party. He finds out the Julian wants Oscar’s car so he goes to find it first.
• Stefan tries to kill Julian but all does not go to plan. Lily intervenes before Julian can kill both Salvatore brothers.
• Bonnie and Matt follow a party guest, who is obviously compelled, to the school. There they find a whole room full of compelled people attached to drips.
• Valerie watches Alaric’s wedding video and realises that Jo’s twins are still alive. She does a locator spell and finds out that they are now developing inside Caroline (which explains the engagement to Alaric in three years time)
• Stefan tells Damon what Julian did to make Stefan hate him so much, Damon agrees to help kill Julian as soon as possible.

Good points:

• Even though an earlier flashforward heavily implied that Alaric and Jo’s unborn children were still alive there was still a huge twist when it was revealed that Caroline is now carrying them. The coven moved them to her body when Jo was dying to save them. There might be some problems, though, with a vampire carrying mortal babies.
• Julian recounts his experience being trapped in the Phoenix Stone for a hundred years. He would wake up every day (sounds a bit strange to have a soul wake up) and try to escape but he would end up killing the person he loved most in the world, Lily. When he is attacking the Salvatore brothers Lily tries to stop him and he looks as if he is about to kill her, almost making his worst nightmare true.
• The rapport and tension is slowly building up between Enzo and Bonnie. In an attempt to make Lily jealous he tells Bonnie to say she’s his date to the party. Bonnie fixes Enzo’s tie while Lily is watching and it creates a hot little moment for them both.
• Some more depth was given to Valerie’s character. She was moved by Alaric’s story of his wife being taken from him while she was pregnant with their children and she watched the wedding video and found that the Gemini’s chanting, which everyone assumed was them trying to send Kai back to the prison world, was actually meant to save the babies and remove them from Jo’s dying body. She lost her child but she helped Alaric find his.

Bad points:

• Lily is very hypocritical and hard to work out. She stops Julian from killing Damon and Stefan and tells him that she will not see her children hurt, but she’s perfectly willing to hurt them herself. It was her idea to make Damon suffer without Elena for another 80 years.
• The writers are still determined to push the Nora and Mary Louise relationship drama into the forefront. It’s really difficult to care about it because they’re both such unlikeable characters who get barely any screen time and their relationship is hard to fathom anyway. Nora is a bitch to Mary Louise who just moans about it and dresses in more revealing clothes which is uncomfortable for her and uncomfortable to watch.

Random:

• Stefan has a dream that he has a son in the 1800s, and he is teaching the child, Jacob, to shoot. It was a nice look at what could have been, though it was actually Stefan’s mind torturing him.
• Caroline suggests a new name for Valerie: “Matilda Pettigrew from Liverpool, England” which she pronounces in a fake posh British which is definitely not Scouse.
• Nora shows Julian how to play Candy Crush on his new phone, not really the most important invention of the 21st Century.
• In a highly enjoyable little scene Damon and Stefan talk about killing Julian but use an analogy involving furniture so as not to reveal too much to the other vampires with super hearing.

Review by Georgina Tyson

Read our other reviews of The Vampire Diaries