The Vampire Diaries and The Originals are headed for a crossover, and now we know that Stefan is headed for the French Quarter!
Update (January 10, 2016 5:35pm): Stefan is heading to New Orleans! Julie Plec told Tvline.com that episode 14 of The Vampire Diaries will have Stefan in desperate need of a safe haven from all the magical mumbo jumbo going on in Mystic Falls. He heads to New Orleans for the St. James Infirmary, you know, that bar that is completely magic free? (It came in quite handy last year against Dahlia.) He, of course, runs into Klaus because what would a crossover be without a little Salvatore/Mikaelson interaction? Julie Plec calls it, “the reunion of the Bourbon buddies.”
Stefan will then stay put through the following Originals episode and will help Klaus deal with some supernatural business. The storyline in New Orleans will affect Stefan just as much as the Mikaelsons.
As far as the obvious Caroline question, Julie Plec had this to say, “All I can say is that Caroline has an involvement in the way that we’ve decided to dramatize the crossover, and I’m sure there are spoilers aplenty if people want to read further.”
Original story (Jan 10, 2016):
Since The Originals debuted in 2013, fans of the vampire superblock have wanted to see the two shows crossover. We’ve had a few small scale mergings, including Nina Dobrev guest starring on The Originals as Tatia, but nothing that tied either show to a related storyline.
At the Sunday TCA’s, CW President Mark Pedowitz announced the event and had this to say about the scope of the crossover: “You will see, organically, a crossover this year. Not of the size and scope of we do with Arrow and Flash. They have to make sense [story-wise].”
Let the speculation begin. Will a Salvatore (or both) be headed to New Orleans for help? Or will a Mikaelson try to escape the prophecy by skipping off to Mystic Falls for a getaway? Who knows, maybe Caroline and Bonnie will need a break from all the testosterone-fueled craziness in Mystic Falls and will skip off to the French Quarter where they run into Hayley and Davina. We’re just excited to know that the two shows will have a bit of a shared storyline sometime this season.
As we suspected, Pedowitz also addressed the elephant in the room regarding the pair’s move to Friday nights. He made it clear that this was not an attempt to kill either show, but instead to boost their Friday ratings. He said to Zap2It, “The move is not to exile [the shows],” he said. “It’s a move to strengthen Friday night.”
We thought so. As we wrote back in December, Fridays are pretty much a dead zone on TV so why not move a pair of successful shows to the weaker night and see if maybe vampires can breathe some after-life into the struggling timeslot.
He elaborated, “We’re hopeful that [The Vampire Diaries], in the move to Friday, continues what it does do, really great — with The Originals, also. They triple their numbers, live +7, consistently. So there’s a lot of delayed viewing on this show, so if it continues and we see the performance we’ve been seeing, hopefully we’re looking at a lot more.”