Posted by Abby | June 1, 2011, 11:05 (EST) | 32 Comments
Category: TV Series

It’s the summer hiatus – and IT SUCKS. So to help wile away those lonely TVD-less hours as we await Vampire Diaries Season 3, we’ve rounded up a slew of guest bloggers (and huge Vampire Diaries fans) for a series called Ripping Open TVD. Each blogger will be focusing on one particular aspect of what we’ve just experienced in Vampire Diaries Season 2 and adding a hefty dose of Season 3 speculation. Remember: These are guest posts, so these are the opinions of the person writing them, not necessarily Vampire-Diaries.net. Cool? Cool. First up, Salvatore Boarding House staffer Abby Graham dissects the new hybrid in town and makes the case for Ultimate Villainy in Mystic Falls.
 

“He’s real! And he doesn’t give up. If he wants something, he gets it. If you’re not afraid of Klaus then you’re an idiot.” - Rose, “Katerina”

Klaus. We first heard his name at the very end of Rose (EP208), and since that time our friends in Mystic Falls have been concerned with little else. His shadow has been looming over half of Season 2, yet the writers waited until the very last minute before showing us his true face. I’ve always been a big fan of villain characters and what they bring to stories, but Klaus is shaping up to be one of my favorite bad guys of all time. Today we’re going to take a deeper look at this year’s biggest bad, and give a little thought to what might be in store for everyone next season. This discussion will only cover Klaus as he is presented in the show, but lucky for us, on-screen Klaus gives us plenty to talk about. The fact and fiction of Klaus can be a little confusing, so I’m starting things off by going over what we already know.

Klaus 101: An Introduction To Ancient Evil
We’ve established by now that Klaus is over a thousand years old. He is the bastard son in his family, the product of an affair between Mama Original and a thus-far unnamed fellow of werewolf descent. We’ve had one comment from Damon referring to Klaus as the younger brother, though neither Elijah nor Klaus has confirmed that officially on screen. We’ve been told that Klaus’s parentage wasn’t discovered until after they became vampires, which means he grew up thinking himself a full-blooded member of the family; only his mother knew the truth. Elijah also told us that Klaus and Papa Original never got along particularly well and implies that their lack of blood connection contributed to this in some way. We know that Klaus was cursed by witches to keep his werewolf side dormant – because a hybrid vampire-werewolf would be more powerful than either – and we also know that Klaus has been recruiting and using witches for centuries to try and find a way out of that curse. Elijah has stated that his brother’s goal is to sire his own bloodline, though Klaus himself has yet to confirm.

Those are the things that we know. On the other hand, at one point we knew that The Sun and the Moon Curse was a real thing and that Klaus was trying to break it with that damnable moonstone, so everyone pour out a heaping tablespoon of salt and set it aside for later. On The Vampire Diaries, the only thing that’s ever really certain is that we’re going to be screaming OH MY GOD! at our TVs on Thursday nights.

In terms of his character and personality, Klaus is smart, and he’s organized. He’s also a tease, very playful. He winks, he nods, he flashes those dimples and, as long as everything is going his way, he’s all smiles. Let even one small thing go slightly awry, however, and the eyes narrow, the dimples vanish and suddenly someone is screaming with pain. Klaus shows every evidence of being a bona fide sadist, a person who gets his kicks from hurting other people. It doesn’t have to be physical pain, either. He enjoys getting his hands dirty and hurting people directly (that was clear when he stabbed Stefan) but I think what Klaus really likes is making people suffer without ever having to rise from his chair. He knew perfectly well that Katherine wasn’t on vervain when he “compelled” her to stand in the sunlight, and I’ll argue all day that he took far more pleasure in watching her force herself to submit to his will when she didn’t really have to than he did in just watching her burn.

Shades of Saw, no? He’s very much a horror-movie villain, our Klaus.

