Don’t get us wrong, we still love us some Vampire Diaries, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we wouldn’t change about Season 5 of the vampire drama. With the promise of a fresh, new Season 6 on the summer hiatus horizon, here are five changes we want to see in the upcoming season.
More time to supporting characters. TVD is at its best when it embraces its ensemble. This has been especially true in recent seasons, when the all-important love triangle has fallen flat. But regardless of what’s happening with the main three, we love TVD the most when it finds time to give meatier storylines to its supporting cast. Now that the main cast extends to Enzo and Alaric (and, hopefully, to some degree, Liv and Luke), our desire to see storytelling distribution between our characters has only increased.
A recognition of our heros’ relative morality. We couldn’t help but feel for Luke and Liv this past season. They were more-or-less the TVDers equivalent of a witch booty call, contacted whenever our guys needed a spell performed, but never offered Fang Gang membership. And the Fang Gang totally got mad at them for going to desperate lengths to save the people they love (aka one another) even though they did the same thing on a weekly basis. The same could be said of Enzo, who hasn’t done anything that Damon hasn’t done, but gets mega-judged for it. We’d like to see TVD mature to the point where they explore this moral relativism as a full-blown theme — not just for Bad Boy Hero Damon, but for all of the characters on this show.
More consistent and effective use of the flashback. We love us some TVD flashback, but the second half of Season 5 was sadly light on the plot device. The flashbacks to what happened to Maggie in the 1960s were disgustingly compelling (that shot of Damon ripping off Maggie’s head, anyone?), but somewhat ineffective as a storytelling device. They were used to give us information we already knew about a character we cared almost nothing for (outside of her value to Enzo) rather than to shine a deeper, more nuanced understanding on one of our main characters. TVD knows how to pull off a flashback like no other (see: Season 5’s “The Cell”), and we hope to see a return to form in Season 6.
Whitmore College world-building. TVD’s solution to the dreaded high school-to-college TV show jump was to mostly ignore its new collegiate setting altogether. Sure, we explored the Whitmore-based Augustine Society and spent sometime in empty classrooms and at lame college parties, but TVD never really embraced its new setting. We’re not saying we want to spend hours on college plotlines, but we would like for the show to establish a sense of place in the same way they did with Mystic Falls in early seasons of the show. Otherwise, we feel a little lost.
A personal villain. The Season 5 villains had their moments (Markos, less so), but none of them were compelling in the way Klaus or Katherine have been. The best villains on this show have been personal. Klaus was unpredictably ruthless, but he was also humanized by his commitment to his family, as well as his attempts to get his best friendship with Stefan back. As terrible as Katherine could be, her long and complicated history with the Salvatores gave her an automatic in to the world of TVD.
Enzo works in a similar manner. His importance to our characters (in this case, Damon) is given through convincing flashback, but he never really rose to true villain status. Instead, he acted as an ally as often as an enemy. We lost time with the feud between Silas, Amara, and Tessa, which was only superficially personal to our central characters in that some of these characters shared our heroes’ faces — and late-to-the-game Markos. We hope Season 6 introduces us to another villain we can care about.
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