2×03 – Bad Moon Rising

Thoughts, Questions, Comments on Episode 2×03 Bad Moon Rising

Normally, by the time I get around to writing these long recaps, I’ve seen the full episode a number of times. For some weird reason I haven’t really wanted to watch this in full again over and over even though I liked it. I have however watched the D/E scenes like a gazillion times. So here goes…

The opening sequence was interesting but I did find the constant cuts to be a little distracting. So I loved how we saw the brothers Salvatore, Elena and Alaric at the boarding house, loved Damon’s one liners and the little looks between him and Alaric, cracked up at how pissed Damon looked at the idea that there was anything in town that could screw him over and actually really liked the way Damon and Stefan bounced off each other to bring Rick up to speed.

Parallel, I thought the sequence with Tyler poking around the cave – especially that one shot of him tracing the claw marks was well done. I just wasn’t a fan of how the two sequences were melded together.

Caroline is beyond adorable. She looks so sad and frustrated that she couldn’t go out and be with Matt. *sadface*

Stelena. This scene just kind of makes my skin itch and I’m not even sure why. I mean, I can admit when these two are cute. There are even a couple of their scenes from season one that I really like but this…I don’t know. Something about them feels different and especially on the heels of their “it’s not going to get easier” convo, this diabetic coma seems out of place.

Other side notes about the scene. Elena thinks she’ll be able to bond with Ric in “anti Damon solidarity”. Boy is it going to suck when she realizes that Damon and Ric have one of the hottest bromances in MF.  😆  😆

Aha. Perhaps I’ve figured out what bugs me about this scene. Elena asks Stefan if he’s okay with her going and to be honest; that if he’s not she won’t go. For one thing, I think she’s hoping he’ll say yes, that he doesn’t want her to go so she has an excuse to avoid Damon. I think that she realizes on some level that if Stefan – her boyfriend and Damon’s brother – hasn’t stopped Damon working his way into her heart, then Alaric is going to be about as much use in making her immune to the elder Salvatore as bubble gum is in solving algebra equations.

I also don’t like and don’t understand Stefan’s whole thing about how he is not going to let the fact that Damon is going, keep her from an opportunity. It rubs me the wrong way because while I understand why Elena’s asking, I don’t like Stefan’s implication that his permission is somehow required in this situation. If Elena wants to go to Duke with Damon or despite Damon to get answers on her family history then that’s her choice. It shouldn’t have anything to do with Stefan at all. So yeah, I’ve never been a fan of the balance of power in the Stelena relationship and this just reinforces all the reasons why that is.

Jenna has a new look!  And also, I actually really like Jenna and I like the way she called Alaric out for his waffling.

That kiss with Stefan by the side of the car was clearly for Damon’s benefit. The way Elena glared at him both before and after it, is kind of proof of that. And to Damon’s credit, he tried to it blow off and act as if it didn’t matter – and to be fair, I don’t really think he was mortally wounded by it – but it wasn’t easy for him to watch, let’s put it that way. Reminded me of the scene in Isobel where he’s looking at her and Stefan hug after Isobel goes.

Interesting that after that kiss, Stefan actually looks over at Damon. Don’t quote me on this, but he actually looks…sorry/embarrassed/at a loss for words?

Over at Casa de Lockwood, Tyler continues with his Sherlock Holmes routine. Carol mentions that the Lockwood house burned down. That seems to have been the fate of the Old Salvatore Manor as well. Coincidence or not?

Stefan and Bonnie. Is it just me or does he sound as if he’s starting to get as exasperated with her as the rest of us are? Having said that, I maintain that if Bonnie hooks up with one of the brothers, Stefan makes far more sense. I actually think there’s been considerable groundwork laid to that end, including the fact that Stefan being stuck in the tomb is the reason she demanded that her grams help her to open it.

D/E plus Ric in the car. Danni pointed this out. Because Elena didn’t ask if he saw the ring before he killed Jeremy, technically he wasn’t lying as he probably saw it after the deed was done. Of course that doesn’t make the situation any better at all. Also, hilarious how Ric gets self conscious about the ring when Damon calls it tacky.

Cut to Caroline looking distastefully at the ring that Bonnie’s about to spell for her. I love Vamp!Caroline. She is made of win. Bonnie on the other hand is pretty much an epic fail for me at the moment. I shall comment on her as little as possible.

Stefan and Caroline though, I am absolutely loving together. It’s hilarious to watch. I don’t think Stefan has this much chemistry with anyone else on the show.

The trio arrive at Duke and meet up with Vanessa. Nothing very interesting going on there except for Damon paying attention to absolutely every detail. I actually think one of the reasons he was so quick to respond a little later to the arrow situation is because he was already slightly suspicious. If you watch really carefully when Ric introduces Damon and Elena, Damon is looking straight at Vanessa and she kind of shakes herself out of a trance which for once probably has less to do with Damon’s hotness than with the fact that she recognized him.

