Throughout its first season, The Vampire Diaries has demonstrated a talent for finding drama, irony and subtext in the strangest places. At the end of “Founder’s Day,” a season finale that’s epic in every sense of the word, Bonnie tells Stefan that “things have to change.” The show might be expressing one idea or several depending on how you interpret the line. It might simply be Bonnie’s way of saying that Damon’s killing spree has to stop, but it might also be the show’s way of patting itself on the back for a first season that grew in leaps and bounds, and a way of congratulating itself for a story that consistently challenged the conventions of genre television and serial storytelling. The meaning I find most likely is that this is an acknowledgement of what seems to have become the show’s mantra: to evolve, to expand and – crucially – to change.

No matter which idea the line expresses, it’s a line fraught with drama, dripping with irony and laden with subtext. If one thing is certain at the end of this season, it’s that things have changed profoundly, fundamentally and irreversibly. Elena’s relationship with Jeremy has changed. Damon’s relationship with Stefan, with Elena and with Mystic Falls has changed. Indeed, even the situation within the town – with a population content to ignore the alarming frequency of unexplained deaths and which closes its eyes to the dozen individuals who inexplicably collapse on Founders’ Day – has changed. As cohesive, riveting and visually stunning as the finale might be, its greatest virtue is that it brings overarching storylines to a close while setting new storylines into motion, a subtle reminder that The Vampire Diaries is a show which thrives on its ability to progress, to adapt and to change.

At the center of this flurry of change is Elena, the misunderstood sister who, despite all her lies and deception, wants to make amends with Jeremy; the high-minded girlfriend who, regardless of how Damon feels about her, reassures Stefan that she loves him; the unflappably loyal BFF who, despite Bonnie’s anxiety that Elena would never forgive her, this week barely casts her best friend a reproachful glance. Elena’s arc in this episode is distinct from previous episodes, however, because for once we see her failing. She fails to get through to Jeremy. She fails to set Stefan’s mind at ease. She fails to convince Bonnie to see Damon the way she does. Stefan insists that “Elena is not Katherine,” but at every stage of the episode, from the ethereal opening in which Elena dresses for the parade to the mind-shattering conclusion in which Katherine successfully passes herself off as Elena, the subtext is that history is repeating itself.

What’s tragic about Elena’s isolation is the suggestion that Elena is indeed becoming Katherine. The heroine who previously moved from one story thread to another so effortlessly is all of a sudden oblivious to her brother’s despair, unable to quell her boyfriend’s insecurity and unaware of her best friend’s moral stance against a particular vampire. In each instance, we’re presented with a character who was once everything to everyone, and who suddenly finds herself on the periphery and out of the loop. The impact that will have on Elena’s role in the second season remains to be seen, but there’s something unexpected and inspiring about a show which began with a heroine at its center, and which somehow expanded into an all-compassing narrative about the heroine’s home town and its history.

Elena’s dysfunctional relationship with Jeremy is in many ways the emotional centerpiece of the episode, if only because the repercussions to Jeremy’s overdose have the potential to be the most devastating and the most far-reaching of the story threads left loose for the second season. While the show tiptoes around the implications of teen suicide – perhaps in the hope of avoiding a preachy and sententious stance – it establishes quite gracefully that, even post-lobotomy, Jeremy has been suffering intolerably. “You can’t fix this that easily,” he tells Elena when she attempts a speedy reconciliation with her brother. It’s an oblique reference to the extensive deception that Elena has maintained for most of the season, but in a way it’s also a testament to the writers’ respect for their characters and their story. The season finale resists the urge to neatly resolve its conflicts and wrap up its storylines, realizing that the issues among true-to-life characters shouldn’t be fixed to suit a schedule. Jeremy’s unwillingness to forgive Elena underscores the complexity of a situation in which Elena saw her brother in pain and made a call to alleviate his suffering. “It wasn’t her call to make,” Jeremy tells Stefan, condemning Damon’s compulsion and implying that, in a departure from his perspective in “Miss Mystic Falls,” he would have preferred to keep his memories – even the memory of a deranged and blood-starved Vicki – intact.

