This is the season of the heretic, where we learn all about what a siphoning witch is, why they can prove to be formidable opponents, and why them getting turned into vampires is a terrible idea for their enemies. Season 7 marks the beginning of the show’s Elena-less tenure, which was met with mixed reviews at the time, but it does have a few other things working in its favor, which is why it slides a little higher on this list. RELATED: The Vampire Diaries’ Best Balls And Proms, Ranked The Original family’s absence is palpable, and leaves a gaping hole that never truly gets filled again, even if there are a few contestants that try. In TVD Season 4, Episode 20, entitled “The Originals,” we see Klaus return to New Orleans and face his former protégé, Marcel Girard, prompting him to reopen the family homestead and settle in to reclaim his territory. Season 4 is also the last recurring appearance of the Originals in The Vampire Diaries. Almost anytime someone turns it off, Stefan, Caroline, Elena, it tends to feel a bit monotonous until the moment it snaps back into place and we get to see the character’s personality whole once again. That particular plot point takes up much of the latter part of the season, and while it starts off downright intriguing, with Elena burning down her house and making snacks out of visiting cheer squads, eventually it just becomes a static chorus of different characters repeating things like: “How can we make her turn it back on?” and “We just have to make her feel something, anything.” But that’s mostly the same with any vampire’s humanity at this point. For every moment you learn something new about Elena’s adapting to her transition, you get a moment about Connor and the Five, a storyline that never fully grasps its own potential.īut we also learned a lot about vampire sire bonds (as opposed to the hybrid variety we learned about in Season 3), as well as what Elena looks like with her humanity turned off. After the premiere, the season becomes all about watching Elena adjust to vampire life and learning to blend in, that is when the vampire hunter drama isn’t pushing for attention. Season 4 brings the first of the rollercoaster seasons on this list, where you get some really high highs and really low lows. Okay, the bottom two seasons are behind us now. And she puts up a pretty good fight at the end, too, but Season 5 is where we say an almost final goodbye to Katherine Pierce, before she’s literally whisked off to a fate worse than the Other Side. Who knew we would get to see Katherine Pierce suffering through the coughing, sneezing, and congestion misery that is the common cold.

We do have Season 5 to thank for the human Katherine Pierce storyline. They leave their mark behind though, casting a spell that not only keeps supernaturals out of Mystic Falls for a bit, but, later in the series, gives Kai Parker a magic powerup that changes a major situation for the worse. Thank goodness their possession-loving, group-chanting selves disappear along with Silas, Amara, and Qetsiyah by the end of Season 5. We are also blessed, well, more like cursed, with the ongoing saga of the Travelers. Sure, there’s more to it than that, but we were pretty firmly team Qetsiyah, even if she was a little bonkers herself. Silas is just another example of a man who can’t keep it in his pants, only he tried it in Ancient Greece back in 1st Century B.C. Stefan is the second member of that exclusive club, and his lookalike is far less entertaining and diabolical than Katherine Pierce. It begins with learning Elena is not the only doppelganger in their friend group. Since Season 5 marks the beginning of the not-so-remarkable villains, it’s important that we identify the chaos that is the Silas storyline in Season 5. And if you were a fan from the beginning, you undoubtedly cried. It’s a crazy one, but it’s honestly as fitting an ending as Season 8 of The Vampire Diaries was capable of.

While everything in this season is a bit insane, especially the history of the Donovan family and their role in some supernatural Mystic Falls shenanigans involving summoning hellfire, it does provide one hell of a final episode.

It’s so hard to hate the final season of a show as beloved as The Vampire Diaries, but when the shark has been jumped, there’s not much left to love. The mind control which leaves both Damon and Enzo acting like shells of their former, interesting selves takes half the season, and even when that is finally broken, things don’t get much better. No matter how much we want to like the grandiosity of including a legendary pair of sirens and the devil himself in the mythology of the show, it’s just a hell of a lot to try and reckon with. The final season of The Vampire Diaries is a total disaster.

The vampire diaries insidia