We have to talk about his werepire-ness, obviously. Is werepire-ness even a word? How about werepirsm? Vampcanthropy? Oh, Klaus, you make things so complicated. To be honest, I believe his obsession with opening up his werewolf side has less to do with the perks of shifting shape than it does with having been told he can’t have it. Finding out that your father isn’t really your real father (and in fact has gone off and murdered your real father, ouch) is bad enough, but having every useful or interesting part of half your heritage denied to you by an outside source adds huge insult to the injury. Joseph Morgan has said in interviews that he sees Klaus as something of a spoiled child, someone accustomed to getting his way who throws tantrums when he doesn’t. I’d hazard a guess that this werewolf obsession of his is the longest running tantrum in the history of the world, and I think Klaus’s collection of witches is not just about access to magic, but also about getting his own back against them. Subverting the servants of nature into willingly breaking a curse that their predecessors went to a lot of trouble to enact is just another example of Klaus’s sadistic streak in action. He may treat the witches who work for him quite nicely, but just by joining up with him they are corrupted by default. Let’s be real here: Klaus loves that. As he told us himself with his now infamous “three goddesses” speech, Klaus appreciates the symbolic and the symmetrical. He loves a good spectacle, especially a spectacle of pain. I bet Klaus was a big fan of gladiatorial games back in the day, nice and bloody. He probably also loves opera, anything with a gorgeous, tragic, drawn-out death. By the same token, I’m sure he hates modern warfare and spent most of the Cold War rolling his eyes and yelling, “Just DO something, you useless gits!”

Speaking of action – here comes the segue, is everyone ready? – let’s talk about Klaus and romance for a sec. Thanks to JoeMo’s handsy portrayal of our villain, everyone is speculating about which way Klaus swings and how – if it all – that will factor in for the characters he interacts with. I hate to be the person throwing cold water on us all, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing much romantic behavior from Klaus, not really. While I’m pretty sure that after a thousand years of rainy days with no TV, Klaus’s sexual preference is simply “yes”, his job as the villain of the piece wouldn’t be served by pairing him off. Giving him a romance wouldn’t make him scarier or more complex, it would just take time away from the overall story and time is something we never have enough of on this show. As an audience, we’re not supposed to fall in love with Klaus, so I doubt we’ll see him falling in love, or into bed, with any of our main characters. I’m sorry, ‘shippers, I’m disappointed too. If it helps, I do think it’s possible that we’ll see him rolling around with a minor character, if only to highlight his self-indulgent nature. Klaus isn’t someone who denies himself any pleasures, ever, and we may get to see evidence of that in Season 3. Fingers crossed, everybody!

Monster Search: Job Requirements For Villains
It’s easy to forget this while we’re screaming and running away, but every villain in every story comes in with a specific job. Anything we learn about Klaus and everything he does on screen is all in service to that job and his ability to do it effectively. As the villain, his purpose in the story is to challenge the protagonists, to give them things to do. Let’s face it, if all we ever saw on this show was Elena going to school and having a happy life, there wouldn’t be a show, because it would be really boring. Klaus’s role is to push the other characters into doing interesting things and he does it by scaring them, taking things from them, killing people they care about and forcing them to go outside their comfort zones by fighting or escaping him. Like any good villain, he affected the other characters long before he made his actual appearance and he will continue to affect them long after he’s gone from the screen. Right now, Klaus is here. He’s an immediate threat and the story is largely made up of his actions and everyone’s reactions to them. The last few episodes of the season were minute-by-minute action with everyone just trying to get through the night. Next season, we will also start to see the consequences of everyone’s choices in this battle, and that will set the stage for the next set of stories after this one has played out.

Thus far, the character of Klaus has been presented as almost completely self-centered, with little thought to anything but his own goals and how to make them happen as efficiently as possible. Selfishness is a standard feature in the antagonist package; nobody wants to sit around watching a bad guy worry about other people’s feelings. Klaus’s personal relationships are thus far limited to minions and victims; he keeps no companions that he cannot absolutely control. Boxing up his family is a way to have control over them; if they were up and walking around he would have to worry about whether or not they could do him any harm (and perhaps worse) or listen to their opinions about his behavior. Klaus can’t have that, so into the cupboard they go. I think it’s safe to say that taking Stefan on as a blood-splattered wing man is also going to serve some deeper purpose, some as yet undisclosed goal. Lexi made it clear that Rippers aren’t exactly uncommon. Klaus could have found one anywhere, or even picked someone out and made his own. Season 3 is going to reveal more of Klaus’s motivations in taking on Stefan, and whatever they are, they will almost certainly have shattering repercussions for everyone.

