So, in case you missed it from the title and the previous paragraph, I’m recapping the whole series thus far, so SPOILERS abound if you’ve not seen it. Similar to Trême, this show utilizes its New Orleans setting as a character, so I’ve provided a little sampler of the series’ soundtrack for your listening pleasure whilst you read (don’t worry, it’s not all jazz, this is the CW, you know).
Cast of Characters
Klaus, Elijah, and Rebekah Mikaelson – The Originals
Marcel – Vampire Klaus Made
Haley – Werewolf Preggers With Klaus’ Demon Baby
Davina – Crazy Powerful Witch Who Helps Marcel
So, let’s assume you missed the pilot, which aired as a TVD episode called “The Originals” back in spring 2013. Basically Klaus goes to New Orleans because the witches there lure him down. He finds that his 18th century progeny Marcel has taken over the city, run the werewolves outta town, and has control of the witches. Klaus is #jelly. Elijah shows up and it turns out that the wolf chick Haley who screwed over Tyler and those 12 hybrids in order to help Silas way back when he was still alive is down in New Orleans looking for her birth pack. SURPRISE! She’s preggers with Klaus love baby (Did she NOT read Twilight?! Wrap that shit up, girl!). Turns out the witches are using Hayley’s hybrid demon baby (cough) as leverage over Klaus. When Klaus indicates that he gives approximately zero craps about the baby and Haley, it’s Elijah who persuades him to see otherwise. To see himself king of New Orleans again with a prince to go with it.
The first “official” episode kicks off with a basically recap of the above paragraph, more explicitly explaining that one of the witches (Sophie Devereux) is linked to Hayley, so if Hayley leaves town, the witches will kill Sophie and thus the unborn demon baby. Rebekah has come to New Orleans after her summer with Matt Donovan and Elijah explains the situation to her and she offers to help protect the baby and Hayley. Then the series introduces the battle between Klaus and Marcel where Klaus breaks one of Marcel’s rules (punishment=death) and then says, “I can’t be killed, so…now what?” And thus begins the Klaus/Marcel bromance-frenemies ordeal.
During this, Marcel essentially kidnaps Elijah and has his secret weapon witch Davina desiccate him and hide him from Klaus. Only there for Elijah, Rebekah decides she’s going to stay until she can rescue him (with lots of eye daggers and snide remarks thrown at Klaus). The Klaus/Marcel “battle” lasts… I don’t know, too many episodes for any of us to care about it by the time Rebekah and Marcel (who are former lovahs) decide to “take Klaus down” (you’d think they would’ve learned the first times they tried, NOPE! Ah, fools in love…). That, of course, ends in Klaus going all hybrid psychopath on most of the city’s vampires and then offering life to whoever picks up the coin he places on the ground (a shout-out to Marcel’s game loving ways of determining loyalty), at which point Rebekah convinces Marcel to pick up the coin because she knows that’s all Klaus really wants (dominance over everyone for always).
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Once Marcel picks up the coin, the series takes a shift in its central conflict and begins to focus on the witches as the enemy and on Rebekah being totally over males always being in charge of everything all the time (take a number, Rebekah!) The Originals (with Hayley) move into the quarter where Marcel was living (aka, their old home) and an uneasy alliance begins with Klaus in charge and Marcel helping him out as a close second in command. But before we get into that, let’s cover the sideplots that I’ve not touched on yet.
Noble Elijah Has A Thing For Hayley
Maybe he just loves babies, maybe he’s a sucker for brunettes who pout, I don’t know, but Elijah is totally into Hayley. Hayley likes him back, but he’s super nice to her while everyone else (like her baby daddy) is kind of dicks, so that might be the only reason. Elijah recognizes however that they cannot be together because it will piss off Klaus (they don’t explain this though, just that it will — we have to assume it’s because she’s pregnant with Klaus’ kid and Klaus hates happiness?).
Human Camille Has a Crappy History and Now Pointless Role?
Camille’s in town visiting their uncle and trying to make sense out of things. Coming to NOLA was her first mistake since she walked into a vampire-witch nightmare. Because Marcel has a crush on her, Klaus decides to use Camille (Cami) as a spy thing during his frenemies stage with him. Turns out Cami’s twin brother went crazy and killed his entire seminary class and himself some 10 months ago. Her uncle is the leader of the human faction in town (well, what’s left of it) and we learn that a witch hexed Cami’s brother to punish her uncle for siding against them. Anyway, you still feel bad for Cami, who is compelled quite a bit by Klaus and then uncompelled through Davina’s super witch powers. Klaus tried to save Cami, compelling her to leave town, but she’s stubborn, feels used, and is sticking around. I’m guessing she won’t die, but I don’t see her character’s purpose now.