What’s curious about this is what it says about Elena’s role in Jeremy’s life. Jeremy berates Elena for allowing Damon to manipulate his memories, and although there’s something compassionate about wanting to lessen his trauma, there’s also something invasive about the decision. It effectively limits Jeremy’s ability to grieve, preventing him from reconciling himself to tragedy and condemning him to a stunted existence in which he’s always Elena’s “in-the-dark little brother.” The context largely exculpates Elena, because despite his young age, Jeremy has witnessed his parents’ death, the transformation of the girl he loved and, after this week, the death of the one person who understood him. In a way, Elena’s decision to wipe Jeremy’s memory feels is the call a parent would make, and since Jenna is (at least at present, and as near as we can tell) ill-qualified to make any decisions relating to vampires, Elena is to all intents and purposes a surrogate parent to Jeremy. Which, in a way, makes her deception seem all the more like a betrayal, because it implies that Elena doesn’t trust Jeremy to absorb the truth and that she thinks he’d be better off living in ignorance.

This, in turn, is what saves Jeremy from looking like an impetuous teenager who thinks he can make a statement by taking his own life. It’s tempting to take a moral stance and judge Jeremy for a decision that could break the hearts of the family he leaves behind, and a decision which, on the surface, seems motivated by adolescent angst and self-involvement. What qualifies Jeremy’s decision isn’t just Michael Suby’s emotive score (a wistful piano that tells us to feel sorry for the character), and it isn’t just Marcos Siega’s intimate direction (complete with close-ups on Steven R. McQueen so tight that we can practically see the pores on the actor’s skin). We could condemn Jeremy for making a choice that was selfish and irresponsible, but what justifies his wish to die – if not making it supportable then at least understandable – is the context: the suffering of a kid who’s been bombarded by tragedy, who has lost everyone who cared about him and who briefly glimpses the ultimate benefit of becoming a vampire when Anna tells him he can turn off his suffering. “Life sucks either way, Jeremy,” Damon tells him in one of the episode’s final scenes, “but at least if you’re a vampire you don’t have to feel bad about it if you don’t want to.” It’s an oddly touching exchange that suggests a newfound solidarity between the characters, but by revealing the ostensible appeal of becoming a vampire, Damon unwittingly pushes Jeremy towards killing himself. It will be interesting to see whether Jeremy indeed becomes a vampire, but also whether Elena will ever forgive Damon when she learns that he was the last one to talk to her brother, and that he inadvertently sold the prospects of becoming a vampire to Jeremy when he was at his most vulnerable.

Forgiveness is one of the predominant themes of the episode, and earning Elena’s enmity is likely to prove a crushing blow to the vampire who began the season wreaking havoc and finishes the season trying valiantly to repent. If there’s one character who personifies the show’s evolution over 22 episodes, it’s surely Damon. “I came to this town wanting to destroy it,” he tells the person he thinks is Elena when they meet on the porch of the Gilbert home. “Tonight, I found myself wanting to protect it.” It’s a moment that captures the immense shift in Damon’s behavior over the course of the season, but also the organic development that has led to it. Damon’s next line – “How does that happen?” – illustrates that while the show’s writers clearly knew from the start where they planned to take the character, Damon’s latent heroism has been as much of a surprise to him as it has to us. The finale encapsulates Damon’s wavering nobility: “I’m here to eat cotton candy and steal your girl,” he jokes to Stefan. We laugh, and even Stefan smiles, but it’s a nervous laugh and a wary smile, and it masks the very real possibility that Damon will prove why Elena chose the wrong Salvatore.

One aspect of Damon’s metamorphosis remains artfully ambiguous. We see him offering a heartfelt thank you to Bonnie for eliminating the threat of the Gilbert invention (a gesture that seems undeserved given that Bonnie duped him); we see him offer to compel Jeremy again, this time giving Jeremy the freedom to choose whether or not he holds on to his memories; we see him apologize to Jeremy for turning Vicki, then revealing to Elena that his visit amounted to “a failed and feeble attempt at doing the right thing.” At every stage of the episode, Damon’s trademark humor and self-deprecation remain intact, but they’re progressively less effective at disguising his humanity. Stefan at one point lectures Damon about good intentions coming from “your desire to do the right thing for nothing in return.” I can’t help feeling sorry for Damon, who’s clearly trying to emulate Stefan, and I can’t help seeing a double-standard in Stefan, who rebukes Damon for his self-serving interests after turning his brother in 1864 to suit his own self-serving interests. But Somerhalder’s performance in this episode conveys such depth of feeling that we’re left in little doubt about Damon’s intention to do the right thing. The character’s motives throughout the season have been driven by love for Katherine and revenge on a town that persecuted vampires, but when he jokes to Stefan that there’s “only one do-gooder hero role available,” there’s almost a hint of envy in his voice; envy that Stefan has earned the admiration of everyone in the town (overshadowing Damon’s false heroism as a member of the Founder’s Council), but more importantly envy that he found the way to Elena’s heart.