The finale left us with a lot of Klaus-related questions. What’s he going to reveal about the Salvatore family? Are there connections between the Salvatores and the Originals? Why choose Stefan and not Damon? Klaus made a point to tell us he had heard of both brothers over the years. Did he pick Stefan, the reformed monster, just to have the fun of re-Ripperizing him? That certainly sounds like something Klaus would do. Damon is largely accepting of his vampire nature, at least on the surface, but Stefan’s entire self-concept is built on self-denial. Because of this, Stefan has much farther to fall from grace than Damon does, and the trip down is going to be rough. Remember, part of Klaus’s job is to open up new stories, and forcing Stefan to face his own nature is going to give us lots of new territory to explore. Back when this character was first introduced, there were some remarks made about how he would “out-Damon” Damon, which led some people – myself included – to assume that Klaus would be primarily focused on the elder Salvatore. Frankly, I’m delighted to be wrong, because I’m desperate to see Paul Wesley get to break out of Stefan’s brood and strut his dark side for a while. I’m also really glad they didn’t try to make it a quip-off between Damon and Klaus. The truth is, nobody could out-Damon Damon, because Damon is unique. His particular blend of charisma and chaos is so perfectly done and so well played by Ian Somerhalder that there was never any chance of someone coming onto the show and one-upping that performance in that style. What they’ve done instead is much more interesting.

Much like Damon did in early Season 1, Klaus began wreaking havoc in Mystic Falls as soon as he appeared on the scene. But where Damon was dangerous, Klaus is deviant. Where Damon was menacing, Klaus is a sociopath. In every situation, Klaus is just worse. Klaus is what happens if someone like Damon gets a thousand years of excess and self-indulgence with no friends and no restraint. In some ways, that makes the character even more frightening to the audience, because it’s so easy to see echoes of Damon in Klaus, and vice versa. Remember Damon slow-dancing with Vicki and smoothing away her tears before he snapped her neck? Klaus likes to caress his victims before – or while – he hurts them. Klaus had a (presumably) compelled woman waiting on him in 1492 and we’ve seen Damon create the same for himself in the person of Andie Star. Both characters have killed members of Elena’s family, but where Damon acted on impulse, Klaus made a deliberate, sadistic choice. We see in Klaus some of the very worst aspects of Damon’s personality done large, and I suspect that it will be Stefan’s turn to be held up against that mirror as we head into Season 3. As uncomfortable as it is to watch, I think it’s a brilliant move by the writers, and brilliantly played by the cast. We need someone like Klaus to show our characters a future possible, a nightmarish version of their own worst traits that they must fight against in order to move forward. In Klaus, the show has created a monster that frightens the characters on multiple levels for multiple reasons, and the battle is consequently all the more compelling.

The Master Plan
Klaus’s ultimate goals are still very murky. Yes, we’ve been told he wants to create his own bloodline of hybrids, but that’s not very much to go on. How does one make a werepire, anyway? Now that the curse is broken, if Klaus brings people over like vampires with his own hybrid blood, will they automatically get the werewolf strain too? One possible scenario is that Klaus will have to find the werewolf bloodlines, pick people who haven’t triggered the curse and turn them into vampires. If he forces someone with a werewolf strain to kill and drink from a human while in transition, it stands to reason that they’d end up with both vampire and werewolf strains active. I’ve also heard theories that werepire babies will have to come about in the usual, human baby fashion, but I can’t get behind that theory. For one, it would take too long…who wants to wait nine months for a werepire baby? In order for the story to stay gripping, it has to keep moving. We don’t do a lot of waiting around on TVD.

The other big question is what Klaus plans to do with all these hybrids once he has them, assuming that Elijah was right about that being his goal. Will he go after the witches, to get revenge on them for cursing him in the first place? That would make things interesting. We’ve all been so focused on the curse and the breaking of it that nobody seems to have thought about what happens after that. Except Elijah, of course, which is another reason I think we’ll be seeing our favorite BAMF back in action before too long. Elijah alone has personal insight into Klaus’s motivations. I have a theory that at some point in the distant past there was a division within the Original family, and Klaus and Elijah split off from the rest – Klaus in the hopes of breaking his curse, Elijah to look after his brother. I suspect that the rest of the Original family knew that Klaus was going to be a problem long before Elijah would accept it. When Klaus and Elijah had their rift over Katherine’s disappearance in 1492, that would have given the others a reason to try to take Klaus out once and for all, or perhaps it just gave Klaus a reason to go after them, in order to punish his brother. So many theories. So many possibilities.

