infiltration of the group—has been priceless. I wouldn’t trade a single scene with the beleaguered Sheriff Forbes, especially the ones where she talked vampire-hunting tactics with Damon, who seems to respect her a little bit . . . at least as much as he respects anyone.1
1 My personal dream for season two of The Vampire Diaries? Now that Mayor Lockwood has been “outed” as supernatural and then murdered, there’s a vacancy in city government. Wouldn’t a fine, upstanding member of the community—someone from one of Mystic Falls’ oldest families, someone who understands the real dangers to the town—be the perfect candidate to take over? Vote for Mayor Damon Salvatore in 2010!
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Finally, having Stefan and Damon be natives of Mystic Falls means that living there—and falling in love with Elena there—has more resonance for them, and so also for us. This came out very powerfully in the first-season finale, “Founder’s Day” (1-22). We saw Stefan and Damon amid people costumed in the kind of clothing they wore during their lives. It was a game when teenage boys lifted vintage rifles and pretended to fire at each other, but the viewers could see that the Salvatores remember that the war was no game.
Most significantly, just after Damon and Stefan had agreed between themselves that they could not confuse Elena with Katherine, they saw Elena—dressed in the same kind of elaborate hoop-skirted gown Katherine used to wear.2 Past and present collided, and we saw that neither brother could ever be totally sure of his feelings where Katherine was concerned. The silence that fell between them reminded us that, as Faulkner said, the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.
Especially in Mystic Falls.
But all those Civil War costumes reminded me that—as smart and innovative as The Vampire Diaries has been in making changes from book to TV—the writers of the television show haven’t yet followed through with all those changes. Although they made a smart choice with this new background (what’s a more perfect parallel for a story that pits brother against brother?), The Vampire Diaries hasn’t fully engaged with that background so far. There are some 2 How wonderful was it when this episode mirrored Elena’s first appearance in Katherine’s clothes with Katherine’s first appearance in Elena’s clothes?
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issues they haven’t addressed—big issues—that not only deserve to be looked at in their own right, but also could make for even more fabulous stories to tell.
First, let’s talk about those flashbacks to 1864. The Salvatore brothers and their father lived in a palatial mansion.
Everyone in town was shown wearing beautiful clothing, shopping happily at a quaint little store, and chatting in the street over various pleasantries.
Except by 1864, it wasn’t that much fun to live in the South. The Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history, had been raging for three years. Quaint little shops in small towns were usually closed, because supply lines had been cut off, transport was impossible, and goods were therefore hard to come by.
Because of blockades, new fabric couldn’t be brought in, and even the cotton grown in the Confederacy couldn’t be sent to mills in the North or Europe to be woven into cloth. So Katherine wouldn’t have had many pretty new ball gowns. The economic devastation across the entire South at that time is almost impossible to exaggerate. Depending on where exactly Mystic Falls is supposed to be, there’s a decent chance the town’s residents in 1864 wouldn’t even have had enough to eat.
(Well, the town’s human residents.) Wouldn’t it be even more interesting to see flashbacks to Mystic Falls at that time and see how dramatically things were changing? To see Stefan and Damon dealing with a world that was coming apart at the seams? It wouldn’t be difficult for the TV show’s creators to introduce that; the more glamorous flashbacks we’ve seen have mostly been set before the Battle of Willow Creek itself.
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So if we