Marcel’s Secret Weapon
For most of the starting episodes, it’s not entirely clear who Davina is. She’s a young witch, only 16, who is extremely powerful but can’t control it. She’s helping out Marcel, but yet is locked in an attic and convinced it’s not safe to go outside in the quarter. She tells Elijah, who she keeps captive for a while, that the witches want to kill her. Elijah takes this info, builds trust with Davina, and helps her start to control her powers by giving her one his mother’s old grimoires (and uses her to unlink Haley and Sophie so the baby remains unharmed when the witches go all cray cray saying that the demon baby will destroy all the witches). Lots of other people take an interest in Davina though, and eventually Cami manages to help her escape. Unfortunately for Davina, Klaus is not pleased and kills her boyfriend thing who played violin.
The Harvest
Davina’s power is a source of confusion as well, until it’s finally revealed that she was part of the Harvest Ritual, which is basically how the witches in NOLA can regain their full powers because they practice ancestral magic.
Davina reveals that the harvest ritual consists of 4 “chosen” witches being groomed for the reaping. It’s explained that they will all have to give some blood and then a spell will put them “to sleep” (i.e. death), but they’ll come back to life once the magic is reaped by the ancestral witches and the power is returned in full to the living witches (or whatever). Except when the first girl goes to give her blood, turns out that slitting her throat is the actual way to reap the chosen ones during the harvest.
This all went down months before the Mikaelsons came back to town, when Sophie has just returned to NOLA. The harvest only has to happen some every 200 years, so she thought the whole thing was BS and that her niece Monique, Jane-Anne’s daughter, who was one of the chosen four was basically going to be slaughtered. But everyone was going along with it and saying that the girls would come back. Sophie takes matters into her own hands and implores Marcel and Camille’s uncle to help stop the murders.
And help they do! But not quite in time… and only the fourth witch of the chosen can be saved: Davina. Marcel takes her to safety and hiding and vows to protect her. Her reasoning is that if the elders lied about how the harvest went down, who’s to say they weren’t lying about the fact that the girl’s would come back to life? Before they leave the cemetery, we see the power of the third dead chosen witch (aka Monique, Sophie’s niece) pass into Davina. So, that’s why she has all that power… 3 witches’ powers inside of her, waiting to be passed on to the ancestors.
BTW, Everyone’s Been Lying to You…All Season!
This is the point in the season when we learn that the entire premise of the storyline so far was a falsehood, or rather, we are learning the story through the Mikaelsons’ point of views. We thought that Sophie was angry at Marcel for killing her sister, Monique’s mom, but she is actually just trying to complete the ritual and doing whatever she can to get a hold of Davina so that it can be finished. She has to bring Monique back, and completing the harvest is the only way she can.
By this point, all of the remaining witch elders have been killed (mostly by Originals or Davina). Only an elder can perform the harvest ritual, so that’s critical. But the harvest ritual has to continue despite the obstacles and Davina not wanting to die. The power of the chosen witches starts to consume her and the destruction of the elements begins to happen. First earth, then wind, then water, then comes fire (yes, then heart!)
By the time the rains start, Davina has had enough and the vampires realize they must take matters into their own hands in order to save their beloved city. Elijah’s 19th century witch lover Celeste is long since dead (yup, Klaus killed her) but her bones weren’t consecrated because she requested to be buried away from the witch cemetery and Elijah obliged. To become powerful enough to finish the harvest spell, Sophie wants to consecrate Celeste’s bones. She gives Haley a shout, pulling a favor-for-a-favor ploy and Hayley betrays Elijah’s trust to get information on her wolf family. Elijah is not pleased, but Hayley is tired of being over-coddled and kept from the reason she even came to Louisiana to begin with. Trouble in a troubled paradise, indeed.
Regardless, Celeste’s bones have *gasp* already been consecrated, despite their secret location and the Originals are forced to allow Sophie to consecrate their own mother’s bones. That works and Sophie can complete the spell. After a tearful goodbye, Davina goes to cemetery to let Sophie complete the harvest ritual, which she does.
BUT NOTHING HAPPENS.
Right before Davina went the way of with-our-powers-combined, she was busy sketching what she called “evil.” It came to her in scattered images, which when put together looked liked Elijah’s dead but already consecrated bones witch lover, Celeste:
As Rebekah so astutely says at the end of that episode, “The four girls haven’t resurrected, so where did all that power go?”
