Vampire Diaries boss Julie Plec explains why Klaroline could never happen today
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Audiences love to root for a bad boy, but it's one thing when the bad boy is a troubled teen from the wrong side of the tracks and something else entirely when he's a 1,000-year-old vampire responsible for the deaths of countless people. And yet, when Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) visited Caroline Forbes (Candice King) on her birthday during The Vampire Diaries' third season, a new ship was born.
"Candice had chemistry with everybody, and Caroline, as a result, had chemistry with everybody," Vampire Diaries executive producer Julie Plec says in episode 3 of EW's Binge: The Vampire Diaries. But the writers had no idea when they were crafting that scene — in which Klaus goes to heal Caroline after he told a sired Tyler (Michael Trevino) to bite her — that it would become something greater. "I think that [scene] birthed the chemistry, as opposed to the other way around," Plec says.
From that point on, the Klaroline ship was a fan favorite, and although it led to many great moments on the series, it's one thing Plec admits would never fly today. "It's so toxic," she says. "That little romantic relationship would never get through a writers' room today because it's just unbelievably f---ed up, but boy was it good."
the cw Candice King and Joseph Morgan on 'The Vampire Diaries'
Speaking of ships, during the podcast Plec also reveals the one relationship that she plotted for five years before realizing it wasn't going to happen. Specifically talking about the season 3 episode "The Reckoning," in which Matt (Zach Roerig) and Bonnie (Kat Graham) share some poolside scenes — and Bonnie saves Matt from drowning — Plec says those scenes gave her an idea. "I shipped Bonnie and Matt from that day, and in my head, the end of the series would be a flash-forward that Bonnie and Matt had gotten together and had a family," she says.
For years, Plec kept that idea in her back pocket. "I held onto that in my head until we were breaking the series finale and broke an entire version of the series finale that had that, that Bonnie found her happiness with Matt Donovan and they had everything they'd ever wanted, a family, a human family, and beautiful Bennett-Donovan children running around," she says. "And then we decided not to go into actual flash-forwards in the future. We jumped into peace instead." And just like that, Plec's idea died.
For more, listen to the podcast episode in full below:
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