Whether this holds true until the end of a second season remains to be seen. When Damon admits to Jeremy that turning Vicki “was wrong,” there’s such sincerity to Somerhalder’s approach – in his flickering eyes, in his broken voice and in his weary posture – that we’d be hard-pushed to doubt that Damon genuinely regrets his atrocities since becoming a vampire. There’s nothing to suggest that the show expects us to forgive him, but perhaps the point is that Damon finally wants us to forgive him.  When he opens up to the person on Elena’s porch – believing he’s opening up to Elena while he delivers a speech that’s beautiful, heartfelt and, with hindsight, probably mystifying to Katherine – there’s evidence of an anti-hero who was taken it upon himself to atone. “Somewhere along the way, you decided that I was worth saving,” he tells her, “and I wanted to thank you for that.” It’s difficult to imagine any permanent atonement in a character who disguises his vulnerability with violence and cruelty, but if Damon intends to reform, his hope for salvation is Elena. His intentions and hopes may be wasted on Katherine, but they lose none of their resonance because their sincerity transcends the person who hears them; whether Elena knows it or not, and indeed whether Damon succeeds or not, what’s remarkable about this conclusion to the season is that he genuinely wants to change.

Damon’s kiss with the person he thinks is Elena is an expression of that hope for salvation, if only on his part. For that, it’s a kiss that’s charged with emotion, with hope and, above all, with romance. On Elena’s part, it’s a kiss that leaves us somewhere between appalled and horrified; or rather, it should leave us somewhere between those two reactions, but in fact drops us off someplace in the same neighborhood – somewhere in the vicinity of “Yes, it’s terrible – terrible! – but it’s not as if we didn’t see it coming all season.” Looking back, it’s easy to argue that it wasn’t Elena and doesn’t reflect on Elena. The more relevant argument is surely that we didn’t know it wasn’t Elena at the time, and, even if we could sense that something was out of place, we weren’t entirely surprised by the prospect of Elena locking lips with Damon. Which is perhaps a credit to the success of the moment, and which captures the undeniable chemistry between the characters and the actors, demonstrating why the triangle at the center of the show isn’t contrived so much as unavoidable. But then, it also says a lot about our perception of Elena: that we’re not entirely shocked at her lack of fidelity, that we can quite easily imagine a scenario in which she’d give in to her secret longing for Damon, and, perhaps most significantly, that we regard her as fickle enough to tell one brother she loves him, only to lock lips with the other brother a few scenes later. I consider Elena’s character arc over the season to have been a success – for the most part, at least – but there’s something to be said about our estimation of the heroine when we think we see her cheating on her boyfriend and aren’t remotely bothered by it.

From this standpoint, Katherine’s arrival in Mystic Falls promises to supply an insight into the core characters, but also a liberation for Nina Dobrev, who suddenly gains an opportunity to break out of a role that has so far been limited to saintliness. The episode goes to great lengths to blur the distinction between Elena and Katherine, illustrating in its opening scenes how indistinguishable they are when Elena curls her hair and slips into a corset, curtseys and gives both Salvatores a mischievous smile. And yet, as difficult as it might be to tell which character we’re looking at, Dobrev’s one scene as the present-day Katherine is her most electrifying of the season. It’s memorable for its intensity – revealing the alarming ease with which Katherine posed as Elena, fooled everyone into thinking she was Elena and extracted an invitation from Jenna into her home – but also for the sheer intensity that Dobrev brings to the role, which evokes a seemingly bottomless well of malice. It’s terrifying to consider the influence this character has had all season without once revealing herself – at least not in the present – and it’s awe-inspiring to think about the impact she’s had through Damon, through Isobel and through John. But what helps Katherine to meet the almost insurmountable expectations we had until now – besides her swift and merciless dismemberment of John’s fingers – is Dobrev’s visible delight in playing a character at the opposite end of the spectrum to Elena. Dobrev exchanges Elena’s purity for Katherine’s corruption; wholesome charm for seductive allure; lofty nobility for depraved sadism. Part of the appeal is undoubtedly the novelty of a character whose appearance had been fervently anticipated for more than half the season, but I don’t think I’m alone in hoping that Katherine vies for Elena’s screen time, and in secretly hoping that Katherine wins.

