‘The Vampire Diaries’ Post-Mortem

The Vampire Diaries exec Julie Plec has spoken to TV Line and EW about taking Elena to the dark side and the decision to kill off Jeremy – whose demise was cemented in Thursday’s episode “Stand By Me” when his body was burned with the Gilbert house.

Why Jeremy had to die

Plec explains that at this point in the series, they wanted to see Elena go to the darkest possible point, and needed to let go of someone close to her to do it.

“This whole year has been about the evolution of Elena as a vampire,” Plec explains. And as “it’s her protectiveness of her brother that kept her together,” the last vestige of her humanity has now been taken away from her. “Tearing her brother away from her would be the thing that would make her fall apart,” Plec says, and therefore he had to die for the story to progress.

Elena without her humanity: Katherine 2.0?

Now that Elena will presumably be more ruthless, many fans speculate that she will begin to act more like her doppelganger Katherine. But while in a lot of ways these two characters are cut from the same cloth, Plec says that there is one key difference: “[Elena is] Katherine minus all the machinations and the sexual manipulations.” To differentiate the two characters, the writers worked out a very useful rule of thumb, which says that, “Everything that Katherine says is a lie and everything Elena says is true.”

So we can expect her to be brutally honest with the other characters in upcoming weeks, and to give in to her urges – exactly as they are – with no regrets or reservations.

What this means for the sire bond and love triangle

A convenient side-effect of having this new honest Elena is that we might get some answers about how she really feels about Damon. “What is their dynamic going to be moving forward when she’s not driven by a love for him necessarily?” Julie Plec asks. “A lot of questions come up and get answered in the next couple episodes.”

When/how will Elena as we know and love her come back?

“It’s going to be very difficult to bring her back from this place that she finds [herself in],” Plec warns. Not least because, ironically, it’s “actually her new happy place because it is a place with no pain, no guilt, no suffering and no extremes other than just an appreciation for life as a vampire and a desire to feed.”

But while we wait for her to get her humanity back (if she ever does), we can look forward to Damon and Stefan getting closer. “As they struggle to try to figure out what to do with this girl that they don’t recognize any more, they start to realize how much their relationship has been impacted by their shared love for her,” Plec explains. “And having kind of watched her lose her brother and them have that feeling of, ‘Oh my gosh. As much as I fight with my brother that I have, if I lost him, I’d have nothing,’ it has a nice healing effect on these two over the next chapter.”

Plec can also confirm that while there might be more deaths, “I definitely will try not to shatter everyone’s souls as deeply as what they went through last night.”

She also previews the Silas plotline, which will take off in the episode after next. “And Stefan and Caroline — and Klaus, of all people — figure out what’s going on and and try to put a stop to it,” she says. Will this lead into Klaus leaving Mystic Falls for New Orleans?! We’ll have to wait and see.

The Vampire Diaries returns March 14 with “Bring it On.” (Get it, cause Elena’s a cheerleader?) We can’t wait!