The Vampire Diaries: I Would For You Recap

Synopsis: After Damon discovers Rayna only has eight lives, he decides to eliminate her once and for all. Unfortunately, plans go awry and Damon decides to desiccate himself.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

This entire season has been struggling to answer the question of who Damon is without Elena. It seems like what the writers decided was that we need to revisit Damon’s inner demons from the early seasons to get there.

Unfortunately, we’ve already explored those dark corners pretty thoroughly during Delena’s epic romance, so there’s really just not a lot there we haven’t seen.

Even more than that, it’s so unconvincing. Every time Damon gets blamed for da crew’s latest misfortune, it’s nothing more than that. Misfortune. The dude has really rotten luck. Damon’s not doing anything to merit guilt. He’s just bopping along the series not making much of a difference to anyone anywhere. It’s boring.

And his victim complex is annoying. So annoying that he ends up desiccating himself at the end of the episode out of guilt. But before that, a few things happen.

Stefan gets some witchy Huntress-masking salve while he’s on the run. He has to restock in a witchy herb garden because he’s running low on his witchy poultice.

Meanwhile, Damon captures Rayna, gets tipped off by Bonners that she only has 8 lives before she dies for good, and then gets started killing the huntress. When she’s on his last life, Bonnie tells him that if she dies for good, all vampires who are marked also die.

Damon scrambles to save Rayna (and Stefan) and succeeds.  Yayyy.

Aside: no one cares about Stefan. The only thing that redeems the less attractive brother in the collector’s set is that Caroline likes him.

Speaking of Caroline, she’s still playing house with Ric and the bbys in Texas. And now that she’s a mother, she has no interesting speaking parts whatsoever.

That aside aside, the Armory captures Rayna, and Damon, wracked with guilt and the overwhelming desire to remove himself from this three-ton elephant excrement of a town is to go desiccate in a coffin next to Elena for sixty years or so.

Given the option of that or sticking around to watch the circus, I think I can speak for the audience and say we’d all take the coffin. Hell, I might take it if I got to stop watching this show.

Bonners is understandably upset because Damon decided to desiccate without saying goodbye (their sudden magical friendship doesn’t convince me.)

In other random news, Matt is being a little twerp going around and killing vampires with his new buddycop girlfriend who doesn’t understand the concept of nuance. She convinces him to run Stefan out of town on her suddenly-discovered vendetta against #AllVampires, so she’s already about 500% more effective than Matt ever was at eliminating vampires in Mystic Falls.

Three years from now, Rayna escaped, Damon wakes up, and Stefan gets offered to choice to transfer his Huntress mark onto his brother.