Our enjoyment of Katherine’s wanton havoc is perhaps an indication that the show has lacked a clearcut villain throughout the season. While Damon has had moments of unequivocal villainy, and while Frederick, Isobel and even Stefan have represented threats in their own ways, the show’s preoccupation with moral ambiguity has removed the peril of a straightforward villain we can enjoy being terrified of. The character who has come closest to this is John, whose brutally efficient murder of Pearl two episodes ago is now complemented by his equally brutal and even more efficient extermination of a dozen vampires, one of whom is Anna.

Even here, there’s an argument to be made that John’s villainy is colored with nobility; Jeremy points out that John is “convinced all the tomb vampires want revenge on this town,” and Anna is forced to concede that John was right. But then, even before he fired a stake into Pearl’s heart with a crossbow, John acknowledged that Pearl and Anna bore no ill-will to anyone and were sustaining themselves on blood bags rather than living victims. What’s incomprehensible about John’s actions, and in turn what vilifies him, is that they’re needless. He pours gasoline over the vampires he’s about to set fire to, but takes the time and effort to drive a stake into Anna’s heart. The moment is made all the more harrowing by the way Siega draws it out for much longer than he needed to, capturing Anna’s helplessness and John’s grim satisfaction by filming the scene from multiple perspectives, and illustrating why Damon would be so affected by the scene that he’d want to confide in Jeremy (although it’s interesting to note that Damon doesn’t reveal to Jeremy that his uncle killed Anna).

Veering from his plan to “finish them off” and savoring the opportunity to stake Anna while she’s paralyzed by vervain, we glimpse in John a crusader similar to Alaric, yet one who lacks Alaric’s charm or charisma (despite David Anders’ almost limitless gravitas), and who doesn’t appear to follow any semblance of an ethical code. His cold, clinical and unsettlingly calm method of capture suggests a disturbing amount of planning; his familiarity with the church fire in 1864 suggests an almost nauseating effort to recreate the same circumstances in the present, and his visible delight while watching a group of vampires burn evokes an image of a character who comes closer to embodying villainy than any other character so far. John doesn’t just cull vampires indiscriminately, but actively stakes a vampire he knows is innocent, firmly establishing himself as the villain of the season. “I’m doing what should’ve been done 145 years ago,” he tells Elena, revealing in the same scene that he is indeed the heroine’s biological father, making his obsession with annihilating vampires all the more potent.

Most heartbreakingly, we know Anna wouldn’t hold John’s actions against Jeremy. “You didn’t kill my mother, your uncle did,” she tells him at the start of the episode. It’s a thought-provoking delivery by Malese Jow, whose performance throughout the episode is – as ever – a perfect balance of decades-old wisdom and eerily adolescent petulance. We know that Anna had a window of opportunity in which to confront and kill John, if not to avenge her mother then to protect Jeremy from an uncle who’s clearly unhinged. The fact that Anna chose not to pursue John – and in fact chose the opposite: to leave town altogether – suggests an unspoken grace, courage, and high-mindedness that resemble her mother’s.

It’s saddening that Anna has been written out, and even more saddening that she was so underrated, but at the same time there’s something admirable about the way the character was written and portrayed: with charm, spirit and vitality, but also with maturity, pragmatism and conviction. I’m going to miss the character, far more than Vicki and perhaps even more than Pearl, firstly because she was gorgeous, but secondly because of her significance to Jeremy’s character arc. It was obvious from the moment they met in “Bloodlines” that Anna was in love with Jeremy, and as the season went on, it became apparent that she was the one character who understood Jeremy. “I know you,” she tells him in this episode. “What it’s like for you; being alone, always feeling empty inside, no one to understand.” Her storyline complemented Jeremy’s because they were both isolated and searching for someone they could open up to – even if they didn’t know it – and her backstory remains enticingly (and perhaps maddeningly) unexplored. She spent over a century waiting for an opportunity to free her mother from a tomb, but we know nothing about her father, her life as a vampire or even when she became a vampire; her initiation and experiences as a vampire remain untouched; her loneliness over 145 years, apparently with no friends or family, has been evident in Jow’s portrayal but has never been articulated. Intriguingly, Anna represents a triumph of nurture over nature: a vampire who bears no hostility to the families whose ancestors captured her mother, who has none of the bloodlust or predatory instincts of other vampires, and whose shy, bookish and introspective temperament perfectly echoed Pearl’s. Most tragic of all is the fact that she died because she didn’t leave town when she could, instead returning to find Jeremy and to protect him from the group of vampires that she and her mother failed to restrain after they broke out of the tomb. In effect, Anna dies at the hands of Jeremy’s uncle, a victim of the repercussions of her own choices, trying to protect Jeremy from her own kind while urging him to become the same as her, suffering the consequences of being a vampire while loving the nephew of the man who hates them.

