Legacies
“There’s a World Where Your Dreams Come True”
February 7, 2019
The canopic key has been glowing and Hope and Alaric are on edge waiting for whatever monster is coming next.
“I just wish that Satan’s nightlight would give us some rest.”
“And I wish that knife was never in our school to begin with.”
“I wish Buffy Summers Hope had never come to Sunnydale this school.”
Now there’s a wish a djinni with an agenda can work with.
And honestly, it’s like no on this show has ever seen an episode of Buffy.
Lizzie is in a rarified state of pique. Despite Caroline’s faxes, texts, and emails, Alaric missed the memo that the twins were coming home from Europe on an earlier flight. Josie says it’s okay. She’s got this jaunty beret, so!
Lizzie snaps that what is not okay is waiting at the terminal and being forced to take a three-hour shuttle ride that smelled like an open sewer. And FEET! She storms into her room and stands in front of the mirror trying to breathe herself down from a magical rage aneurysm.
She makes her wish and Ablah the djinni reveals herself in a burst of blue smoke. With a snap of her fingers, Lizzie’s rash wish is granted.
Lizzie wakes up in her bed and takes a pass on fight training. She tells Alaric she’s not really in the mood to watch Hope be a ninja today.
Alaric is like, who?
Lizzie doesn’t immediately realize she’s in the wish!verse, even though her father is sporting the classic bizarro world beard.
When she does, Lizzie is thrilled to have her father’s attention and delighted that she’s so good at sparring. Alaric shoos Lizzie and Josie off to change before their morning tour. He reminds them that they need to sell the new recruit on the school.
Lizzie and Josie greet werewolf Jed and escort him into the great room … only it’s not so great. The hardwood floors are scuffed and dingy. The furniture is threadbare, tattered, and stained. Cobwebs coat the corners.
Lizzie tries to deflect by suggesting they introduce Jed to his pack. A scrawny 12-year-old walks over. He’s Luis, the Alpha.
Josie frets over Jed. Will he stay? She says it’s so hard to get anyone to stay. Lizzie glares at her watery breakfast gruel. Where are the pastries? The Belgian waffles? WITHER THE SMOOTHIE STATION?
The terrible truth washes over Lizzie.
Josie scolds that Lizzie knows how expensive it is to run the place. How hard it is to get benefactors. She says that Damon Salvatore has been as generous as he can be, but he and Elena have children of their own to think of.
Lizzie is forced to confront the fact that no Hope means no Klaus-funded endowment for the school. Which, nice retcon, but no. I call shenanigans. Klaus wrote that check 5% because he wanted Hope to have a safe place to be herself and 95% because he wanted to be Caroline’s last love.
As one does.
Lizzie tells Ablah to fix it.
Just as quickly she tells the djinni to belay that wish. Lizzie says she knows how this game is played. She wastes her first wish by not being specific enough. The second trying to clean up the mess of the first—and only making things worse. The third by wishing she never had any wishes in the first place.
She’s not falling for it. Send her back in.
Lizzie finds herself in Alaric’s office. He’s on the phone apologizing to Caroline for sending her on a dud scouting trip while Josie dutifully clips potential leads from the newspaper. Lizzie tells them she knows how to help.
She wheels a large globe into the great hall and removes its dusty drop cloth with a flourish. She says the instant a new young supernatural being is awakened to their powers, the globe lights up. An annoying known-it-all witch she knew in another life created it, so Lizzie just copied her spell.
Alaric gives the globe a spin and it lights up like Christmas. He’s astonished by how many of them there are. He notes the brightest point of light. Lizzie says the bigger the glow, the more powerful the being. Alaric says they need to bring them in immediately.
To New Orleans!
Josie beams as she watches Alaric train with Hope. She says having a tribrid puts the school in the game for real. She’s never seen their father happier. Lizzie really saved the day.
“Yay me.”
She summons Ablah and accuses the djinni of being terrible at her job. Ablah says Hope hadn’t come to the school, just as wished … at least until today. She helpfully instructs that one must word their wish carefully. Precision is key.
For her second spin, Lizzie wishes there was never a Salvatore School to begin with.
