The Vampire Diaries "I Alone" Review: Time Crimes (PHOTO RECAP)

The Vampire Diaries S06E09: "I Alone"

Because each episode of The Vampire Diaries is an exercise in pushing us to the limits of how much information our brains can retain, almost every week my brain will latch onto a single story element like a frightened baby koala. It could just be an off-hand remark, or a tiny detail, or maybe something insane that nobody except me will ever notice or care about. In this week's episode "I Alone," it was the idea that a witch hotwired a car and drove across AN EMPTY USA in a couple days. See what I'm saying? Just a tiny bit of info makes your imagination run wild. Like I had accepted that this 1994 witch prison was simply just an empty town, but now we're talking about an empty WORLD. But is it like a Leftovers situation where the humans simply disappeared and left all their possessions exactly in place? Like were the freeways littered with empty vehicles? How are basic utilities still running without the constant oversight of power plant employees or water treatment people? Were the radio stations still running? Exactly what kind of environment did Bonnie encounter as she traversed the lower 48 in her sweet stolen ride? And whether you think an experience like that might be an existential nightmare or effing HEAVEN, I personally could have watched an entire episode of Bonnie's road trip. It could have been a wordless exploration of isolation a la Gus Van Sant's death trilogy. But in classic TVD fashion, this show had simply presented a crazy idea, glossed over its insane implications, and moved the story relentlessly forward. Not a complaint!

"I Alone" was terrific. Let's talk about it!

Oh, another example: The last episode set up the idea that Damon was willing to compel Alaric to betray Jo and get her Ascendant. But where normal TV shows have trained us to expect this plotline to unfurl over the course of a few episodes or at least an entire single episode, it pretty much went down entirely in the cold open! Alaric seduced Jo with fine delicacies and, you know, his face, and got her to admit that she keeps her powerful witch artifact in her underwear drawer. A classic hiding place!

Anyway, yeah. He got it. Boy did he!

Ha this show. I love how years of casual murder are fine, but telling a white lie to SAVE A FRIEND'S LIFE is frowned upon. Vampires are so weird.

So then Jeremy and Elena went for a jog and Jeremy nonchalantly suggested that all the girls on campus would enjoy seeing his junk. That is pretty much all I remember about this scene.

Oh wait, there was more. Apparently word hadn't properly gotten around that Bonnie was still alive, so, days later, her boyfriend finally received the update. But in a sad twist he had JUST gotten over her death, so this news was treated as a major inconvenience.

There was A LOT to parse when it came to Jeremy's underwhelmed reaction to the news that Bonnie was alive, but I'll leave it to the relationship experts to figure out. In short, it seemed he was mostly just mad that his girlfriends are constantly dying and coming back to life and he has HAD IT. "Get me off this madcap merry-go-round," Jeremy did not say but probably could have, who knows.

Meanwhile Liv had had enough werewolf sex for the moment.

YEP, still loving this LivTyler plotline. He's really sweet to her. I know a lot of people like it when Tyler is sh*tty, but I like it when he's nice. I like nice things! What can I say.

Anyway, yeah, she had to leave, specifically so that she could go help a couple of vampires time travel.

She was going to whisk them back to 1994 for a set number of hours and then she'd be able to pull them back out, but first they had to drink her blood.

Also I loved that Liv had to drip LUCY BENNETT'S blood onto the Ascendant. That is a character nobody's seen since SEASON 2. See what I'm saying? Just a casual mention of Lucy Bennett sent my brain on a tangent that I barely recovered from in time to care about whatever happened next. Had Damon visited Lucy? What was that conversation like? Did they talk about Katherine? Did he tell Lucy that he'd ridiculed Katherine on her death bed and that Katherine met her estranged daughter and later staged her death by body-jumping into Elena and then got killed and sucked into the sky? Did Lucy believe him when he explained that he is now best friends with Bonnie? Again, that confrontation could've been a whole other episode in itself. Bless this show.

And yep, 1994 is still kinda boring (whenever there isn't a CD player nearby). Elena did not look super impressed.

Like I've been saying, Kai's possible escape could've been an episode in itself, but TVD was like, "Nope. Let's just cut to him arriving at Whitmore."

The show also dispensed with the culture-clash stuff as quickly as possible. Basically Kai had walked into an Urban Outfitters and bought skinny jeans and then went and bought an iPhone 6 (which, LOL at this show pretending that it's totally caught up, year-wise). Kinda disappointed he was riding in a taxi instead of an Uber, but Kai still has a lot to learn about modern ground transportation I guess. However, I was NOT disappointed when he strangled his cab driver with iPhone earbuds.

Oh, this lady was still on the show.

Matt had agreed to set up a meeting between "Sarah Salvatore" (air quotes spoiler) and Stefan, but look who showed up seeming very butt-hurt about nobody returning his calls?

Luckily Stefan and Matt stepped to Enzo and told him not to murder anybody. Phew! That usually keeps Enzo in his place. He's fine with being told what to do, why do you ask?

