The Vampire Diaries
season 1, episode 22, "Founder’s Day"
My decision to watch The
Vampire Diaries was primarily based on nostalgia. Having read and loved L.J. Smith's books when I was in junior high, I was thrilled to see them having a
rebirth both on the NY Times bestseller list and on the small screen.
And only partially because it gave me many opportunities to exorcise my nerd
rage in a health way by informing people who called TVD a Twilight ripoff,
“Actually, these books were originally published in 1991, well before Twilight.”
The first episode was fine. Nothing I was too excited about,
but good enough to keep me watching. But then it happened; sometime during the
middle of the first season, I stopped telling people I watched TVD because I used to love the books and
started telling them that this was THE BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION and if they
thought they were too cool to watch it then they were MISSING OUT. All of this
came to a head in the season 1 finale, when the show became so awesome, that
even satirically self-described bastion of “critics/hipsters/snobs/douchebags,”
the AV Club (aka, one of my favorite web sites) had to sit up and take notice.
Major spoilers ahead! (Although if you haven’t watched this
yet, what are you doing? It’s on Netflix Instant and in case you didn’t hear me
before, it’s SO good.)
