The Originals recap: Klaus’ lessons in bad parenting

The Originals returned after a couple weeks off with an episode that clearly kicked off the final stretch of episodes. Marked by many deaths.

When The Originals last aired a new episode a couple weeks ago, the darkness of the Hollow was starting to take over Hope and violence seemed to be the only way to stop it. Meanwhile, Emmett and the vampire purists made Vincent choose a side. He chose wrong by siding with Josh and Marcel, so Ivy was poisoned.

This hour picks up basically right where the last hour ended for all of the characters. Let’s start this recap with what happened with Vincent and Ivy this week as it is the smallest and most self-contained storyline of the episode. Vincent is too late to save Ivy and the other witches. As he prepares the bodies for burial, they start to come back to life as Emmett put vampire blood in the poison.

He has Ivy back, but she has no desire to live as a vampire so she won’t feed and will die again soon. Ivy is fine with dying again because she has seen the afterlife and knows her father is waiting to greet her. In an effort to get Ivy to become a vampire and stay with him, Vincent shows Ivy the truth of what the afterlife hold for her as a New Orleans witch. Being a magical battery for the living witches trapped in a miserable afterlife.

But, even after seeing the truth of what is on the other side, Ivy would still rather die than live as a vampire. So Vincent ends the connection that the New Orleans witches have with the ancestors. This way Ivy gets the afterlife she always saw. It is unclear if this change in magic will have any effect on the remaining episodes, but it is probably safe to assume it will play some role in the final episodes.

Now lets move on to what was going on with Marcel this hour. He tracked Emmett to a warehouse and tried to call Josh for back up before he went in. But Josh was busy flirting at the bar and trying to convince Declan to not look into his family’s dark past (Declan ignored Josh’s warnings).

Seeing as Josh wasn’t answering, Marcel went into the warehouse alone to confront Emmett. Marcel is quickly taken down by a witch and Emmett starts extracting Marcel’s super, able to kill an original venom to create weapons to kill the Mikaelsons. Every season of The Originals features the big bad trying to kill the Mikaelsons, it never ends well, so Emmett should just learn from the past and leave.

This seems like the perfect time to switch gears to talk about Klaus, Hope and Klaus’ unique parenting style. If there is one thing Klaus is very good at, it is being really violent. For the first 15 years of his daughter’s life, he tried to hide that side of himself from Hope. That all changed this episode.

Violence is the only thing that seems to keep the Hollow at bay, so Klaus is letting Hope throw him around the courtyard. Only it’s not working because Hope doesn’t want to hurt her father, she wants to kill Roman. Klaus being Klaus, he decides that being a good Dad means kidnapping Roman so his daughter can kill him.

Klaus wants to turn torturing and killing Roman into a father/daughter bonding activity because this is The Originals. But, this is something Hope wants to do herself and after Klaus leaves she begins torturing Roman. Before she can kill him, dark veins start appearing on her arm, the Hollow is gaining more control.

Around the same time, Antoinette reaches out to Elijah because she knows Klaus kidnapped Roman. She begs Elijah to get Klaus to not kill her brother. When Elijah learns that this is all part of a plan to help Hope, the older Mikaelson is furious. Hope is supposed to be the brighter future for the Mikaelson, but Klaus is just pushing her toward the darkness faster. Also, if she loses control and kills a human, the werewolf curse is triggered.

Klaus yells that this is the only way he knows to help his daughter and Elijah need to stay away as this is partly his fault. But Elijah has a plan for how to let Hope release some of the darkness without killing Roman.

Working with Antoinette, Elijah sets up a meeting in the church with Emmett and the other purist vampire. Antoinette insists that she wants to continue her mother’s work and lead the charge to kill the Mikaelson. Only, it is all a trap. Klaus, Hope and Marcel show up, so that Hope can quickly kill Emmett and all the other purist vampires.

In a matter of seconds, Emmett and all of his followers are dead. But, Declan was upstairs digging into his family’s past of going crazy in New Orleans. Klaus manages to save him only to learn about the priest who was also up there. With the priest’s death, Hope’s werewolf curse is triggered, because just being a witch possessed by an ancient evil wasn’t enough for one teenager on The Originals.

Related Story: The CW: Ranking the most recent seasons of the DC superhero shows

Other highlights from this episode of The Originals:

• Josh is the one who rescues Marcel. But in the fight to escape, Josh is stabbed in the heart with a needle full of Marcel’s venom. The pair share a couple of touching last words before Josh dies. In the afterlife, Josh is reunited with Aiden, who was name dropped earlier in the hour. Their reunion is like the happy afterlife seen in the series finale of The Vampire Diaries.
• By the end of the episode, Roman and Hope are getting close again. He apologizes for the role he played in Hayley’s death. She apologized for torturing and almost killing him.
• As much as Hope is Klaus’ daughter and has a violent side, she has enough of Hayley in her even with the Hollow to know that killing Roman is wrong. She makes Klaus proud.
• Now that her werewolf curse has been activated, is Hope not a witch anymore? How do the magical rules work when it comes to the not supposed to ever exist child?
• With Emmett dead, the focus for the final stretch will be on the mission to save Hope. A storyline that would be much more interesting if Hope wasn’t already set to star in her own spinoff this fall.