Equally underrated and almost certainly as unexplored are Tyler and his dynamic with his father. It’s regrettable that Richard Lockwood dies before he has a chance to reconcile with his son, and even more regrettable that Tyler’s meek submission to his father’s tyranny was never further developed after “The Turning Point,” when we glimpsed Tyler’s fondness for sketching and saw his father encourage him to resolve his issues with Jeremy by fighting him. Richard Lockwood’s inability to share his true nature with his son is surely the most regrettable part of his death, not least because it seems to have been a secret he kept from Carol, and because it seems to have been something he hid with remarkable success, suggesting that Tyler could have learned everything he needed from his father about how to deal with his emerging aggression.

Tyler and Richard Lockwood’s reaction to a device designed by Emily to stop vampires represents a part of the storyline that doesn’t quite hold up on repeat viewings. On the one hand, unless Emily anticipated a need to paralyze werewolves as well as vampires, it’s not clear why her magic device would affect both of them. On the other hand, everything about the device lacks a solid rationale: why does the device only paralyze vampires for five minutes? Why does it only affect vampires within a five-block radius? Why can it only be used once? The answer, of course, is because it’s magic, but while suspension of disbelief is a staple part of a show populated by vampires, witches and now (presumably) werewolves, the Gilbert invention – and everything about its creation – strains credibility.

The tomb vampires are another weak element. Unestablished, anonymous and impossible to sympathize with, they reunite after previously going their separate ways. Their motive for waiting until now to attack makes sense; it’s the one night when the town’s entire population gathers together, allowing the tomb vampires to cause the most widespread destruction. But then, it’s established in dialogue that the vampires’ targets were the founding families, so wouldn’t a Founders’ Council meeting be the event to target? The logic doesn’t hold up, and more worryingly, it doesn’t bother us because we don’t particularly care. We don’t even care if John tranquilized and set fire to all of them or if a few escaped. The tomb vampires – previously a focal part of the show – now represent a subplot that’s wholly uninteresting and secondary to John activating the Gilbert invention, the Salvatores’ peril, Anna’s death and Caroline’s hospitalization.

Which was likely a conscious choice on the part of the writers, and which suggests that – quite rightly – their focus was always on the core characters. The downside to such a densely packed finale is that numerous core characters are limited to brief and occasionally thankless roles. The plot heavily implies that Tyler’s lack of development throughout the season will be remedied next season with a substantial storyline, and Bonnie’s firm assertion that she “knows who she is now” suggests that at least one person (other than Bonnie herself) has a notion of the character’s identity, even if that person hasn’t deemed it worthwhile to share their notion with the audience. Less fortunate are Jenna – whose role this week consists of doing Elena’s hair and glaring at Damon after he kisses Elena – and Alaric, whose post-compulsion state of mind after the previous episode remains unaddressed, and whose relation to Elena via Isobel remains the single most glaring omission of the season. Alaric’s arc has been reduced from vampire hunting and soul-searching to retrieving vervain darts from his car and escorting Jeremy home, but more lamentable is the fact that, amid the myriad storylines set into motion in this finale, Alaric seems to be fading into the background. His relationship with Jenna has evaporated, his bond with Jeremy has vanished, and his goal to find and eradicate vampires who pose a threat to the population has all but been discarded. Among the dozen ideas the show is considering for its second season, I hope that at least one of them will involve restoring screen time to the character who’s now a glorified chauffeur.

In the show’s defense, Alaric’s absence from the narrative hardly seems like either an intentional or specific attempt to marginalize the character. Matt’s objection to his mom’s parenting skills have quietly been forgotten, and Caroline’s resentment towards her workaholic sheriff of a mom seems like a distant memory (although Caroline’s ominous declaration this week – “I’m fine, I’m fine” – suggests her mom may soon have cause to grieve).

