The Vampire Diaries: Do You Remember the First Time? Recap

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg4jU_uv_Rc]

The Vampire Diaries: Do You Remember the First Time?

Synopsis: Bonnie and Kai are still alive on the Other Side – Bonnie stores her magic and transports it to This Side, stranding them both probably for another two episodes. On This Side, Damon is trying to woo Elena while Caroline and Stefan negotiate with Tripp’s people for a hostage exchange between him and Caroline’s mother.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Welcome back to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, ahem, I mean The Vampire Diaries.

As you can tell, I’m getting real tired of this Elena-doesn’t-remember-Damon schtick.

We pick up after Elena opens the door to see Damon for the first time after he came back from the dead, and surprise, she remembers nothing. Nothing but pain,that is. Which is probably not the best way to rekindle a relationship. Elena tells Damon that she’s sorry, and she feels guilty, but she’s just not interested. Which serves as an invitation for Damon to stalk Elena for the rest of the episode (again).

Speaking of weirdly intense-and-unjustifiably-close relationships, Dr. Joe is strangely clingy for only meeting Alaric a few weeks ago. I mean, I get saving his life and such, but he’s clearly been trying to push you away for the majority of your encounters together, so I don’t get why you’re so committed already, hon.

Anyway, Damon cautions Joe that she might get requests from other vampires to undo their vampirism like she did for Ric last week. #DubiousPlotPoint? She says that it’s extremely unlikely that she’d be able to do that again because Ric’s injuries were treatable with emergency medical attention and that might not always be the case.

Ric and Joe go to a hospital fundraiser together, aka this week’s ‘town-event-of-the-week.’ Damon crashes and runs into Elena and her date-du-jour, Liam. Liam happens to be investigating corn-maize Lady Whitmore’s miraculous recovery – at the end of the episode, he calls Elena out on being a liar and promises that he’ll figure out her secrets.

Needless to say, I am not Team Liam.

There’s this wonderful comedic moment where Liam and Damon meet and Damon compels him into admitting that he’s ‘slightly intimidated, but thinks he can take him [Damon]’ in a fight over Elena’s affections. While Liam runs off to get Elena a glass of chardonnay (a drink she hates, at Damon’s behest), Elena and Damon traipse off to try and recover her memories of their relationship.

Meanwhile, on The Other Side. . .

Kai and Bonnie are still alive! The Ascendant shattered into pieces the last time Bonnie used it, but Kai is trying to reconstruct it so they can both get back home.

Bonnie doesn’t think the sociopath act is cute anymore (that makes one of us), and she stabs Kai and runs away with the pieces of the Ascendant. She assembles the device in the Mystic Falls hospital, only to find the last piece is missing.

Three guesses as to who took it.

Kai shows up with the missing piece and threatens Bonnie to perform the spell to get them back home. To his credit, he does bribe her with a teddy bear.

Just as Bonnie starts the spell, she spills blood on the teddy bear that Kai brought her and transports it to This Side, along with all her magic. Now the two are trapped on the Other Side without her powers, and presumably without a way of getting back (for now!)

Damon finds the bear at the end of the episode when he’s reminiscing about his and Elena’s evening watching the meteor shower in the rain back when she remembered their relationship. He picks up the bear and knows that Bonnie is alive – and probably only 2 to 3 episodes away!

Back in Mystic Falls / Approximate. . .

The vampires kidnapped Tripp in order to save themselves and eliminate the other vampire hunters after last week’s border fiasco that left Ric powerless. Tripp, ever the enterprising leader of the Neighborhood Watch, arranged to have his team kidnap Sheriff Forbes if he was ever to get caught.

Suddenly, Stefan and Caroline find themselves in the middle of a hostage negotiation. They make the trade on the edge of Mystic Falls, only to find that Tripp dies as he crosses the border. Surprise! Enzo turned him into a vampire when they held him captive, but at least we don’t have to deal with his annoyingly self-righteous murder sprees anymore.

Meanwhile, back in Delena Land . . .

The pair ditched Liam and the fundraiser to try and recover Elena’s memories, but with little success. Damon keeps on revising her false memories, but nothing’s working. Upset, Elena flings herself across the border of Mystic Falls and starts drowning – and recovering flickers of her memories.

Damon quickly pulls her back across the border and tells her that he would rather her never remember than have her hurt herself for him. He also realizes that Elena started over and now she’s happy, so he’s willing to let her go, even though he would never erase their time together if the situation were reversed.

The scene closes with Elena asking what happened the night of the meteor shower they watched together in the rain, and Damon lies, telling her she was cold and miserable and they went home. The real scene plays afterward, where the couple kisses in the rain, ending with Elena asking Damon to promise her that what they have is forever.

As for the others. . .

We also find out that Dr. Joe is Kai’s sister – the one he left spleenless after killing the rest of his family. She stored her magic away so that she wouldn’t have to see them at family reunions or somesuch.

Stefan knows that Caroline has the feelings for him after Enzo jerkily blurts out his observations of her. Stefan handles this in the worst way possible and asks her why she would ever have a thing for him. Yeah, no. You sound like you have the self esteem of pubescent boy right now. Not cool, S.

Anyway, Caroline tells him that if he ever felt anything for her, then he wouldn’t have left her to start over on his own. She ices him out, but I’m sure that’ll thaw in an episode or two.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hlYkvmIzFY]