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Also, I guess as a reminder of how it's even possible there's a "Sarah Salvatore" we were shown this picture:

Except I only care about the photo behind it! Who on earth are those people? It's blurry, but I am pretty sure I see: a magician, Orson Welles, former President Bill Clinton, Adolf Hitler, Life on Mars-era David Bowie, and Gallagher. None of these boarding house residents would come as a surprise, frankly.

Then Elena found an old camcorder like the kind teen that journalists used to use on MTV's Rock the Vote specials and it had some VERY salacious and incriminating footage on it:

Obviously I laughed when Damon claimed it was his audition tape for Real World: London, mostly because that season could've really benefitted from a foppish vampire character! Damon and Neil would've been friends and he probably would've dated Jacinda at one point. Also Sharon would've succumbed to an "animal attack" in week one.

Anyway, this episode contained a couple moments of Damon having to explain early '90s technology to Elena. For example, pagers. He did not explain how he knew that Bonnie would be in possession of Kai's pager, or how he knew that cell phone (?) towers would be operational nationwide, but didn't matter. It worked!

Another tossed-off thing that made me laugh? Bonnie was in Indiana and had seven hours to race to Mystic Falls before they'd all be whisked back to modern times. She'd be cutting it close! But also, Damon and Elena didn't even offer to cut her travel time in half and meet her halfway so she could drink Liv's blood sooner? Don't tell me a nearly 200-year-old rebel vampire doesn't know how to hotwire a car. Wait, actually, his actual car was probably still in the driveway. So yeah, Damon and Elena traveled to '94 so that they could relax in his living room while Bonnie white-knuckled it across the country. Cool friends, very helpful.

Meanwhile back at Whitmore, all h*ck was breaking loose!

Jo was steamed that her Ascendant had gone missing. Because, again, it was right there in her unmentionables drawer, so assuming she changes her unmentionables every day, she was gonna notice!!! (Sorry, caffeine.) But Alaric didn't remember stealing no Ascendant and he was ticked about the accusation. Trouble in paradise, folks.

Then Damon made vampire pancakes for Elena while listening to sweet '90s jams and for a brief moment they were living the dream. (Cut to Bonnie wiping sweat from her brow as she floored it through endless wastelands.) But then Elena found out that Damon had done something unconscionable: He'd compelled Alaric to hand over the Ascendant. Because after years of guilt-free slaughter, stealing an artifact to save a best friend was suddenly this unforgivable transgression.

Again, read into this whatever you want, but it seems like Elena maybe doesn't really value Bonnie's safety as much as she claims. I guess the whole point was she didn't want to risk setting Kai free, but as this episode would point out, he had that pretty much figured out on his own. So yeah, anyway, Elena did NOT approve of the lengths to which Damon went to free Bonnie—and they were the least-extreme lengths in TVD history—PLUS she made it about herself by accusing him of only wanting to rescue Bonnie to get in Elena's pants. Have you ever noticed that sometimes Elena is the Big Bad on this show? She is truly diabolical.

So then Kai joined twitter.

(Whoever is running that account is clearly a genius, if only from the list of accounts Kai's currently following.)

Anyway, yeah Kai went to Liv's bar and ordered a Zima and this was Liv's reaction:

Then after what felt like 1,000 decades of dropping mega-hints that he was her brother, Kai finally just handed over his Drivers License (TWICE) so that she could see his full name and address. Liv's reading comprehension is just as bad as her memory and instincts apparently.

Next thing we knew he was grabbing her arm and sucking her magic out of her like a child soccer player draining an after-game Capri-Sun! So she stabbed him with a fork and ran upstairs!

And just when it seemed like Kai was about to murder Liv, a certain pre-werewolf-concerned-about-murdering-folks showed up and PUSHED HIM off a balcony.

But of course Kai didn't die, so Tyler is still a human, don't worry.

Meanwhile, there was a scene in which Enzo called Matt "a bowl of mush" (ALMOST CORRECT, Enzo) and Stefan ordered a milkshake so that Enzo couldn't hear him tell Sarah that she was a damn liar and to take a ride in his tiny car with him.

Yeah, in what was either a surprise double-reveal or just simple, "Eh, we didn't know where this plotline was going," the writers revealed that Sarah wasn't actually a Salvatore, she was just a lowly con artist. And Stefan knew this because he'd been in close personal contact with the real Sarah Salvatore and knew for a f*ckin' fact this girl wasn't her. Busted!

Meanwhile Damon finally confronted Elena about her accusations that he was only trying to help Bonnie in order to score with Elena.

And yes, we got another scene in which Damon extolled Bonnie's virtues by couching them in reluctant insults. But neither Damon's downplaying nor the weekly protests by Dalaric fans can convince me otherwise: His bond with Bonnie is more intimate and dynamic and, after four months of constant contact, more time-worn than any of his other friendships. And now he wants to save his friend, and not even his possibly epic love with Elena can get in the way of it. "Deal with it." —Season 6 of The Vampire Diaries.

