Back-to-school means another season of The Vampire Diaries and the Mystic Falls High crew. As the previous season finale felt more like a regular episode than a season finale, the first episode of the new season felt much like another episode continuing the drama, subtley. Things did indeed pick up from the season finale but you don’t get much of a sense that a lot of time has passed. Not a lot of major drama for a typical Vampire Dairies episode.

The episode starts off confirming your fears from the previous season finale — Stefan is definitely a baddie. In this episode, he kills Damon’s newscaster girlfriend Andie as a means of saying, “Back off.” Damon we find, has been secretly tracking Stefan and Klaus’ whereabouts via newspaper clippings. Alaric joins Damon on a mini roadtrip to confirm Stefan and Klaus‘ whereabouts and to find out what Klaus is up to. While on their roadtrip, we find out at that the purpose of Klaus’ death tour is to create more wolf/vampire hybrids like himself. So far in this episode, we only see Klaus turn one werewolf into an unconfirmed creature by forcing vampire blood down the werewolf’s throat at a dive bar

Elena of course is upset that Damon would be keeping Stefan’s death tour from her. Regardless, Elena still has faith in Stefan. Stefan calls her without saying anything and Elena tells him, “Stefan if this is you, you’ll be okay. I love you, Stefan. Hold onto that. Never let that go.”

While the Stefan/Damon/Elena drama makes up most of the episode, we definitely know that Jeremy now has this weird ability to see dead vampires. Tyler and Caroline finally share a heated vampire/wolf romp on the night of Elena’s 18th birthday. Unfortunately, Tyler’s mother wasn’t happy about this. She doused Caroline’s bag in vervain. As Caroline picked up her bag to leave, Tyler’s mother shoots her down with vervain darts revealing Caroline is a vampire.

At the end of the episode, Alaric leaves the Gilbert residence in an attempt to get over the death of Elena’s sister.

Thoughts? Watch this episode?