Legacies
“Death Keeps Knocking on my Door”
December 13, 2018
It’s the eve of Mystic Falls’ Remembrance Day, and the Salvatore students are writing letters to their lost loved ones that will be scattered throughout the cemetery. The TVD Wiki tells me Remembrance Day was started in the 1820s following a cholera epidemic. Clearly the town’s outsized mortality rate has kept the tradition going.
Rafe doesn’t need to write a letter to his deceased love Cassie. She just walked through the school’s front door.
She says she’s hungry. She’d like a shower. And then, she’d like to get to the bottom of how her boyfriend murdered her.
Cassie forces Rafe to acknowledge that his jealousy and anger spurred him to take the turn too fast, causing the crash that killed her. It wasn’t the storm; it was him. With that admission, she forgives him and urges him to keep doing the work he needs to to be a better man. Then she asks him to give her a few minutes alone by the lake. She wants to stand in the sun.
Like Jo in the previous episode, Cassie has been raised by the Necromancer. Bringer of life and death. He who holds the Fates’ threads. The cursed king of the underworld. The warrior of the wasteland. The Ayatollah of rock and rollah.
And, as Alaric tells him repeatedly, no one has ever heard of him.
Alaric hasn’t made any progress with his stick, blowtorch, and kitchen cleaver approach to questioning the Necromancer. Hope decides she knows just the carrot to dangle. She starts by convincing him that, no really, nobody knows who he is.
After he’s done pitching his hissy, Hope suggests they work together to figure out who erased him and all the other monsters from history. She shows him a sketch of the dryad’s symbol. The Necromancer says it means no one remembers you. No one celebrates you. No one mourns you.
Loosely translated, it means permanent death.
The Necromancer doesn’t remember how he died. He says it’s not uncommon—the subconscious mind’s way of protecting itself from the trauma. The memory though could still be there. He tells Hope if she’s thinking of taking a walk through his subconscious, she does so at her own peril.
Hope ropes MG into helping her do a head dive. He has second thoughts when he actually sees the melted wax would-be Eddie from Iron Maiden monster. Hope tells the vampire to pull it together.
Moments later she finds herself in the Necromancer’s mind. Only it looks a lot like Rousseau’s Bar in New Orleans. The Necromancer says he spent a good amount of time there drinking with Klaus when he was at his most murdery. Hope’s father was good for business.
“Always killing people.”
And isn’t Klaus really what this little trip is about?
The Necromancer ditches Hope and she continues into his subconscious alone. She starts down a staircase and falls into a dark existential void. She yells into the emptiness that she doesn’t need to know anything about her dad. She’s at peace with Klaus. So he died because of her. She’s come to terms with it.
Standing in the cell with the Necromancer, Hope begins to whimper and cry. When MG can’t pull her out, he runs to get Alaric. And then he seeks out Kaleb. MG says he needs to be strong enough to handle everything that comes along with being a vampire.
“People get hurt if I’m weak.”
Kaleb takes MG to the cemetery and instructs him in the time-honored art of snatch, eat, erase. He says he read about it in a book about the Salvatores.
Kaleb picks a victim and takes a sip. But when MG begins to feed, he can’t stop. Kaleb is unable to pull him off the boy. It takes a shot of vervain administered by Dorian to end the attack.
Kaleb says he and MG were just having a little fun. He insists they have a right to be themselves. To be real vampires. Dorian tells Kaleb there’s a reason he was at the cemetery. A reason that Remembrance Day is the one and only day he takes off.
He says it’s to honor the father and sister who were murdered by Stefan Salvatore.
364 days of the year Dorian loves his job. But one day out of the year he cannot stand the sight of the place. And then he schools Kaleb on rippers.
He says they’re vampires driven by obsession. A ripper will feed until there is nothing left to feed on. And if he were taking bets on what kind of vampire is susceptible to becoming a ripper, it would be MG.
In the void, Hope admits that she needs to know if Klaus found peace. She needs to know that he’s not alone.
If she keeps up all this jibber jabber, she won’t be alone for much longer.
After the Necromancer releases her from his subconscious, Hope and Alaric have a slap fight over their respective traumas and Hope locks him in his office so she can finish what she started.
Only the Necromancer decided to skip to the end without her.
He says it was the knife that killed him, so he summoned the spirit of the man who forged it. From him, the Necromancer learned that Malivore was created to consume the supernatural in a permanent death. Decades ago Malivore was contained and three locks were created to seal it shut.
The knife is one of them.
And when all three locks are returned to Malivore, it will opens its jaws of death once again.
Which is why while Hope was cooling her jets in the void, the Necromancer sent Cassie off to the library to retrieve the knife from its hiding place in the stacks. And as they speak, a recently resurrected Bennet witch is with Cassie by the lake. One who can mystically transport the knife back to Malivore.
Aces work, Hope!
As a thank you for helping him finally find peace, the Necromancer tells Hope that her father watches over her every day. He did die with love in his heart and he doesn’t regret his choice. But Klaus won’t find peace until Hope does.
“Good luck with that.”
The Necromancer takes his bow and disappears.
Bye, Necromancer! Bye! I’m sorry to see you go. You were easily the most entertaining character we’ve met so far on this medium show.
Hope writes a letter to her father. She says she messed up and knows he would be disappointed in her. But she’s going to do better. She got a glimpse of what lies in store for her if she doesn’t find her own peace. So she going to work on it.
Hope leaves her letter in the cemetery. She apologizes to Rafe for not being there for him with Cassie. “Apparently I was too busy launching Phase One of Mal!Apocalypse.” Rafe chooses to take a glass half full approach. Maybe with the knife gone things will quiet down.
And that’s when Hope’s ugly bracelet begins to glow. Landon is in trouble.
Legacies airs Thursday at 9/8 p.m. on The CW.
Whitney also watches Supernatural. Follow her on Twitter @Watcher_Whitney.