After a month-long hiatus, The Vampire Diaries are finally back on TV and I was so ready to go through the episode trying to remember what happened last month. Unfortunately for me, ‘trying’ wasn’t good enough because I was having a hard time remembering everything that happened as every plotline seemed to twist itself in this episode.

The last episode ends with Elena’s biological mother (AND Alaric’s ex-wife), Isobel, making an appearance. Naturally this only resulted in an angry Jenna. Isobel makes an effort to apologize to Alaric for being MIA all this time. What seemed like a heartfelt apology only ended up being a ploy to have Isobel call upon one of Klaus’ warlocks to knock Alaric out. Isobel then reconnects with Katherine and it’s established that Klaus is only looking for Elena and the moonstone. With this knowledge, Katherine and Isobel attend a Mystic Falls founders luncheon to kidnap Elena. After the kidnapping goes down, a plot twist: Isobel had no intention of bringing Elena to Klaus — she only wanted to protect her. So as it goes, Katherine fell into a trap that allowed her to get captured by Klaus’ warlock.

The twisting doesn’t stop.

Isobel kidnaps Elena to bring her to the site of her grave to tell her that it’d always been her lifelong goal to protect her. Then she receives a call from a Klaus warlock telling her that her mission has been accomplished. Unfortunately, Klaus had compelled her this entire time to complete this mission AND kill herself. So, in a dramatic move, Isobel rips her vervain necklace and burns to death in the sun.

On the witch front, Bonnie carries out what Jonas communicated to her in death — how to kill Klaus. This entailed going back to the site of the original massacre to perform some energy-sucking witch ritual to harness the power of 100 witches. Believe me, it wasn’t pretty but now, Bonnie is all-powerful and now Stefan and Damon’s official weapon against Klaus. Too bad being a weapon could kill her.

Things between Caroline and Matt haven’t patched up so well in this episode and it doesn’t seem like things will ever be the same between the two. Matt demands that Caroline tells him everything regarding Vicki’s death, then asks her to compel him to forget. Only, this whole time, he wasn’t compelled to forget as it was a setup planned by Caroline’s mother. She had Matt down vervain before meeting with her.

Finally, the episode ends with what appeared to be Klaus’ warlock channeling Klaus through…Alaric. This whole scene confused me as it wasn’t clear if a spell was performed so that Klaus could gain control over Alaric or if Alaric…really is Klaus. CRAZY stuff.

Anyone watch this episode? Thoughts?