The Vampire Diary

During Comic-Con weekend in San Diego, I was treated to an exclusive sit-down interview with Vampire Diaries executive producers Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec to discuss some of the Season 2 secrets they’re plotting.

TV Guide Magazine: Your first season included so many great theme episodes — like the bloody Halloween party and the Miss Mystic Falls pageant. Can we expect more of these events?
Williamson: The CW is very event-oriented, but I was initially very resistant of it. Last season was all built around Founder’s Day. And this year we’re considering three events as our big lead-up to the season finale.
Plec: We do have a carnival in our second episode, and in the third episode, Elena and Damon and Alaric travel together to Duke University, where Isobel, Alaric’s wife and Elena’s birth mother, met and lived together. She studied the paranormal and was an expert in the anthropology department which is how she disguised her vampire research. She had become obsessed with Mystic Falls and dug deep into the history of the town. So on their trip, they dig into her dusty files to see what she may have known that they don’t know.

TV Guide Magazine: What about another Halloween episode?
Williamson: We’re not looking at the show as if a whole year has passed, but we will have an episode timed to Halloween, which will be a huge masquerade ball that we’re now thinking of as a possible two-parter. S–t will hit the fan.

TV Guide Magazine: There will be one big murder?
Plec: Yes. At least.
Williamson: It’s getting harder and harder to look at our wall of death where we have photos of people like Anna (Malese Jow) and Bonnie’s grandmother (Jasmine Guy).
Plec: And Lexi (Arielle Kebbel)…

TV Guide Magazine: I was quite upset about Bonnie losing her Gran. Will we meet Bonnie’s parents?
Plec: People ask, ‘Why doesn’t Bonnie have parents?’ Well, Bonnie does have parents. She lives with her father, who we have not met on camera, but she does not have a relationship with her mother. These are characters we may possibly explore this year. Bonnie comes from a long line of Bennett witches and mom is out there somewhere…
Williamson: True Blood actually did with LaFayette’s mother (revealing her in a mental institution) what we wanted to do with Bonnie’s mother, even though we came up with that idea a year ago.
Plec: That happens all the time.
Williamson: Sometimes we’ll write dialogue and Nina Dobrev (Elena) will say, ‘You do realize that’s exactly what was said in Twilight, right?’ And I’ll tell her, ‘No, I had no idea.’ Vampire stories have been told for centuries so stories are going to overlap. I just don’t want to do it in the same way or too close to when the others do it.

TV Guide Magazine: Speaking of which, both Twilight and True Blood have plunged heavily into werewolf territory, which you are about to do in your new season.
Plec: We actually talked about this a lot, because we didn’t want to be the third to bring something to the table. But it’s in the Vampire Diaries books and the character of Tyler Lockwood could not and should not exist without this werewolf arc. We started laying the groundwork for this story all last season, so to negate that genre element would have been to negate the entire Tyler character.
Williamson: Every vampire story has a werewolf nearby. It’s just the way it is.

TV Guide Magazine: What will your werewolves look like?
Williamson: Wolves, and we’ll show them transform. But not right away. And I think on True Blood their werewolves transform at will, whereas Tyler is bound by the full moon. Once a month he can’t control it.

TV Guide Magazine: And now it’s looking as though True Blood is about to introduce werepanthers.
Williamson: Really? Well we’ll introduce were-armadillos!

TV Guide Magazine: One thing Elena hasn’t considered yet is her potentially having to sacrifice motherhood if she lives forever with a Salvatore vampire, because your vampires can’t conceive, can they?
Plec: No they cannot.
Williamson: One of the things we’ll see Elena deal with this year are mortality issues. She’s dating a guy who’s never going to get old and she’s never going to be able to have children.

TV Guide Magazine: There’s lots of gayness going on over at True Blood. It surprises me that there’s no suggestion of homosexuality on a Kevin Williamson show.
Williamson: I’m happy to bring a gay character in when it fits the story. Caroline’s father is gay. He has a boyfriend. We’ve already set him up as a Founding Family member.
Plec: And it’s quite possible we’ll be meeting Caroline’s dad this year. This is going to be a big season for Caroline’s relationship with her mom, the sheriff.

Sounds like some good stuff is planned. And it seems we can at least breath a sigh of relief that Caroline — last seen bleeding internally — will survive her emergency surgery. As for the other cliffhangers, we’ll all have to stay tuned until the Sept. 9 season premiere to find out if Jeremy becomes a vampire, if Uncle John survives and if Elena exposes Katherine as her scheming impostor.