We can – and will – speculate all summer about the Original family, what their dynamics were and what will happen when they wake up, but ultimately, they aren’t the stars of this show. That means that there is going to have to be some connection between the Originals and our main cast. To do anything else doesn’t make much sense, because the Originals would have no logical reason to want all these young kids tagging along when they eventually wake up and go after Klaus. There has to be more to it than that, and whatever the connection turns out to be, I believe that Stefan will be the linchpin of that story. That’s why Klaus took him, and that’s why we need to see where Klaus takes him before he can go home to Mystic Falls.

The Bigger They Are…
Much as I hate to admit it, not everyone likes the character of Klaus. Ever since he was introduced to us this season, some have voiced concerns about him being “too much.” Too strong, too powerful, too organized. Too impossible to defeat. There were complaints that people were sick of hearing his name before he ever hit the screen, and that now that he’s impossible to get rid of without a very implausible bolt from the heavens or something of that ilk. Here’s the thing, though: Klaus is a classic vampire villain.

Stories about vampires frequently follow a pattern: the first story introduces our lead vampire, or vampires. Usually an anti-hero of some kind, the lead vampire is more powerful than the humans around him, nearly godlike in comparison. We learn about our lead, we fall in love with him (or them, in the case of the Salvatores) and then next story introduces a more powerful vampire who challenges our protagonists’ sense of invincibility. Pearl and Katherine are both examples of this type of character on TVD – they both showed up, posed a threat, did something to put our boys in their place and were then somehow neutralized. Pearl was killed, and her death served to make John Gilbert a little more frightening. Katherine caused all kinds of trouble until entombment removed some of her power. By the time she got loose, the danger posed by Katherine was overshadowed by the threat of someone even worse: Klaus. Klaus is THE vampire, the biggest and baddest of them all.

If you know anything at all about vampire genre you’ll recognize this pattern, and if you don’t, trust me, it’s there. Anne Rice started with Louis, upped the ante with Lestat, and then brought out Akasha (she’d be the Klaus equivalent in Rice’s work). HBO’s True Blood did it too: first we met Bill, then Eric, and then came Russell, older than old, with powers beyond reckoning. Twilight‘s villains scaled up from James to Victoria (and her army) and then to the Volturi. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the escalation went through a succession of vampires and then branched out to demi-gods and the endless hordes beneath the Hellmouth. The Ultimate Evil is not a new story in the world of vampire fiction. It’s classic, it’s cool, and – alas – it is how I know that in the end our wonderful werepire is going to have to be taken away.

Klaus is not the anti-hero, that role belongs mostly to Damon. Klaus’s story is not one of redemption or personal growth. No matter how much I love Joseph Morgan’s portrayal, no matter how terrific he is for the show, Klaus is the villain of this piece and eventually our heroes are going to have to find a way to take him out. It might not happen right away – once they sort out his businesses with Stefan, Klaus could be off in another place pursuing his own goals indefinitely – but sooner or later he will come in conflict with Team Mystic Falls again and a resolution will have to occur…and even though I love Klaus as a character, I’m rather hoping that Elijah and the other Originals bury his eternal ass at sea. Harsh as it sounds, I think that would be more fitting and more in line with the mythology than to discover some convenient witchy-woo or artifact to kill him off entirely. Either way, though, and regardless of the method, at some point our villain must suffer a final defeat. Klaus is like a one-man destructive party that would always have the power to muck things up for our characters, and it would be terribly unfair of the writers to leave his story unresolved forever. Eventually this party is going to end.

…and when it does, somebody send me flowers or something, because it will break my heart to see Klaus go.

 
Abby Graham is a writer, educator and occasional puppeteer with a background in museum education. She recently joined the staff at The Salvatore Boarding House where she writes the weekly Top Ten, encourages shenanigans and represents Team Originals at every possible opportunity. You can follow her on twitter at @AbbyGraham.

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