The Originals season 5 spoilers: The new lay of the land

When The Originals season 5 airs on The CW in the new year, one of the biggest things that you can anticipate is a new landscape for so many of these characters to operate in. Years will have passed, and the first family of vampires will still be trying to pick up the pieces of what happened to cause them to split up.

One of the things that you have to remember is that everyone has their own way of dealing with problems, whether it be something like grief or being away from those you love. These are emotions that executive producer Julie Plec was quick to describe even more in a new interview with TVInsider:

“[The family is] still apart, because they can’t be together … Hope is 15 years old in the boarding school. Hayley is now the mother of the alien-like child who is misbehaving; [Hope] misses her dad, and her dad is off trotting the globe, murdering people and being at his nastiest and most wicked. Elijah is playing the piano in France, having absolutely no idea his entire family of a thousand years is out there looking for him and wondering about him.”

The reality here is that these characters will be hurting in a significant way when the show comes back without each other, and much of that plays into the psychology of who they are. They may act as though they do not need one another and could be happier alone, but that may not be all that true. Klaus may be the one who hurts the most, largely because for the first time really in his life he found a cause that he could get behind that put much of his inner rage and fire at bay. He cared for his child, and would do almost everything that he possibly could in order to protect her. He cannot even fathom having her away, not knowing him or understanding what went wrong. (The Hope – Klaus connection that we saw was rather fantastic, even if it was brief.)

So why is Klaus off killing if he is hurting? That stems very much from the person that he is. One of the things that we’ve learned about him through both this show and The Vampire Diaries is that when the going gets tough, he gets nasty and does fairly unspeakable things to people. It’s tragic, but it’s a part of his DNA as a coping mechanism. That is why he never came close to having a child for much of his life before Hope came around. The only good news that he has is that with his immortal status, there is still time for life to turn around.

What do you want to see on The Originals season 5?

Be sure to share some of your thoughts in the comments below! Rest assured, this is not the end of our coverage on the series — we will provide more news throughout the hiatus over at the link here. (Photo: The CW.)