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The Vampire Diaries: Season 3 Finale

By Sarah Heiman · May 13, 2012

Major spoilers ahead! If you have not yet seen the season three finale of The Vampire Diaries, you do not want to read this review. Trust me…

This is my first ever TV review; The Vampire Diaries’ fantastically twisty season finale compelled me (sorry) to spill my guts about how I felt about it. TVD is well known for its incredible season finale craziness, but holy crap, writer/executive producer Julie Plec has really outdone herself with this one. There are a ton of plot points to talk about with the closure of season three, but there’s really just one gigantic development that I’m going to focus on: ELENA (Nina Dobrev) IS DEAD. They actually killed her! This being TVD, though, you know there’s a twist—and that twist is that Elena died with vampire blood in her system, meaning that when season four picks up she will need to drink human blood in order to complete the transition into vampire existence…and if she doesn’t, she will encounter real, final death.

It seems to me that over the past three seasons, most episodes have centered on the uber-goal of keeping Elena safe and alive. But what none of the characters seemed to consider (in season three, anyway) was that they should also make sure that Elena didn’t get turned. If you’ve read the books by L.J. Smith, you know that Elena vamps out fairly early on, but because the show has taken a different direction from its source material, I did not expect the main character to become one of the undead. HUGE props to the TVD writing team for leading us to forget that turning Elena was even a possibility. Season three involved so much drama and intrigue, what with The Originals, Bonnie (Kat Graham) and her mother, Caroline (Candice Accola) and her father (remember him?), and more recently, Alaric’s (Matt Davis) homicidal alter ego plus Alaric the Super Immortal Vampire, that we got distracted. It was a brilliant ploy. Well done, writers.

In what I now see as a sort of pre-emptive memorial, the opening scene gave us Elena, in a concussed sleep, dreaming of happier times. She was a perky high school cheerleader, unaware of supernatural beings, and had living parents and a visiting Aunt Jenna (Sara Canning)—hi Jenna! We miss you! This scene offered a lovely portrait of a content Elena that we as viewers have never really known. The dream-flashback later allowed us a smidgen of closure after her death; we had forgotten that her life wasn’t always filled with fangs, fear, and fighting. We were also treated—if that’s the right word—to a flashback of the horrible car crash that killed Elena’s parents and introduced her to Stefan (Paul Wesley), who dragged her out of the submerged car as her parents succumbed in the river. This haunting flashback set up some emotional symmetry for Elena’s upcoming death.

Before Elena’s drowning death in which Stefan dragged an unconscious Matt (Zach Roerig) out of the water after his truck went off a bridge, Elena had finally made the decision that we’d been waiting for: she chose Stefan over Damon (Ian Somerhalder), partly because she met Stefan at the right time in her life, when she was vulnerable and open to love. In a Damon flashback we learned that, ironically, Elena had in fact met the elder brother first. True to Damon form, he compelled her to forget that their encounter ever took place—supposedly because he wasn’t ready for Mystic Falls folks to know he was in town just yet.

Elena-in-transition is a real game changer for The Vampire Diaries. It seems that this event, in a way, will re-boot the show. Now that Elena is no longer a human bargaining chip, what will Klaus (Joseph Morgan), now a vampire in Tyler’s (Michael Trevino) wolf-vampire clothing, need to do in order to stay alive and to get the girl-vamp Caroline? What will Vampire Elena be like, and will she still choose Stefan over Damon? Will she become more like Katherine and use the brothers as her playthings? Now that Supervamp Alaric is dead, does that mean Matt Davis has left the show (it’s not like “real” death is final on TVD)? More practically speaking, does all of this vampire business take place on weekends, or do these kids just never go to class? And can the people on this show possibly get any hotter? These are just some of the questions we are left with after those stunning last moments of the finale in which Elena gasped and sat up in the morgue. I know I won’t be the only fan waiting in agony to see where the show creators take our beloved characters in season four.