The Originals episode 12 review: Dance Back To The Grave

This week's episode of The Originals holds a great deal of promise for the show's future. Here's Caroline's review...

This review contains spoilers.

1.12 Dance Back To The Grave

After the big game changer last week, Dance Back from the Grave was an episode concerned primarily with introducing the new villains and our heroes’ positions against them. The sibling rivalry is still hanging around, especially where Rebekah is concerned, but in the coming weeks they’re going to have far bigger problems to deal with if Papa Tunde was anything to go by. My only big complaint about this episode is the short-lived presence of Tunde, to be honest, but then this show never does leave its characters dead for very long.

Davina’s permanent death has already been contested, for one, with Marcel deducing that the four sacrificed can be resurrected as soon as they deal with the four new adversaries that hijacked the Harvest. I like that our gang (with a little extra help from Sophie) have already figured out how many new threats have entered New Orleans, if not that Celeste is the one behind it, as it eliminates a lot of the tedious surprise over the coming weeks. These characters are smart, crafty and dangerous, so it’s no fun to see the wool pulled over their eyes if the audience regularly know more than they do.

Ad – content continues below

Papa Tunde had a crack at them first, and he did so in gloriously over-the-top fashion. If this is the first course, we can only wonder how entertaining the other four witches are going to be. One of the fun things about this show in the first half of the season was the warring between different species, with humans, vampires, werewolves and witches all coexisting in New Orleans and regularly engaging in mini battles and revolutions when things aren’t going their way. It opens up a lot of opportunities for the show in the future, and it’s something that The Vampire Diaries never really indulged in.

But the interesting stuff going on with these various groups means that we still have a lot of characters floating around with nothing to do. We’re down a witch in Davina but, with Hayley just making eyes at Elijah until her due date, Cami doing very little with her knowledge of the vampire world and Sophie only present at group meetings for exposition purposes, The Originals doesn’t seem to have everything worked out just yet. Things in this show are epic and world-shattering, mainly because of who our main characters are, and this leaves little room for casual flirtations and petty grudges.

But the conversations between the Mikaelsons each week continue to be compelling, with Rebekah’s insight into Elijah’s hypocrisy when it comes to Klaus pretty satisfying for long time fans of the franchise. Although Rebekah has been pitched as the feminist self-preservationist and Elijah the moral centre of the trio, neither of them are perfect or even know what they’re doing most of the time. The flashbacks revealed that it may even have been Rebekah and Marcel who had driven their family out of New Orleans in the first place, for example, and we can only imagine what other regrets these guys have in their past waiting to be unveiled.

I have an image in my head of the next few weeks of The Originals being like levels of a game – Celeste as the final boss with all of the Harvest power passed to her as each villain is picked off one by one. I’m certain that’s too simplistic a prediction for this show, however, and the very fact that the Mikaelson siblings never reach harmony for very long means that there will be some twists and turns ahead. No matter what happens, this week’s standalone episode held a lot of promise for the future of the show, and I look forward to seeing who wins out in the imminent vampires vs. witches confrontation.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, Apres Moi Le Deluge, here.

Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.

Ad – content continues below