Surprise, surprise, Sabine (random witch who seemed to have maybe 10 lines all season) is actually Celeste embodying Sabine’s body. She’s absorbed the power of the harvest and brought 3 intensely hardcore witches back from the dead instead of the Harvest Ritual casualties. One we know already, but the other two are totally new!
But before we dive too deep into these blasts from the pasts, I have to note that Marcel’s reaction to Davina’s apparent permanent death and consequently Klaus’ reaction to Marcel is really what secures the show as a real series. We already knew Joseph Morgan could act, but Charles Michael Davis brings it this episode. I cried, guys. I actually real life cried.
Secrets, Secrets Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink
In classic Plec style, people back from the dead means some vampire flashbacks. For Papa Tunde, the baddest of asses, we head back to 1919 and learn how Klaus brutally killed him the first time. But don’t feel too bad for the guy, he practiced sacrificial magic in order to gain power. Tunde uses Rebekah as a sacrifice (because Originals cannot be killed, so she is an infinite power source) in order to have enough power to kill Klaus. Elijah and Hayley figure it out though and are able to break through the barrier around Rebekah using Hayley’s hybrid blood (fetus to the rescue!). Our main players recoup and realize that Papa Tunde will discover their vampire prison (called the garden) and sacrifice all of those vamps, which he does. As they fear what’s to come, Celeste (as Sabine) is preparing to sacrifice Tunde and take his power herself.
Once she does this, he’s dead again and one of the harvest rituals can come back. Apparently how much you believe in the ritual determines which order you come back, because Monique is the first to return to the living. And though we didn’t meet her before she was killed, I’m guessing she wasn’t an utter sociopath like she is now. Made clear when Sophie attempts to drive them out of town and away from it all to have a better a life and Monique tells her they can’t leave when the war is just beginning. Um, and then she kills her own aunt saying, “You should have believed.” YIKES. Probably don’t want to mess with these four… (dead Sophie in the background)
…too bad for Klaus, Rebekah, and Elijah that these four want to mess with them. And do they ever! Exploitation of secrets is the weapon of choice, starting with the reminder that Marcel originally brought Papa Tunde to town in order to drive out / kill Klaus so that he and Rebekah could finally be together. Once that failed, Rebekah realizes that only one person could actually kill Klaus: their father Mikael. She and Marcel hatch a plan to contact him and alert him to Klaus’ whereabouts. Viewers already know that Mikael coming to New Orleans is the reason the Originals fled in the first place (in the twenties, which is when they met up with Ripper Stefan Salvatore in Chicago, if you recall), so we know the plan failed. But, fools in love are fools…
Somewhere in there, we see Hayley reunite with her real family (the werewolves who are cursed to be wolves except on full moons), find out she is basically the royalty of the pack and betrothed to a dude named Jackson (I LOLed), and almost burn to death until Elijah decides to save her instead of his sister (the start of Sabine’s revenge on Elijah).
Hayley realizes that the witch who cursed her family was being embodied by Celeste, so she was actually Celeste and thus this curse still can be broken. So, preggers takes shit on herself and we last see her going after Sabine/Celeste outside the hospital that Rebekah and Klaus are trapped in.
They are trapped here because no longer dead witch Genevieve has a bone to pick with Rebekah. Turns out that Marcel and Rebekah turned to her as the witch who would locate Mikael and call him to NOLA. Rebekah has a change of heart (like seriously?! It’s Klaus. He totally killed your mom and lied to you about it to guilt you into caring about him for millennium; she doesn’t know this yet, to be fair) and Geneveive says it’s too late. So…. Rebekah conveniently is able to force her to contract the Spanish Influenza that they’re treating (Edward Cullen, anyone?). To get her revenge, Genevieve links Klaus’ mind to Rebekah’s and forces the werewolf bitten Rebekah to hallucinate her memories of how she and Marcel plotted against Klaus. To put it mildly, Klaus is incredibly pissed. Elijah intervenes just in time and commands Marcel and Rebekah to run as far and as fast as they can.
So there you go! How long will Klaus be down for the count? How far will Rebekah and Marcel actually run? Why didn’t Elijah just rip out Klaus’ heart when he had the chance in Season 2 of TVD? Will Cami have more importance to the end of the season? Why am I like John Watson and completely addicted to highly functioning sociopaths? Get on board now, because the series has been renewed for another season! After all, we need to see what the demon baby is actually capable of…
Also, Daniel Gilles… so much unf.