Everything happens really quickly between Vanessa shooting the arrow and Damon taking it in the back to save Elena. There’s major eye contact between them and Elena is clearly in shock. I think it’s one of those moments that Elena will come back to later when she’s trying to work out her feelings for Damon because as quickly as it happened, it does have a lot of implications for her. And also, she does kneel down to check on him once Ric has Vanessa under control. Hate to keep pointing it out but if she really hated him she wouldn’t care if he died. Her instinct wouldn’t be to check on him and find out how he was doing and she wouldn’t have bothered to pull the arrow out of his back. She also wouldn’t have looked so uncertain and agitated about how to pull it out.

So Elena can say that she hates him. She can say, as she does in the webclip we’ve seen from next week, that she’s made it perfectly clear she wants nothing to do with him, but most people with eyes would agree that her every action negates those statements.

Also is anyone else kind of amused by the absurdity of Elena’s statement when she says, “if you touch her, I will never speak to you again?”. It’s like, “kill my brother and we can totally still have angry flirtatious encounters but kill this random woman that I met five minutes ago and who tried to kill me and we are so over.” Poor girl, she’s under so much stress that I shouldn’t make fun. *hugs Elena*

I love Elena’s expression when Damon asks her “what makes you think that has any power over me?” She kind of blinks at him, like she’s trying to figure out just when and where she came to the conclusion that she has power over him.

And I think – I could be wrong – but I think that Damon realizes what the implications are. If she’s trying to manipulate him then it means that she realizes she has the power to do that to him. It means, she’s aware of his feelings for her and it’s only a couple of steps between that and having to figure out her own feelings for him. And the way he looks at her even after she leaves is like the wheels turning in his head.

So some questions. How, why and when did Isobel’s research lead her to Katherine? She can’t have known at that point that Kat was a vampire, otherwise Vanessa having read the research would also know that. So I suspect that Isobel’s digging into Katheirne’s past doesn’t go too far past her arrival in Mystic Falls. It’s the only reason she would have thought that Kat was dead.

Damon, “I’d be extra nice to me right now,”.  I love it 😆  😆  and I also love that despite his denial to the contrary, he allows Elena to get him to abandon his “you piss me off, I want you dead” philosophy. And I think it’s an even bigger deal than it first appears. He’s not mad at Vanessa because she shot him. He’s mad because she tried to kill the woman he loves and as he so eloquently told Isobel, “Going after Elena? Baaad move.”

This scene with Stefan and Caroline is golden. Practically every word out of her mouth had me in stitches. Damon and his one liners are going to have serious competition for best quotes. I was also quite amused by Stefan trying to tell Caroline that she was more of everything she’d been as a human without offending her.

Vanessa has revealed something that we didn’t know before. She said that Kat arrived in MF in April of 1864. That means that everything that went down between her and the Salvatores happened in a maximum time frame of eight months.

Love the scene where Elena and Vanessa are talking and Damon can hear them. Elena looked a little too flustered by Damon saying that if she (though he was probably talking to Vanessa but that’s Damon and his double meanings for you) wanted to see him naked all she had to do was ask. She kind of verbally flailed for a while before managing to push a halfhearted no past her lips. You know she has so totally thought about it before and when he said it, for a second, she was wondering if he actually could read minds.

And I love that little smile of his after the jackass comment. Also, this is the second time they’ve done a scene with D/E kind of like this. Remember family night in COTD when he’s playing video games with Jer and she’s talking to Jenna. I believe that time she called him a jerk.  😆

I think there’s a lot to be said for the natural enmity between vampires and werewolves. Damon was suspicious of Mason from the minute he saw him with Carol at the Lockwoods in TR. And while Mason didn’t say or do anything when he and Stefan were arm wrestling, the look that he gives him here screams I don’t like or trust you and Stefan’s picking up on it. Natural suspcion.

Seriously, I love Stefan and Caroline together. I know I said it before but it’s just fantastic to watch.  🙂

Firstly, sadface Matt and Caroline fight. Secondly, HYPOCRITE PATROL. Stefan takes Caroline to task for compelling Aimee. “No one deserves to have their mind messed with for shallow reasons,” says the man who compelled a carnival worker to let him into the park after hours so he could kiss his girlfriend on top of a Ferris wheel.

Random question/thought/theory. Stefan talks about things magnifying when you go from human to vampire and Caroline talks jealousy issues. Maybe it strikes me because it comes right after the whole hypocritical compulsion conversation but if Stefan has magnified jealousy issues regarding Damon now that he’s a vampire. Does this mean he was jealous of Damon when they were human? And if he was, why was he?

