Episode Report Card Tippi Blevins: N/A | 82 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT The Family That Preys
By Tippi Blevins | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 10.03.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Elijah Mikaelson travels to New Orleans to figure out who or what is conspiring against his brother, Klaus the werewolf-vampire hybrid. When he arrives, he finds the city much different than when he and his siblings left it a century earlier. The witches cower in fear of an upstart vampire named Marcel. The vampires feed on unwitting humans, openly and without consequence. Beignets are rarely made with lard anymore. And so on. He soon discovers that it was a witch named Jane-Anne Deveraux who lured Klaus to town, but Marcel killed her for practicing magic in the Quarter, then took her body so her spirit couldn't rest in peace.
It's up to Jane-Anne's sister Sophie to fill in the blanks for Elijah. The magic that got sis killed? She was doing some kind of witchy pregnancy test on a werewolf named Hayley to determine that she is, indeed, carrying Klaus's child. The witches keep her under guard at a local cemetery, hoping to use her and/or the baby as a bargaining chip. They need Klaus to help them defeat Marcel, since, as Marcel's maker, he knows all his progeny's strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately for them, baby rabies isn't one of Klaus's weaknesses and he shuns any responsibility that his wayward werewolf sperm may have heaped upon him. Sophie threatens to kill Hayley, so Elijah gets to work trying to convince his brother that family rules, above all else.
Klaus pouts and storms and pouts some more. He lashes out against Marcel and bites one of his vampire lackeys, then refuses to cure him with his blood. Rebekah, via phone chats with Elijah, thinks they should just leave him to his tantrums. Eventually, Elijah manages to talk some sense into him, and Klaus fakes an apology to Marcel in order to win back his trust. In truth, what Klaus really wants is to be King of New Orleans again and he'll oust Marcel to do it. Elijah brings Jane-Anne's body back to the witches as a gesture of good faith and an uneasy alliance is struck.
We don't find out just how Marcel gained control over the witches or why Klaus can't be allowed to simply kill him outright, but it probably has something to do with a girl named Davina. We only meet her at the end, and she has some kind of magic, but maybe isn't a witch like the others. Elijah is feeling pretty good about how things are going, right up until the moment Klaus stakes him in the heart with one of those white oak daggers from The Vampire Diaries. You'd think he'd learn not to trust Klaus at some point, but he seems genuinely shocked as he slips into another temporary death. Stay tuned for the full weecap, with added flashbacks!
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!After four years, The Vampire Diaries finally got so overfilled with vampires and werewolves that it had to send some of them down south to New Orleans. As relocations go, it's not bad place to end up. Nor is it the first time that supernatural creatures have washed up on its steamy shores. We go back 300 years, to a foggy night on the Mississippi, as a rowboat approaches a seemingly abandoned ship. "Over the course of my long life," Elijah tells us in voice-over, "I have come to believe that we are bound forever to those with whom we share blood; and while we may not choose our family, that bond can be our greatest strength... or our deepest regret."
Several men disembark the rowboat and climb aboard the ship. "It's deserted," one of the men says. "Which makes everything in the hold legally forfeit." As the men scatter to plunder what they can, they notice several ornate coffins among the booty. Inside one of them lies Kol, daggered through the heart. As they gape in confusion, something yanks the men, one by one, off their feet and into the shadows. When only one man is left alive, Rebekah appears, lit by a shaft of moonlight. Her hair and clothes are impeccable, despite a long journey at sea. She wipes blood off her mouth with a hanky. "So nice to see such a handsome face after a long journey," she says. "Can I eat him, Brother?" "I'd rather you didn't," Elijah says, stepping out of the shadows. He points out they need someone to carry their luggage ashore. He compels the man to calmness, but it doesn't lessen the fellow's confusion. "What kind of hell demons are you?" he asks. "We're vampires, darling – the Original vampires," Rebekah says. She introduces them all, including their half-brother Niklaus/Klaus/Nik, who is standing on the deck above them, having just killed one of the would-be looters.
"Would you be so good as to tell us where we've landed?" Elijah asks. "In the French colony of Louisiana," the man says, "off the shores of a town they've named New Orleans." He raises his lantern, casting light about the hold, and sees the bodies of the crew, drained of blood. Perhaps next time, the Mikaelson brood should leave a couple of the crew alive – like the captain, for example – so they don't end up adrift. Jazzy horns play us into the dawning of the title card.
In the present day, the French Quarter bustles with tourists and street performers. Elijah has parked himself on a stool at a bar called Rousseau's, where a pretty blond bartender gets him to exposit some familial history for us. He's looking for his trouble-making brother, because he, Elijah, is the trouble-fixing brother. We get little flashes of Klaus killing a lot of people back in Mystic Falls. "He's a little temperamental," Elijah says. They don't share the same father, he goes on to explain, which has always bothered his brother. "He believes there are people in this town conspiring against him," he says. "Wow," says the bartender/psychologist, "narcissistic and paranoid." But you know what they say. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Elijah asks to meet with a woman named Jane-Anne Deveraux, who's supposed to work there. The bartender doesn't know where she is, but points Elijah to someone who might.