Bonnie became the huntress in The Vampire Diaries season 7, episode 21, “Requiem for a Dream,” and as Damon said, it may be her best look yet.
This episode is all about the Bennett witch, or should I say, the Bennett huntress! We get to explore who she was, who she’s become, and how she feels about the important people in her life. It’s pretty cool and impressive how the show has brought Bonnie back from being a severely underused side character to make her a huge focus of the back half of The Vampire Diaries season 7.
Related: The Vampire Diaries: Ranking Bonnie’s many supernatural identities
The episode begins when Bonnie wakes up following Rayna’s sacrifice…or does she? This scene was so creepy, and actually had me worried for Caroline’s life for just a second! Then, I was reminded that they’ve already tricked us into believing that one of our heroes killed everybody once this season (when Damon got out of the phoenix stone), and I should stop being so gullible.
Bonnie actually decided to not wake up, since her resurrection will result in her trying to kill everyone she loves! As Enzo so eloquently put it, “The reason she isn’t waking up, is because she’s Bonnie.” It’s nice to know that he really does know her and appreciates her for who she is, since we still don’t know that much about their love story. Also, his accent makes it sound very Shakespearean whenever he talks about love.
When Salvatore and Co. realize that Bonnie is fighting a difficult battle regarding whether or not she should rejoin the land of the living and undead, they decide to give her some ammunition. Caroline believes she is “the single best person for Bonnie to see when she wakes up,” (even though I’m fairly certain that would be Jeremy Gilbert, whom she trusts, is human, and has gone through exactly the same thing) so she’s up first.
Even though Bonnie’s murders were part of a dream, her creepiness wasn’t. She is exactly that level of creepy throughout the rest of the episode. Thanks a lot for giving me nightmares, Kat Graham. Caroline is her usual perfect self, but it isn’t enough to get through to the huntress. Now, Caroline finds herself with one of those trendy huntress marks over her heart. So apparently, the mark doesn’t only come from the phoenix sword.
Enzo goes next, and gives us a cool glimpse into Bonnie’s life before the Salvatores came to town. We’ve gotten some kind of retrospective for most of the characters, either through flashbacks, or through them coming to terms with their vampire transition, but we’ve never really gotten one for Bonnie. It was nice to get even a short insight into who she was before literally every bad thing possible happened to her. Instead of Bonnie turning on Enzo because he’s a vampire, she kills him (in the dream) so that be can’t convince her to wake up.
Bonnie has an incredibly difficult choice to make, and in true Bonnie fashion, she chooses the selfless route. Luckily, though, Bonnie doesn’t get to make the choices when Damon’s around. After several weeks of an extremely blurry Bamon line, a side may have finally been chosen in The Vampire Diaries season 7, episode 21. It really could have gone either way. If Damon had been able to save Bonnie by going into her head and appealing to her as a friend, with love, then the door would have been wide open for a Bamon romance going forward, especially if Enzo had already failed.
Damon loves a little differently, though, and he decided to force Bonnie to wake up through hatred, instead. Just as Bonnie is always playing the martyr, Damon is always “doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.” He was successful in saving her life, but if she ever does end up hurting someone she loves, she will hate Damon even more in the aftermath.
Damon uses some extremely harsh words to fuel Bonnie’s wrath. He thanks Bonnie for sacrificing herself so he could have his Elena back, and also lets her know that everybody’s grieving process would be relatively short once they had back the one that they “really miss the most.” It would be easy to dismiss this as a lie if Bonnie’s huntress senses weren’t tingling. She can feel what Damon’s feeling, which means she knows that part of Damon meant what he said, and that he only keeps saving her because Elena would never forgive him if he didn’t.
Is that completely true? I’d say no. We’ve seen Damon’s passion when it comes to saving Bonnie’s life, and there’s no way it’s only fueled by the thought of Elena’s disapproval. That being said, Damon may have delivered the final blow to the romantic Bamon shippers when he said, “I love you, the same way Elena loved you.” I think that pretty much confirms that friendship is the only thing between Bonnie and Damon. There’s still a little bit of room for interpretation, but if he loved her as more than a friend, he probably would have used that as incentive for her not to kill him in that moment.
Even though The Vampire Diaries season 7, episode 21 definitely focused on Bonnie, Steroline was not forgotten! Am I the only one that expected Stefan’s grand explanation for leaving Caroline to be more than a simple, “You were happy without me?” A little disappointing, Mr. Salvatore.
Caroline says she’s forced to make the same choice that Stefan had to make, but she really isn’t. Caroline’s huntress is unrestrained, and an immediate threat, while Stefan’s was locked up in the Armory. Caroline really has no choice at all, and is forced to leave her family behind to go on the run with Stefan. At least she gets in a few great comments about his tendency to run away.
We finally got to see Caroline talk to Lizzie and Josie, and they are adorable! I vote for more of them and their cool siphon powers in the future of The Vampire Diaries. Caroline’s conversation with the girls is heartbreaking, but even though circumstances couldn’t be more severe, she still doesn’t tell Alaric she loves him. There are very few obstacles in Steroline’s way now. I’d say it’s only a matter of (a very short) time before they’re back together.
The Vampire Diaries season 7, episode 21, added another gem to the growing count of Paul Wesley directorial efforts. Some of the episode was a little too dark for my tastes (literally dark — it was difficult to see anything in many scenes), but I thought he did an amazing job with all of the dream sequences and with Enzo and Damon’s conversation at the end, which was woven in with shots of the Armory.
The Armory looks delightfully terrifying, and was very cool to see, but I definitely don’t want any of our heroes going in there! Unfortunately for Damon, it looks like he either has to take his chances in there, or risk death at the hands of his best friend.