Last night The Vampire Diaries took us through an epic plan to kill Julian, and despite the fact that it was all about killing someone, the family aspect of the show has grown leaps and bounds.

Lily Salvatore and her children

Let’s start with the main family in this show: The Salvatores. While they’ve always been a part of the story, The Vampire Diaries has always been more about the brothers’ relationship with Elena than with each other, but now it seems it’s all about the family.

Not only has this season brought Damon and Stefan together for a common cause, but it’s re-introduced Lily as the mother who actually kind of cares about her kids, blood and non-blood related.

Along with trying to win the love of her kids back, Lily has also brought together a family of heretic vampires. While this family is definitely way more complicated, it’s still a family at heart.

A family, it turns out, that she loved enough to risk killing herself in order to kill Julian — the manipulative ass who’s been controlling her and her children for hundreds of years.

Only, staking herself in the heart did not have the effect she had hoped. It turned out that Julian already had Mary-Louise unlink him from his former love so if Damon did succeed in killing him, she wouldn’t be hurt. So when Kily plunged that stake through her heart, Julia remained alive and well, albeit heartbroken at his loss. And now with the mother figure in everyone’s lives dead, both the Salvatore family and the heretics are going to have to figure out what to do next.

Caroline and her Twilight babies

In addition to the family drama brought to you by the Salvatores, there’s another story arc this season that’s started to revolve more around family than love. Caroline Forbes is now pregnant with Alaric’s twins, first created by him and Jo. But ever since Jo died at the wedding, the babies, it turns out, have been inside Caroline — a plan that the gemini coven had executed at the last minute to save their line.

This pregnancy makes us question exactly how vampire bodies work, but regardless of the technical aspect, we’re interested to see how this plot will go now that Caroline has officially told Stefan about it. Due to the horrible timing, though, Stefan had to bounce and deal with his mama drama, but we’re sure he’s going to come back to Caroline and take care of her.

Caroline’s pregnancy is bound to bring together two families, just like Lily Salvatore. She’ll bring Damon and Stefan back together again as they will have to work together to protect her and ensure nothing ruins the pregnancy, and she’s also going to bring Alaric into the mix. Alaric will finally have a family to care about and we saw from the flash forwards we know that these babies live to be at least three years old.

All together the show is definitely still about love and true love and finding your soulmate (i.e. Mary Louise and Nora’s engagement and also breakup, Julian and Lily’s foul relationship, etc.) but it’s refreshing to see family take a newer, more important role in The Vampire Diaries.

Next week on ‘The Vampire Diaries’ winter finale