When Lizzie opens her eyes she’s sitting in the backseat of Alaric’s late model minivan. He pulls into his spot in the teacher’s lot at Mystic Falls High. Public school. Lizzie says it makes sense. But why is she in the back seat?
Lizzie hurries to keep up with Josie as her sister strides through the gym with the confidence of someone sitting firmly atop the high school food chain. Connor walks over and kisses Josie. Lizzie chokes on her tongue.
Connor tells Josie her sister is being weird again. Josie says he should cut her some slack. It’s hard being the only one on homecoming without a date.
Lizzie is so confused. She doesn’t have a date and Josie is into Connor? What? Josie patiently reminds her they talked about this. He’s QB1 and she’s head cheer. It just makes sense.
Dana walks over with Josie’s skinny vanilla latte and the two girls laugh about Lizzie’s “off” day. Dana warns that her mom’s pharmacy is going to run out of pills if Lizzie’s doctor keeps raising her dosage. Josie walks off with her friend, because it actually is now, Dana.
Alaric and his beer gut slur their way through a lecture on the Battle of Willow Creek in front of a bored and listless class. Josie isn’t bothered that her father is day drunk—when isn’t he?—but she is upset that he’s still wearing his watch. She just needs Lizzie to get it like she promised.
Josie full body eye rolls at having to explain herself again some more. Stephanie Salvatore’s dad gave Alaric the watch. It’s a magical object that she can siphon so she can take things to the next level with Connor and show him she’s a witch.
Lizzie heaves a sigh of relief. It’s a terrible idea, but for a second—
“I’m going to have sex with him.”
Yeah. That’s what Lizzie thought she meant.
Josie tells Lizzie she promised not to let her down. She snaps at her sister to actually do it for a change.
Lizzie slips into Alaric’s classroom and creeps along the floor towards her passed out father. She complains again some more about Ablah and disputes that there is any world where this could actually happen.
Well, allow the djinni to retort.
Ablah says it’s Lizzie who is rubbish at making wishes and that everything she is experiencing is, in fact, a potential reality. She says it makes sense if you think about it. Alaric built the Salvatore School so Lizzie and Josie could thrive. A safe place to shield them from their darkest impulses—the legacy passed on to them by the Gemini Coven.
And then Lizzie went and wished his dream away because it wasn’t perfect.
So now she’s the school freak and Josie gets to shine. But if Lizzie is ready to go, Ablah says she could use another wish. And it’s not like the djinni wants to be there.
Ablah complains that she’s spent nearly 500 years granting awful wishes to self-involved humans before they even met. Lizzie brats that this isn’t about the djinni before stomping out of the classroom.
She walks out into the parking lot in time to see Dana and Connor kissing.
Josie, her spangly dress and tiara have no reason to believe Lizzie when she tells her. Josie says her sister always does this—has an episode just to steal the spotlight. Lizzie is the ruiner and Josie is done making excuses for her. Josie is done trying to make Lizzie feel okay about herself and worrying when she is going to snap.
Josie is taking control of her own happiness, dammit!
She demands the watch from Lizzie. Lizzie offers it to her sister—but only after siphoning its magic. She says it is for Josie’s own good. Josie tells Lizzie she hates her and walks away.
Lizzie stands alone in the crowded hallway, pleading with her sister to just wait. And then she has a Carrie level rage aneurysm that blows out every light and window in the school. Sparks rain down on the students and then the phones come out.
Alaric appears in the hallway and hustles the girls to the exit.
They’re met at the door by a spandex-clad superhero squad let by Hope. She tells Kaleb to compel the students and instructs Jed and his guyliner to establish a perimeter and lock the place down.
“Pedro, call in the chopper.”
Yes, Legacies. More of this. More fun. More Pedro.
Lizzie insists that she and Josie do NOT want to be superheroes, but Hope isn’t there for them. The Mikaelson School has been quite the success. So much so that Klaus is establishing a European branch and they’d like Alaric to run things in Mystic Falls.
Lizzie finds a corner to pout in and tells Ablah she wants her final wish. The djinni advises that Lizzie isolate her biggest problem and show it no mercy. Since Hope seems bound to keep intruding into her life, Lizzie does the only thing she can.
