Love You to Death Season 1 - Excerpt!

episode guide: The Night of the Comet (1.02)

Elena: He didn’t tell me he had a brother.

Damon: Well, Stefan’s not one to brag.

1.02 The Night of the Comet

Original air date: September 17, 2009

Written by: Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec

Directed by: Marcos Siega

Guest cast: Terri James (Nurse), Elizabeth Keener (Girl), Peyton Lee (Guy)

As a comet passes over Mystic Falls, Stefan tries to cover up his brother’s attack on

Vicki.

Despite the heavy-handed comet metaphor and the brief return of the diary duet voice-over, “The Night of the Comet” proved that The Vampire Diaries was nuanced and enjoyable to watch — far from being the Twilight knockoff most critics anticipated it would be. From one moment to the next it’s scary, romantic, playful, bloody, earnest, and . . . epic. Caroline’s moans turn to screams as Damon bares his fangs, and the writers show an impressive mastery of the cliffhanger in only the show’s second episode.

The morning after Stefan and Elena get to know each other, they each begin their day more optimistically than is usual for either of them, happy to have the promise of a new relationship. But Stefan and Elena are also wary; each feels the constant presence of a terrible loss, reminding them that they can lose again. Elena feels that in allowing herself to experience happiness she is betraying her grief and her parents’ memory. What if she lets herself be happy and her world crumbles again, like it did in the spring when her parents died? Stefan’s fear is of being exposed as a vampire. As Stefan worries about covering his brother’s bloody tracks, he inadvertently pushes Elena away. She understandably reads his brush-off as disinterest rather than a desire to protect her from his homicidal vampire brother. And Stefan’s right to be alarmed: Damon dangles Vicki over the roof ’s edge, compelling her to believe it was Stefan, a vampire, who attacked her, just to see if his brother will take a bite to protect his secret identity.

Vicki has secrets of her own — she doesn’t want Tyler to know about her relationship with Jeremy. The love triangle of Tyler, Vicki, and Jeremy contrasts nicely with the Matt, Elena, Stefan triangle. Matt gives Elena space for her new relationship but lets Stefan know he’ll always be by her side should she need him. Matt’s observant and honest — he sees Stefan skulking at the hospital and asks him about it, but he also thanks him for finding Vicki. On the other side of the coin is Tyler and Jeremy who take the “eye for an eye” approach. Tyler and Jeremy butt heads over Vicki and hurt each other in the process by exposing secrets — Jeremy’s a pill pusher, Vicki slept with Jeremy, Tyler forced himself on Vicki — just as Damon threatens to do to Stefan.

Like Emily Brontë writing under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Stefan has chosen to hide the part of himself that’s unacceptable to human society. Damon’s counsel to his little brother to “be himself ” perversely echoes Elena’s to Jeremy in the pilot episode: she’s on her brother’s case for behaving badly; Damon’s on Stefan’s case because he’s too goody-goody for a vampire. Damon calls Stefan out on his doomed plan, telling him he will never be human again. He urges him (with Vicki’s bleeding neck before him) to remember who he is — a vampire that feeds on humans and does not impersonate them. The idea of finding and being your “true self ” is a theme that carries across the season, especially with Stefan who faces a daily struggle between being a man or a monster. The temptations are real and powerful for Stefan; his face gets vampy when he’s in the blood donor room at the hospital, and he considers biting Vicki before his will power beats out his hunger.

Damon tells Elena he’s a fatalist, and Stefan echoes this idea when he talks about the comet “trapped on a path that it can’t escape and once every 145 years it gets to come home.” Are the Salvatores like the comet, returning to Mystic Falls only to repeat the past? Are we powerless to change the course of our lives, stuck on a path like an orbiting comet, no point in denying the inevitable? The women of Mystic Falls don’t think so. Encouraged by Bonnie and Caroline, Elena pursues Stefan rather than giving up or waiting for him to make the first move. Caroline purposely and confidently strides across the town square to approach her handsome stranger. Jenna, after she gets “Tannered,” realizes she has to step up her game as guardian to Jeremy. And Elena, in her pep talk to her aunt, says she has to keep fighting the fear and not believe, as Damon says he does, that all relationships are doomed to failure before they even begin. Stefan also rejects fatalism, thwarting Damon’s plan to tempt him into drinking human blood again. Damon may have lost this round but his devilish grin and pursuit of Caroline suggest he’s a vampire who believes the stars are aligned in his favor.