The Vampire Diaries won’t be back with new episodes until Sept. 15 (and its annual Comic-Con session takes place Saturday), but executive producers Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec gave The Hollywood Reporter an early tease of what’s to come in Season 3.
[WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead.]
When we last left off with the folks in Mystic Falls, Damon was on his deathbed, Stefan went back to the dark side with Klaus, Elena’s relationship/friend with Damon may have evolved and Jeremy had visions of his ex-lovers. And that’s not even the half of it.
“We wanted to both end the story that we were telling this season and also give the audience a sense of what was going to be coming up and how everything was going to shift and change,” Plec told THR while in San Diego of the show’s second season finale.
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“And I think the network appreciated it too,” Williamson added with a laugh. “We didn’t want six dangling cliffhangers so we had to pick out in the moment, in the same night at the same time. We wanted to bring every bit of a resolve so we could jump ahead a little bit.”
“We set up the big building blocks this season, which is Stefan is off with Klaus back on blood doing god knows what to god knows who. Damon and Elena’s relationship, their friendship has had a moment that will certainly, over time, the two of them being stuck together knowing that Stefan’s off doing god knows what and god knows where can bring them a bit closer. And Jeremy’s seeing something,” Plec says.
Williamson and Plec opened up about the returns of Kayla Ewell, who was killed off in Season 1, and Malese Jow, killed in the first season finale. “That was tough with those,” Williamson recalls. “We didn’t want to say goodbye to them as actresses. It took us a long time to earn it but we had to circle all the way back around and we got there.”
“We weren’t faking around. She was dead. She was as dead as it gets,” Plec says of Ewell, who played Jeremy’s then-vampire girlfriend Vicki. “It felt right for who Jeremy was with his character, his relationship with Bonnie, to reintroduce these really powerful love elements so that Bonnie could experience the consequences that the witches threatened.”
But will Bonnie find out about what Jeremy’s going through in the new season? “The storyline takes a lot of twists and turns and as it moves forward, all sorts of things happen. I don’t want to say, ‘She finds out,’ ” Williamson says. “The thruline goes left, it goes right, it goes a bunch of different ways before it reveals what it is and what the storyline itself is about and what’s going to happen. It’s Jeremy’s journey.”
With the addition now of a hybrid werewolf-vamp in Klaus (played by Joseph Morgan) to the mix, Mystic Falls is teeming with supernatural beings. Is Jeremy’s “powers” something that will be added to the mix? “We have a new element for us,” Williamson says of Jeremy’s revelation. “When I say element, it’s a new storyline for us.”
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