The most criminally overlooked character of all – and the most worrying shortfall on the show’s part – is Stefan. Having recovered from his brief but riveting blood-crazed frenzy, Stefan has been stripped of everything that made him an interesting, flawed and attractively complex character. Stefan now wearily returns to the bland and unremarkable character he’s been for most of the season, making his insecurity over losing Elena to Damon all the more justified. Early on in the episode, Damon jokes that he’s “the better, hotter, superior choice,” and that seems truer now than ever, at the end of a season in which – unlike almost every other character – Stefan hardly seems to have changed at all. His mystique at the start of the season has eroded, his junkie persona has been unwritten so rapidly that it’s disturbing, and unlike Dobrev – who can at least look forward to playing a villainous alter ego – Paul Wesley seems doomed to spend the foreseeable future playing a self-righteous tight-ass whose most noticeable attribute is his fear that his girlfriend’s about to break up with him. So noticeably threatened is Stefan that Elena at one point is forced to say “I love you, Stefan” three times in order to placate him. Wesley demonstrated in the season’s final episodes that he’s capable of working with the most demanding material the writers can throw at him, yet he’s ostensibly drawing the short straw in terms of dramatic opportunities. Where Somerhalder consistently gets to work with rich and dark complexity, and where Dobrev now gets to alternate between saintly and malevolent, Wesley is apparently saddled with another season of playing the same one-note character he played for most of the past season. Hopefully the more exciting aspects of his backstory will be revisited, and hopefully the actor will have a chance to demonstrate that he’s every bit as talented as the rest of the show’s cast.

Which isn’t to imply that the season, or its finale, have in any way failed. If anything, storylines such as Jeremy’s, Pearl’s and Anna’s seem to have taken on a life of their own and become unexpectedly crucial parts of the ongoing narrative.  Indeed, despite a densely packed hour, the episode has frequent and often surprising moments of poignancy and introspection. It resists the urge to be eventful simply because it’s a season finale, developing instead into an eventful episode that just happens to be a season finale, providing an appropriate sense of closure to key story threads and elegantly introducing several others. If no one can tell the difference between Elena and Katherine, if Jeremy is about to become a vampire, if Katherine has just killed Elena’s biological father, if Tyler turns out to be a werewolf and if Bonnie is waiting for the earliest opportunity to do away with Damon, the second season seems overflowing with material before it even begins.

Is it a self-congratulatory finale? Certainly, but perhaps deservedly so. It’s an episode that has a celebratory feel to it, with flags, banners, fireworks, and crowds that convey the town’s jubilation. It may be a false sense of jubilation from a town that’s mired in death, but it’s a jubilation which the show’s writers, cast and crew have earned several times over.  The finale in particular bears a strange resemblance to the show’s characters: with its swift and at times brutally efficient style of storytelling, its approach evokes Damon, Pearl or John; with its propulsive and inexorable momentum, it resembles the deliberate, strategic planning we’ve come to expect from Katherine; and with its heartfelt and at times almost unbearable poignancy, it captures the unshakeable spirit and compassion of its heroine.

There are numerous remarkable performances in the episode. Steven R. McQueen’s performance as the teenager broken by persistent tragedy and desperate to shut off his despair is gut-wrenching. Ian Somerhalder is as much of a pleasure to watch as ever, perfectly capturing the vampire who spent all season burying his empathy, and whose capacity for good intentions – whatever his motives might be – finally becomes evident in this episode.

If there’s a star of the episode, however, it’s Nina Dobrev, who to all intents and purposes owns the episode from two distinct vantage points. As Elena, Dobrev conveys the predicament of a teenager trying to make her way in the world, surrounded by a reality she can’t explain and confronted with insurmountable adversity. As the present-day Katherine, Dobrev portrays a kind of viciousness that’s in turns terrifying, seductive and entirely irresistible, and it’s only upon rewatching that the brilliance of her final scenes becomes apparent: the cautiousness Katherine displays when she arrives outside the Gilbert home; her carefully measured and suitably ambivalent responses to Damon; the way she studies Damon and seizes Jenna’s invitation into the house; and her decision to arrange the kitchen knives in their rack – plaintively, with deliberate, free and yet perfectly precise elegance – which conveys the horror about to ensue.

Given the enormous wealth of material the show was juggling even before Katherine arrived, perhaps the show risks overloading itself with storylines and characters. But then, Katherine signifies the start of an enormous and calamitous shift in tone, and if The Vampire Diaries has proven anything, it’s that things change, and, perhaps more importantly, sometimes they have to change.

A remarkable conclusion to a remarkable first season.

5 out of 5