I totally paused!

The main setting of this episode is the Mystic Falls Founders Party.  Do towns really have this kind of thing?  Or maybe they go on and I never pay attention.

Anyway, everyone in Mystic Falls goes to the party, which is a little weird to me because the town seems so small, and half the people in it are apparently high school students, so I dunno why they want to spend that  much more time with each other.  But whatev.

We open the show with what appears to be a not so good situation for Elena…which turns out to be Damon infiltrating Stephan’s head while he sleeps.  So I’ll just say again – the best way Stephan can protect Elena from Damon is to just tell her the truth!  And if he loses her love because of it, well then it’s just not fate after all!

Also, if Stephan ultimately needs to ingest human blood to defeat Damon, why doesn’t he go to the blood bank?  I know it’s like, dishonest and that’s against Stephan’s code, but it’s better than feeding off a human, right?  I don’t think Stephan really wants to be rid of Damon, he just likes to be all angsty about it.

I think my favorite thing from this episode was Damon reading through one of the Twilight books and making fun of it.  Him saying he doesn’t sparkle because he lives in the real world where vampires die in the sun – love it!

The big subplot to the Founders Party is that Stephan is trying to poison Damon with vervane, an herb that apparently prevents vampires from glamouring people, and when they consume it, they are weakened a ton.  I have some comments about this, but we’ll get to that in a bit.  I also have a few questions…

• In this vampire world, how does the invitation thing work to get into a house?  I ask because the Salvatore brothers have already been in the house where the Founders Party takes place.  Do they need to be reinvited because it’s a different set of people living there?  That’s probably how it works.  And also, you’d think someone would notice that only two people don’t just walk right in.
• Why does Elena get freaked out when she sees Damon Salvatore and Stephan Salvatore on the guest registry of the original Founders Party?  And why doesn’t Stephan have the easy explanation that Damon comes up with?  Families recycle names all the time, I don’t see why she would even be concerned – I know I’d just think it was ancestors.  It also seems like Stephan doesn’t put any thought into this whole thing, since he gets flustered anytime something questionable comes up.  Or again, he could just tell Elena the truth…
• I am very curious as to the significance of this crystal that Damon gets out of the box.  And why does he hide it in a place he has no promise of getting to?  Shouldn’t he have put it in the Salvatore house, or I dunno, a mausoleum?
• We all know that part of the vampire deal is you don’t change, and it’s clear at the end of the episode that some of the townsfolk know about the vampire thing and the Salvatore family.  You would also presume that since there’s a picture of Katherine, and the town seems way into their history, that there would be pictures of the Salvatore brothers.  So why is it that no one in the know seems to recognize them?

Now that we have that out of the way, back to the vervane.  During the party, Stephan puts a big vial of vervane into Caroline’s drink…guess it doesn’t have an affect on humans.  Then of course, Damon feeds from her and magic!, he’s weakened!  So Stephan carts him off to the Salvatore house and locks him in the room where their descendant grows vervane.

This is the part that makes me think Stephan does not actually want to be rid of Damon – an easy solution here is to take Damon’s magic ring that lets him go in sunlight, lock him in a place where he’d get all sunny, and there you have it.  Vampire + sun = dead…Damon said so himself!  Or, an alternative could be, I dunno…STAKING HIM!

So pretty much, Stephan has his golden opportunity to get rid of Damon once and for all, and he’s blowing it.  Because you know Damon is going to get out and ruin Stephan’s life again.

All of this is not to say that I want Stephan to destroy Damon – Damon is my favorite character and he makes watching this show worthwhile.  But Stephan is being kind of dumb about this whole thing!