It Still Stings: The Vampire Diaries Judged Katherine Pierce Too Harshly
Photo Courtesy of The CW
Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:
The CW’s The Vampire Diaries may be most frequently remembered for the seemingly eternal love triangle that drove the bulk of its eight-season run, but the series had plenty of strengths that had nothing to do with whether Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) would ultimately choose to be with Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley) or his brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder). Its breakneck pacing mixed with a willingness to commit to some truly wild—and often wildly ridiculous—plot twists, and a diverse array of entertaining characters, all helped to make the series better than it had any right to be.
But for all that The Vampire Diaries often came across as a teen soap starring hot immortals of various magical stripes, the show also wrestled with surprisingly complex moral and ethical questions, about issues ranging from free will to our understanding of the binary concept of good and evil. After all, both its male leads were technically mass murderers, and yet we were still not only expected to believe in the possibility of their redemption but to also not really care that much if and when they failed to live up to the promise of their better angels.
This is why the fact that Katherine Pierce (Nina Dobrev), who was one of the only Vampire Diaries antiheroines, wasn’t allowed anything like peace at the end of her story is so frustrating. Damon got the girl, Stefan got a hero’s death, even Original vampire Klaus Mikaelson (Joseph Morgan) got a spinoff and a family of his own. Katherine… literally got dragged to Hell. Not only is this a terrible ending for one of the series’ best characters, but it’s also a twist that carries more than a whiff of misogyny along with it. Because while it’s true that Katherine committed many crimes, it’s not clear she did anything all that much worse than the men who this show continually encouraged us to not just forgive, but actively root for.
Essentially chaos in human form, Katherine was one of the most complex and layered characters The Vampire Diaries ever created. Smart and incredibly cruel, frequently vulnerable and entirely unpredictable, any episode in which she appeared was guaranteed to be a wild ride. Yet, her story was also a strangely sympathetic one that often carried real emotional weight. From her centuries-long emotional entanglement with the Salvatore brothers to the discovery of her long-lost daughter Nadia (Olga Fonda), Katherine felt things deeply and fully; it was her love of life and everything to do with it that was a big reason she fought so hard to hold on to it.