The Vampire Diaries: Coming Home was a Mistake Recap

Synopsis: Enzo flips his humanity switch back on while Damon finally tamps his down for good. Meanwhile, the rest of Team!Mystic mourn Tyler’s death.

It’s the week before Thanksgiving, but yet I already find myself stuffed – no, not stuffed – overFILLed. AGAIN. What is with the filler episodes in this last season? Nothing important happened this episode. The synopsis literally covers it all except for some voodoo magic witchy crap the twins do with Selene. 

Other than that, we spend the entire episode mourning a secondary character’s death. Tyler Lockwood wasn’t even a secondary character because he’s been so far removed from this series for two seasons now that I forgot he even existed. He’s not even on The Originals so I literally have no idea why he’s supposed to hold **emotional relevance** with the TVD audience. 

Seriously. I got more attached to Aunt Becky, Sarah Salvatore, Caroline’s mom, and the chiseled pre-med dude Elena dated for a hot second than Tyler – and yet I don’t remember mourning any of those characters purely for an entire episode. 

It’s ridiculous how the writers are cherry-picking a random death to make Damon’s arc suddenly, FINALLY, irredeemable. Hasn’t Damon been irredeemable for the past half season? How many times does he have to prove this? It’s exhausting, and frankly, it’s lazy writing and sloppy storytelling.

You can’t just keep telling everyone this character is grrr, scary, bad and then repeatedly demonstrating it by ratcheting up the evil bit by bit without the audience getting tired of the puppeteering. If he’s so terrible, start him off super terrible and then we’ll believe you – quit showing me how edgy and dark he is by playing emotional chicken. It’s exhausting.

So Damon’s finally lost – Stefan tries to stake him and then Sybil revives him to do her evil bidding without moral confliction. Whatever.

In the meantime, Bonnie literally sets a house on fire with herself in it to get Enzo to turn on his humanity switch. If that’s not a textbook manipulative behavior, I don’t know what is.

What kind of message are we sending young girls here, Julie? That we have to endanger our lives so that object of our affection can decide that we’re worth caring about? 

Now I’m just in a terrible mood – but it’s still  not as terrible as this filler episode was. 1/5 stars; do not recommend.