The Originals season 2 episode 13 review: The Devil Is Damned

This review contains spoilers.

2.13 The Devil Is Damned

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Kol needs to stick around on this show, and he needs to have Daniel Sharman’s face while he does. Season two of The Originals has done a fantastic job of making us care for some of the lesser loved Mikaelson siblings than we would have thought possible back when they were villains on The Vampire Diaries but, after this episode, it’s clearer than ever that Kol is the linchpin in all of it.

He’s the one it’s possible to redeem for one, coming off younger than the others and thus far less of a lost cause. That’s important in that it falls on the other characters to steer the narrative, and Kol has taken Marcel’s place in a lot of ways. He’s antagonistic to whoever’s not currently on the winner’s side, but he’s also irrevocably connected to the family, equally loved and loathed by Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah.

But here Klaus gets to chastise his little bro for feeling hard done by, which is a lesson most of this show’s characters desperately need to learn, and reward for his sudden familial loyalty is the chance to keep hold of the white oak stake. That thing has been around since before the show was even a thing (killing Kol at one point, if I’m not mistaken), and it’s a monumental thing for Klaus to trust someone like Kol with it.

And it’s important to have him on their side, since Finn now apparently has a returning Freya on his hands. We got the story there, too, with Freya apparently sleeping 1,000 years for every year she gets to be awake, as a way to stay young save for immortality. It’s an interesting wrinkle in that it means she’s by far the youngest of the siblings, marrying up with Finn who has also spent more years asleep than his brothers and sisters.

The stuff with Hayley, Jackson and the wolves still feels a little separate from everything else going on, but it’s all preparation for a wedding that’s probably going to bring it’s fair share of drama (and a whole lot more besides) when it finally arrives.

The other Alphas have renounced their status in the hopes that Hayley’s power will also transfer to their packs, and everything looks set for the ‘good guys’ to have an entire werewolf army at their disposal as soon as the union is complete. Of course, for that to happen we’ll have to watch a lot more awkward sex conversations between those two, but they’ve become so adorable that it shouldn’t be a problem.

I still can’t fathom why Klaus would think leaving his vulnerable baby with his unstable brother suffering from murderous PTSD was a good idea, but he has, so it falls on Elijah and Cami to protect Hope when Finn comes knocking. They’re all quite domesticated at this point, and there was a brief moment in which I seriously thought the show was just going to have Elijah do DIY on the house for the rest of the season.

Thankfully, that’s not the case, and instead Elijah takes drastic measures that may or may not have been necessary given Hope’s own apparent supernatural powers.

It was an inevitability, mostly because non-magical babies can be even more of a drag on a show like The Originals than magical ones, so giving Hope some sort of protective abilities feels like a smart move. What these include isn’t clear, but she’s either very interested in saving her own skin, Cami’s, or both.

We’d better hope Elijah didn’t explode along with that house, but at least it’ll have the side-effect of getting him out of the box this show insists on sticking him in every season. Seriously, we have three out of the four brothers and Rebekah protecting the kid and, now that the secret is out, we can finally look forward to a proper face-off with Finn and his new super-powerful helper.

Read Caroline’s review of the previous episode, Sanctuary, here.

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