Episode 2.12 – “The Descent”

And we’re back!

Thank goodness for the recap at the beginning of the episode as I’d forgotten just where we left off!

We begin with Jules waking up naked in the woods; her mouth artfully smeared with dirt and dried blood.  How lucky that she stumbles upon some campers… well, what’s left of them after she tore them apart the night before.  Is it just me or wouldn’t there be less parts if they’d been savaged by wolves?  Why would a wolf need to chop them into so many pieces anyway?  But there are body parts galore as she piles them onto the campfire.  Jules whips up some fast crocodile tears when the law shows up, and before he can call it in, she beats him to death with a handy piece of wood. 

Elena comes to see Stefan and we’re treated to a gratuitous shot of his bare torso.  (psst, where’s our shot of Damon with his shirt off?  It’s been a long hiatus!)  The couple seems just as lovey dovey as usual.  She doesn’t want them to be apart anymore, ever.  (where is this girl’s parental supervision?  Doesn’t Jenna care that she’s out all hours of the night?)  Stefan feels like he should talk to Isobel to ask her about Klaus, but Elena isn’t sure it’s a good idea.  Next on the bad idea list is Stefan chugging back some vervain dosed water to try and build up a tolerance to it.  It looks painful, but he seems to recover pretty quickly after all.  It’s nice to see Elena take a sip as well, hopefully affording her a small modicum of protection herself. 

Rose looks like crap.  They did a great job making her look like she’s weak and dying.  Damon has no sympathy for her depressing talk, telling her in typical fashion, “You know if you’re going to be maudlin, I might as well just kill you myself, to put me out of your misery.”  He tries to lift her spirits, intimating that she might not be dying after all, but as he takes a look at her wound, it’s obviously much, much worse.  Damon lies and tells her it’s definitely looking better, enlisting Elena to reassure her as well.  He asks Elena to play nursemaid to Rose for a while so he can go out and run some errands, knowing that she won’t say no.  Elena asks if Rose is going to die.  Damon replies that she probably will, explaining about the infection that seems to be spreading from the werewolf bite.  “The sooner she dies the better, it’s gloomy as hell in here.”  He adds.  We all know that just means he’s repressing his emotions as he tends to do when he’s being that glib, which also means that he actually cares about Rose on some level.  Interesting.

Elena tucks rose into Damon’s bed and we get our first real look at his bedroom.  Nice.  Especially the bathroom, I hope they show him taking a bath at some point… okay I’m back now.    He’s reading Gone With the Wind, not what Elena expected, she was thinking he was a silk sheets kind of guy.  Rose tells Elena she’s lucky, no one has ever loved her the way that Elena is loved.  She’s always been on the move, running away from Elijah and Klaus, not putting down roots anywhere.   They chat a bit about how Rose thinks she’s giving up by making her deal with Elijah, but then she starts raving about getting the horses ready and I’m thinking… delusional vampire… not where a helpless human wants to be!  But of course Elena sticks it out, even when Rose starts choking up blood.  The moment we see Rose has disappeared from the bed, I knew she was gonna attack Elena.  Yep, right on cue, Rose pins her to the wall, all vamped out, calling her Katerina.  Good time for a commercial break. 

Elena pretty easily talks her down, only having to say she’s not Katherine once before Rose comes to her senses.  (Good time to get out of the house now Elena!)  But instead, she walks Rose back to the bed, tucking her back in.  Rose is in and out of reality, forgetting where she is but she tells Elena about her home in the English countryside.  Elena goes out to get some clean sheets and by the time she gets back, Rose has gone missing again.  Finding her in the basement surrounded by a whole slew of empty blood packets, Elena panics and runs.  What follows is a little game of chase through the house as Rose stalks her.  Why she doesn’t run outside into the sunlight is beyond me.  Instead she runs deeper into the house, only escaping by digging her fingernails into the wound on Rose’s back. (eewh!)  After barricading and arming herself with a stake, Elena does the genius thing by waiting until it gets dark before she ventures out.  (Can you tell I’m not loving this plotline?) 

At the high school (which almost seems like a different show.  When was the last time we saw either Elena or Stefan at school?  Does she even still go?) Caroline is telling Tyler that they had a victory last night in his surviving his first transformation and they should just enjoy it.  These two are so cute together, but the longer she talks, the more I find myself talking to the screen – shut up Caroline… stop talking… don’t… aw man, she had to go and tell him that a werewolf bite is lethal to vampire!  Why, why, why would she do that?  Matt steps in before Tyler can get much of a reaction to that and kisses Caroline right outta nowhere.  She lets herself enjoy it for half a minute before she pulls away, telling him she can’t.  Matt chases her down asking her why she ran away.  Caroline admits that she loves him, but runs away again before she tells him why they can’t be together. 

Jules shows up at the grill talking to the sheriff to ask if there is any news on Mason’s disappearance.  Alaric puts in a cameo appearance (bring more Alaric!) to spot her and call Damon to tell him that she’s at the grill, and to give Stefan a phone number that could put him into touch with Isobel.  Stefan calls it, leaving a message for her that he wants to talk to her about Elena. (this so reminds me of when Elena was trying to get ahold of Isobel in my Wake Me When the Sun Goes Down! But I digress…)  Damon shows up and Stefan cautions him to be careful before he goes to talk to Jules as there are a lot of people around.  Damon replies, “Damn, there goes my plan to rip her spleen through her back.”  He wants to know why everyone thinks he’s so upset about Rose dying?  He goes on to threaten Jules that he’ll kill her unless she tells him how to cure a werewolf bite.  Instead she says “Bite me; I’m not afraid of you.”  The only cure she says, is to take a stake and drive it through Rose’s heart.  

