Sooner or later, we were bound to hit a snag on the run of surprisingly great episodes thus far into The Vampire Diaries‘ seventh season. The introduction of the Heretics in general had me weary, but now the direction of their story is going into entirely uninteresting territory.
Valerie has been hung up on Stefan since before her imprisonment in 1903 with Lily and company. As it turns out, she was sent by Lily to check up on Stefan when he was still a human. Naturally, she couldn’t resist his charms, and she fell in love with him. This was before she was turned into the first Heretic, so she became pregnant with his baby unbeknownst to him. The only person who did know about the baby was her chaperone of sorts, Julian. He beat her to a pulp to ensure the second heartbeat inside of her stopped.
Bringing this all back to present day, Valerie knows what Lily’s mission was for Oscar, the sixth Heretic. In order to stop Lily from finding Julian and bringing him back into the fold, she would rather kill her own brother. Now, since Lily knows Damon has found Oscar, her rage at Damon will only get worse once she finds out about another son’s death.
Long story short, this is all delving too far into the Heretics’ history, and personally, I don’t like it. Why should we care about Valerie and Julian? I just barely started to tolerate Enzo and Lily. Let’s not give these half dozen new people equal amounts of story and screen time when we have plenty of older characters we still care about. Oscar may have been my only exception to this general dislike of the Heretics. He was actually a pretty cool guy, hiding out in Myrtle Beach and reveling in the modern advances that come along with his newfound freedom. All he wanted was to be free from this crazy witch/vampire mess of a family. His past with Damon unfortunately didn’t get any flashbacks, but I do wish we got to see a bit of their friendship in the war. After all, he did save Damon’s life by talking him out of going to Gettysburg where the rest of Damon’s troop met their end.
Of course, now Valerie is my main suspect for the mystery woman after Stefan in the future. It was a pleasant surprise to see Tyler back, however briefly, in the only flash-forward of the episode. He may or may not be Caroline’s fiance since he explicitly told Stefan he doesn’t want to get in the middle of them. The only other clue we got from the future is that Stefan’s scar is opening, and he needs to warn Caroline. We know it was probably too late for her at that point since she was last seen being attacked in her Dallas news studio.
Not much development was made on the phoenix stone front, other than the fact that Bonnie learned Ric didn’t actually destroy it when he said he did. She seemed to have gotten over that lie pretty easily considering how she’s seriously talking about helping him with this necromancy.
What did you think of this week’s episode of The Vampire Dairies? Do you enjoy the direction Valerie’s story is taking or are you growing tired of it already too?
[Photo via The CW]
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