To her credit, Elena forgave him for his petty larceny and even apologized for going all Eternal Sunshine on him.

But before they could break into Elena's childhood home and find some packs of Gushers, something weird happened: They'd been whisked back to modern times!

Liv explained that her psychopath brother was back and was in the process of trying to murder her so she had to cut short their time warp situation, but Elena did NOT care about Liv's well-being AT ALL. Doesn't Liv realize she isn't a person, she's merely a servant whose only purpose is to do life-threatening magic for Elena's benefit? Get with it, Liv.

Next: Page 3

(Continued from Page 2)

So then Monique, who is not Sarah Salvatore, and who is also not a witch from New Orleans (Originals deep cut) apologized for trying to steal Sarah Salvatore's life (girl, you chose the wrong family to scam) and Stefan compelled her to forget about it. But then Enzo showed up and did this:

And he killed her! And again, as viewers we were presented with a few options. (1) The Vampire Diaries was killing off a so-far pretty useless character. (2) The show was setting up the arrival of the REAL Sarah Salvatore. Or (3) Monique pulled an Ivy and had vampire blood in her system before getting killed and now she'll be a problem. Maybe all three? Either way, Enzo's presence in this episode and even the reasons why he did this were pretty sketchy. Yes, it was nice that he reverse pep-talked Matt into hating vampires again, but whatever. A little harsh. Rest in peace, lying lady.

Meanwhile, the news that Kai was out on the loose was not enough to stop Damon and Elena from enjoying a leisurely hang at the cemetery. Unfortunately Kai didn't get the memo and showed up anyway.

And he still had some of Liv's magic left in him!

Fortunately Damon was able to counteract Kai's magic by swinging a shovel around wildly!

Then Kai ran into the magic-free zone at the edge of the cemetery because the geography of this town will never not be baffling.

Meanwhile Matt told Stefan off REAL GOOD.

His point was that, while he was friends with several vampires, the piles of bodies they'd all been leaving in their wake was undeniable. Tripp, Monique, just whoever happened to encounter their friend group did not tend to survive long. Which was a good point even though Matt seems to come to this conclusion at least once a season. But he still won the argument, if only because of how funny it was when he drove away:

Haha Stefan's tiny car. Ain't nobody gonna win an argument with a car that tiny.

Then Elena called up Jeremy to tell him that he was right, they failed to get Bonnie back. And to be honest he was NOT stoked.

But then Matt showed up and slapped the glass of hooch out of Jeremy's hand and got him excited about life again by announcing that they were going to go kill Enzo! Wuh-oh! Careful, boys. We better at least get a training montage out of it, though.

Also we finally saw the fallout from Damon compelling Alaric: Jo suspected that's what had happened, so she drove Alaric into the magic-free zone and Alaric remembered everything. Next thing we knew he was wandering around the woods looking for Damon and then FOUND him.

But don't worry, just because you burn one bridge with a former best friend doesn't mean there aren't other bridges to keep you going.

Like, for instance, the bridge to your NEW AND #1 BEST FRIEND FOREVER, BONNIE. But in a sad twist, she'd shown up to their designated meeting spot (tellingly, at Elena's old house and not, say, at the West Virginia border) only to find that they'd abandoned her.

:(

Man, this was tough. Like, Liv was justified in cutting the mission short and I'm sure Bonnie will understand, plus Liv's spell seemed like it could work pretty much whenever, so I don't know. I'm sure it'll be fine. But can you imagine being Bonnie in this moment? Your butt's all numb from the drive and you're exhausted and hungry because all the Wendy's drive-thrus were abandoned and you probably haven't even gone to the restroom in a while AND THEN your friends are gone? Horrible. Poor lady. If I was her I'd teepee the sh*t out of the Gilbert house.

And then Kai broke into Tyler's house and held a broken bottle to his neck like some kind of handsome hobo!

He ended the episode with a cryptic promise that he'd save Liv's life if Tyler helped him do something. I think you and I both know that means he wants Tyler to kill Luke and I am NOT happy about this. Next week is the fall finale (which probably means there'll be a death) and I just don't think I can handle a Christmas break in mourning. Show, do NOT kill off Luke. Do not.

"I Alone" is not only a better song than "Lightning Crashes," it is also a very good episode of The Vampire Diaries. This was mostly a set-up, stakes-raising episode, but it was still well-done and full of funny, clever dialogue. Season 6 continues to be a high point for The Vampire Diaries and, seriously, I can't believe how much I look forward to every new episode now. Before it was like, "Oh, right, new TVD this week." But now it's like I'm starting to daydream about the show again? Its stories, its characters, its possibilities, the 1990s. I'm all-in.

OK BYE

QUESTIONS:

... Are you Team Matt and Jeremy or Team Enzo?

... Have you ever been ditched by your friends who time-traveled without you?

... What was the deal with that Sarah Salvatore plotline?

... Hot or not: getting your arm set on fire in a cemetery.