Elena is tiptoeing through the house, jumping at shadows until Damon surprises her asking where Rose is.  Rose is long gone, at the high school, still barfing up blood and then attacking a poor janitor while the rest of the school is at a pep rally.  Luckily Liz calls Damon the moment she finds the body with signs of a vampire attack and he and Elena rush down to the school to try and catch Rose.  While the manhunt is on, Rose kills another two people, (maybe they’re alumni, cause they look kinda old to be high school students) in the parking lot.  Damon manages to pin Rose down and restrain her, even though she’s supposed to be a lot stronger than him, maybe it’s the wolfbite making her weak?  She pleads with him to make it stop, she hates that she’s been killing again.  Instead of just staking her and handing her over to the sheriff, instead he scoops her up into his arms and takes her home.  “You went on a murderous rampage, [it] happens.”  He gives a dismissive shrug when she apologizes for her behavior. 

Rose says her goodbyes to Elena, apologizing, before convulsing in pain.  Damon shoos Elena out before holding onto Rose in the bed, comforting her while she lays dying.  We cut to Rose’s dreams of the past mingled with the present.  She’s wearing a flowing dress with long hair, and comes upon Damon sitting on the hillside, both of them in the sunlight.  (I had almost forgotten his ability to enter dreams)  “This was my favorite place to come as a girl,” she tells him.  They sit there together, much in the same position they’re in on the bed in reality, the pain is gone and she’s thinking about her family.  She tells him she’s not afraid anymore, maybe she’ll see her family soon and Trevor.  Damon stakes her, tears falling down his cheeks as she dies in his arms. 

Tyler is waiting for Caroline when she gets home, wanting to understand why she risked helping him if a bite would kill her.  “Because you needed help.”  She replies.  He doesn’t understand why she’d risk it and she goes off on him, saying she doesn’t understand why he won’t let anyone care about him because she does whether he likes it or not.  Instead of arguing, he steps up and kisses her, and it’s a really good kiss until Caroline freaks out a little.  “You can’t do that.  Everyone just needs to stop kissing me!” She wails in frustration as she pulls back into her house.

Last seven minutes of the show:

Damon meets with Liz, showing her Rose’s staked body in his trunk.  Once again the town is safe, thanks to Damon, and Liz is properly grateful.  The trouble is… I recognize that look… this is unstable Damon we’re dealing with.  Uh oh.

Jules meets with Tyler, asking to be his friend.  She has quite a lot to say:
Mason is dead and that Caroline and her vampire friends were the ones to murder him.�
Not only is the town crawling with vampires, there are more werewolves on the way.

Damon comes home and Elena is waiting with a drink all ready for him (she knows him well!)  He urges her to go home, but she wants to be there, because she’s his friend.  He tries to push her away.  “What do you want to hear, that I cared about Rose, that I’m upset?  Well I didn’t, and I’m not!”  He insists.  Elena calls him on pretending not to feel.  Damon admits that he feels plenty and it sucks.  What makes it worse is feeling guilty that it was supposed to be him that Jules was after when Rose was attacked.  He asks her again to go home and this time she relents, but not before wrapping her arms around him in a hug and not letting go while he wrestles with his emotions.  (awww)

Elena goes home and Stefan is there not with Isobel, but with John.  (dun, dun dun!  I didn’t see that one coming!)

Final scene of the night.  Damon’s lying in the middle of the road when a girl gets out of her car to check and see if he’s alright.  (serious déjà vu here to the beginning of last season)  He’s drunk and confused and in need of help that has nothing to do with being injured, but she panics and runs away once she figures out he’s not wounded.  In a flash Damon compels her not to move, and she’s frozen in one place while he rants about keeping secrets and not being able to be what Elena wants him to be.  “Are you going to hurt me?” she asks.  “I’m not sure,” he replies in a beautiful, poignant moment as we see the struggle within him.  He misses being human more than anything in the world; and it’s tearing him apart.  Damon releases her from the compulsion, and for just a moment I thought he might let her go, but instead he chases after her and kills her.  Bad boy Damon is back.  I wonder how long he’ll last?

Random thoughts I had:

How many deputies does this town have left?  That’s gotta be the crappiest job around with their death rate.  Or rather, their disappearance rate because you have to think that their deaths would be covered up for the most part. 

Why didn’t Stefan call Elena back after her multiple calls trying to reach him?  Her messages were pretty urgent.  He seriously couldn’t get away?

Maybe I’m just expecting too much, but I didn’t LOVE this episode like I wanted to.  It felt more like a bad teen horror/slasher film for a lot of it when Elena was running through the house to get away from Rose.  And while I enjoy bad Damon, I hope they’ll make it more about accepting that he’s not making much progress with Elena in trying to be what she wants him to be and deciding to have a little fun for a change and not make it about him wallowing in grief over Rose for too long.   Hopefully they’ll pick up their stride again in the coming episodes. 

What do you guys think?  Am I wrong?  Was it the best episode ever?