Damon’s face when Vanessa reveals that werewolves hunt vampires is priceless. Also priceless is the way that Elena turns to look at him when Vanessa’s words sink in. I don’t think it’s a matter of her being worried about him more than she is about Stefan. I just think it’s a matter of the fact that she expects him to know how to fix it. To steal a quote from the show, Bones, Damon is the lynchpin of this group when it comes to these sorts of things. Ric, Stefan, Liz, and even Elena, always turn to him in these situations, expecting that he’ll devise a plan.

Matt and Caroline are so cute. Sadface.

Mason tying himself up half naked and with chains. Kinky.  But what was that stuff he was putting in his water?

What a creepy place to take a girl for a makeout session Tyler.  😮

Also, turning into a werewolf sounds painful as hell.

Now this doppelganger conversation. Someone made the point that as Kat is 350 and Elena is 17, technically Elena is Katherine’s doppelganger and not the other way around. It’s a very interesting thought that Elena – however inadvertently – is the one tormenting Katherine and undoing her life such as it were by taking the brothers away.

The whole, “friends don’t manipulate friend’s” speech reminds me of the “trust breeds trust” speech in COTD. Now either the writers are really good or I am crazy.  😆  😆   But we have Professor Elena’s Relationship 101 in COTD where the lesson is given right before she lies to him. Here we have the same class and teacher shortly before she…lies again? Elena’s expressions which I’ll get to later in that final porch scene – specifically how much she looks away from him, which is rather uncharacteristic of her (they make a lot of direct eye contact) and the only other time I’ve seen her do it is when she was lying to him in the kitchen. So perhaps she was lying again when she told him that he’d lost her forever. I mean we know she is because we know he hasn’t. But what I’m suggesting is that maybe Elena herself knows it’s a lie too.

Damon blinks a lot when he’s trying to put pieces together in his mind. Random observation.  😆  😆

Tyler. Shot down.

Stefan.Vampire spidey sense powers activate!

Stefan, seriously. You’re 162 years old. I know that you’ve seen a teen horror film or two in your time so why in the world are you walking towards the car with the angry growling sounds coming out of it?

Wait just a minute here. Minute 29:21. Stefan’s approaching the car. We hear that kind of whoosh sound that usually indicates vampires at superspeed and there’s a brief shadow that passes over the screen. Stefan notices it because he looks up sharply. However. It’s not Mason. He’s still in the car. And it can’t be Caroline because she’s with Matt. Damon’s on the way home from Duke which leaves us with only one vampire unaccounted for. Katherine. Just a thought.

Vanessa and Alaric *yawn*

Damon and Elena by the car. First of all, damn girl. What did the car door do to you? Did you expect it to magically unlock purely because you’re mad at it?  😆  But in all seriousness, Damon’s trying so hard – poor baby, he’s not really pulling it off – to mask how vulnerable he is but at the same time he can’t not take the risk. Elena is too important to him. He has to know if he has any chance at all of fixing things between them. It took a lot of guts for him to ask her especially when I’m sure he was quite scared of the answer.

The look on his face though when he closes the car door.  *supersadface*

Random question: Anyone else have trouble believing that Damon handed that book over to her without so much as flicking through the pages himself? If he did though, it says a lot about where his head and heart is at. It would mean that at this point all of his curiosity about Kat is tied up in how she affects Elena. It would mean that his every interaction with Katherine going forward is not about the fact that he loved her once. It’s about protecting the woman that he loves now.

I so totally did not see the Caroline tries to eat Matt thing coming.

Tyler manages to call Mason/Wolf off. I think this suggests quite clearly that he is in fact the Alpha Male now that his father is dead.

Interesting conversation between Caroline and Stefan about the whole dating a human thing. It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. Stefan’s made a specialty of trying to leave Elena for her own good in the beginning of the series. He’s admitting to a weakness, to a chink in his armor and let’s face it. He’s not the only man to be laid low by love. I think it adds layers to his character.

Tyler is. Officially freaked out.

*hugs Caroline* You brave girl. I  heart you.

About damn time Alaric.  😆

You know since we’re going with technicalities here, Elena never actually denies Damon’s claim that he chipped away at her wall of hatred. She just asks a different question. So he probably did chip away at it – especially given the whole he saved her life thing – and that’s why its such a big deal that he still told her the truth.

He sacrificed whatever little bit of progress he’d managed to make with her by telling her the truth knowing that it would further shatter something that was nearly irreparable as it was. He gets big points from me for doing that.

And telling her that she and Katherine have a lot more in common than just looks was just…I mean that was the simplest most brutal way for him to say, you hurt me, and I may have screwed up big time but you just screwed up too. And you can tell that Elena is disconcerted by it as she watches him walk away.

Hi Caroline, it’s Katherine. I’m an evil bitch and I killed you. Let’s be BFFs!  😛