She wishes Hope was never born.
Lizzie wakes up in the dugout of the high school’s ball field. She doesn’t seem to pick up from the de-saturated color and wanted posters that she’s wished herself into a post-apocalyptic world.
One where Klaus never found a reason to be a better man.
Two years prior, he shut off his humanity altogether and started a war. Now supernaturals are known and hunted by Triad.
Lizzie leads Kaleb and Jed to the ruins of the now abandoned Salvatore School. They walk in on a vigil for Josie. Penelope bitterly says that at least Lizzie earned this breakdown.
When Lizzie wakes up again she’s in one of the school’s basement cells. Ablah says the third wish is always tricky. Better luck on the next one! You see, genies only grant three wishes. A djinni can grant—or ignore—any wish they choose. Ablah says she can reset reality back to where they began … if Lizzie gives her the second key to Malivore.
“Like you said, I’m a monster. You should have trusted your gut.”
It’s a small price to pay to end all the suffering. Ablah would know. She says she was born into five centuries of suffering. Five hundred years of realizing other peoples’ dreams before she’d ever have the chance to pursue one of her own.
And then at the end of year 499 she found herself in Malivore.
As miserable and heartbroken as she is, Lizzie still isn’t willing to put the world one key closer to monster apocalypse. She says there’s a loophole. Magic always has a loophole. Ablah suggests she find it quickly, because things are taking a turn.
The djinni snaps Lizzie into the middle of the old mill where her father and classmates are preparing for battle. This is where they’re taking their stand. Lizzie says this is all her fault, but Alaric blames himself. Maybe if he’d told the girls sooner about the Merge, Lizzie wouldn’t have learned about it accidentally from another witch, lost her shit, and killed Josie. Maybe he wouldn’t have failed them.
Lizzie tearfully realizes how foolish and selfish her wishes have been. That time after time, world after world, all her father has tried to do is protect her—and students like her. She tells Alaric he has to believe that there is a world where his dream came true. Where she and Josie are safe and loved.
Alaric asks if he told her about the Merge in this other world.
Ablah snaps Lizzie into the middle of the battle to help incentivize her to wish the djinni the key. Lizzie big damn heroes that that’s the one mistake she won’t make … even as she watches her father being carried away by Triad.
Because she knows how to fix this. She knows how to fix the djinni, broken by the curse she’s been forced to live with for 500 years.
Lizzie wishes that Ablah had never met the monster that sent her to Malivore.
The djinni is like, oh shit. That’s a tricky wish that checks out. She never goes to Malivore, she completes her term of service, and she’s free. Wish granted and Lizzie could not be more delighted with her big brain and clever twist!
But there’s a catch.
Ablah points out that they will never have met either. Lizzie’s reality will reset and she won’t remember the Merge … but the truth will be buried somewhere in her mind. Just close enough to tickle and slowly drive her insane.
And when Lizzie learns the truth, as she inevitably will, she will kill Josie all over again.
Ablah thanks Lizzie for her freedom, and with a snap, she’s back in her room standing in front of the mirror. Lizzie knows something has happened, but she’s not … sure … what.
Before she has time to give it a think, Josie bursts through the door. Any thoughts of being angry of her father evaporate, replaced with an overpowering urge to squish her sister in the tightest hug possible and not let go.
Later in the kitchen, Lizzie calmly explains that—on a fundamental level—she thinks she’s broken. And is maybe losing her mind. She says she’s haunted by a feeling that something terrible is going to happen if she doesn’t change.
She starts by apologizing to her father. She admits that all the tools Caroline has given her to manage her ups and downs go out the window when it comes to Hope. And that’s as far as she gets in moderating her animosity towards Hope.
It’s a start.
Wee Pedro tells Lizzie it sounds like she’s got a lot going on. She suddenly realizes it’s way past his curfew. She tells the boy to go to bed—and leave the sandwich. Pedro is disappointed. She said she wanted to talk. Did she? Lizzie can’t imagine why.
Legacies airs Thursday at 9/8 p.m. on The CW.
Whitney also watches Supernatural. Follow her on Twitter @Watcher_Whitney.