To the editors of The A.V. Club (avclub.com):
Please don't fire me.
You guys know me. You know that I'll watch any old piece of crap and try to give it a fair shake. You know that I braved three episodes of Happy Town – Happy Town! – when no one else would and thought there were some fun, goofy, guilty pleasure moments in it. You remember that whole thing when I took one for the team and reviewed Gravity? Remember that? Wasn't that a good time? And you know that when push comes to shove, when you absolutely, positively cannot stomach another hour of FlashForward, when the NETWORK ITSELF cannot stomach another hour, I will be there, and I will be staring into the abyss, hoping it doesn't stare back at me.
I say all of this because I … kinda, sorta liked the finale of The Vampire Diaries. I know we're not supposed to like things with vampires in them. We're critics/hipsters/snobs/douchebags (really, take your pick). Twilight is stupid. True Blood is uneven (though we all like how much crazy violence and/or nakedness there is on the show from time to time). We are tired of sexy vampires. And The Vampire Diaries, which did not have the best pilot in the world, is yet another step down the road toward sexy vampire hell. The success of the show means that every network – and The CW in particular – is plumbing every possible type of supernatural sex fiend they can think of to come up with a show to match its success (or True Blood's or Twilight's success, but whatever). And this show has beaten much better shows many times, including a few weeks when it's beaten Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec!
I know we thought it might be fun to check in on this show in the finale because it's had that ratings success and the review of the pilot got a weirdly high number of viewers and other sites have had success with recaps of the show. If nothing else, it would provide a great opportunity for mockery, or so we thought, right? And there were all of those people who insisted the show had grown into a very fun guilty pleasure, people whose opinions we respected! Oh, those days were heady ones, when we thought we'd get in and out of this clean.
But, yes, I'm giving the season finale of The Vampire Diaries a B. I don't know if it's even a deserved B. I haven't watched the rest of the season, so I have no idea if this closes off the rest of the story arcs in believable fashion or if it's a fitting culmination of what's come before. But I'll tell you this: I had a damn sight more fun watching this episode than I did tonight's FlashForward, and it's not just because it was a season finale (a televisual form I'm uniquely susceptible to, with all of their crazy cliffhangers and such). The Vampire Diaries is one of those shows where everything that's happening is pretty overwrought and stupid, but unlike in the pilot, where no one involved seemed to know this, the series seems to have committed to that overwrought stupidity.
If you're the kind of person who gets really emotionally invested in this stuff, you probably were shocked when the main girl (Nina Dobrev, who's finally mastered looking pretty while appearing to think hard about things as I hoped she would) kissed Boone from Lost (who is playing a character named Damon, but is obviously Boone). Hell, I practically wanted to join you with an "OMG!" kids. But since I've never seen this show, and I find the whole concept of vampire love triangles kind of dumb, I'm far from the kind of person who would really get invested in this kind of thing. But I'll say this: It was about as well executed as this kind of trashy fun can be. All of that brooding. All of those soulful looks. All of that handsome hair gel!