'The Vampire Diaries' recap: Boys in the Wood

In the first season of The Vampire Diaries, you could feel the pace quicken after we learned Damon's diabolical plan to free Katherine from the tomb he thought she'd been encased in since 1864. Every episode was reveal, reveal, reveal. With the Lockwood family werewolf curse now confirmed, I suspect we should strap in again. This show is gonna move.

Let's start with the road trip to Duke: Damon, Elena, and Stefan finally called in Alaric because they wanted to know if Isobel's old research mentioned anything about supernatural beings other than vampires. Alaric said she'd been interested in lycanthropes, or werewolves, which Damon refused to believe existed because in his 160-plus years on the planet, he'd never run into one. Still, they needed to know what they were dealing with: "If this wolfman thing is true, I've seen enough movies to know it's not good," Damon said. "It means Mason Lockwood is a real-life Lon Chaney and that little Tyler punk may just very well be Lon Chaney Jr, which means Bela Lugosi, meaning me, is totally screwed." Damon, Alaric, and Elena hit the road, and Stefan stayed behind to watch over Caroline and smile more than he did in the entirety of season 1 (more on those two later).

The car ride was appropriately awkward, with Elena giving Damon the silent treatment for, you know, killing her brother. "There is a huge asterisk next to that statement," Damon said. "He came back to life." He insisted he'd seen the "big tacky" magic ring on Jeremy's finger, but Elena didn't believe him. Honestly, I thought Damon darting in front of Elena and taking an arrow in the back for her when the folk-lore grad student Vanessa went all Buffy would've made up some ground between them. Ditto Damon not following through on his first words once Elena pulled that arrow out, "Whew... that bitch is dead." But it didn't. She only pretended to soften the tiniest bit so Damon, who was hiding information he said he would've shared with her if they were friends again, would pony up. He eventually gave her a book that he'd found on Isobel's shelf labeled Petrova, the last name Katherine was born with in Europe. (He'd seen the name engraved on an heirloom. "Men snoop, too," he said.)

Damon told Elena she had every right to be mad at him, but she hated him once before and they became friends. "It would suck if that was gone forever," he said. "Is it? Have I lost you forever?" She just thanked him for the book, and they drove home. At her door step, it was deja vu (if that had really been her instead of Katherine in the season 1 finale). Damon said he must have chipped away a little at her wall of hatred, but she said she needed to know the truth: Did he see Jeremy's ring before he broke his neck?

NEXT: Let's hear it for the Damon Contrition Tour!

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