In my mind, the fifth season of The Vampire Diaries hit the skids with Katherine’s demise.  Once the writers shuffled her out of the picture, the season just never managed to hit its stride.  It didn’t help that the whole threat of the Travelers never seemed to gel, and the treatment of the breakdown of the Other Side felt muddled and inconsistent.  So I had a lot of hope that the season finale would bring this plot thread to a close and give the series a much-needed new direction.

 

I won’t shed a single tear if Bonnie’s season-long resurrection turns out to have been a minor reprieve, and she really is finally dead and gone.  However, taking Damon with her would be a catastrophic turn of events.  For me, there are three characters that I’ve ever cared about on the series, and Katherine and Damon are two of them.  (Caroline, the third, has long been relegated into subplots that repeatedly hobble her development.)  Why get rid of the best things about your show in the same season, writers?!?

 

If one of the Salvatore brothers had to go, I would much rather have had Stefan leave.  He’s not nearly as exciting.  Bringing back Alaric is a great move, but it doesn’t make up for the loss of Damon at all.  And unfortunately, the writers are going to have to work overtime to figure out how to resolve the problem of the Other Side being wiped clean, yet really needing to bring Damon back somehow.  Hopefully without Bonnie.

 

I did find it hilarious that Liv and Luke, the most recently introduced witchy wonder twins, thought that trying to kill vampires was a reason to get out of Mystic Falls as soon as possible.  That’s an everyday event in Mystic Falls, and if you’re a witch, there’s usually a reason to keep you alive and in roughly working order.  Especially if it means helping get rid of Travelers and the ever-expanding revolving door to the Other Side.

 

In that regard, I liked Damon’s plan.  I’ve wanted nothing more than to blow all the Travelers back to hell from the moment they became the primary antagonists, and since they seemed to really enjoy burning alive earlier in the season, it was thematically pleasing.  And it would throw the doors to the Other Side open long enough for all the good characters to come back, right?  Well, setting aside the problem that Katherine didn’t come back (as far as we know), it led to that whole “Damon is dead now” problem.

 

Also, Tyler is back alive and well, and even though he’s human again, I doubt they will do the smart thing and kill him off anytime soon.  It’s just another example of the downside to this finale; characters that should stay dead are alive, and characters that should be alive are dead (for now).  Sure, I fully expect both Bonnie and Damon to come back, but this series needs to get its mojo back, and keeping Damon off the board for too long will only delay that course.