‘The Vampire Diaries’ review: Connor arrives, and [spoiler] returns

We don’t know how most of the townspeople in Mystic Falls manage to stay oblivious to what is going on at this point. After all, a good half of Thursday night’s new episode of “The Vampire Diaries” was spent with our lead characters trying to hide their true identity while at a memorial service for a town council that managed to more or less blow themselves up because they couldn’t handle knowing the truth. As much as we didn’t like this sort of cop-out ending for the council last week, it did create for one heck of a situation this time around.

What was also a surprise here was that it was not Klaus, or any of the Originals, that was the real adversary here. Instead, it was the new arrival Connor, who came to town with some mysterious tattoos that only Jeremy could see along with a clear mission to take out vampires left and right. For most of the episode, the one person he was most interested in taking out was Tyler, mostly because he was the only person he knew for sure was a member of the blood-sucking undead. We still don’t really know much more about the man than what we saw here, but we know both he and another new character in April are far from done in this tiny town yet.

The hour did have a particularly sweet moment at the end of the episode, as we saw many of the main characters finally get together and try to mourn the loss of some of the people close to them who were killed off recently. Unfortunately, Damon didn’t want to participate. Instead, he went off and talked to … Alaric? Okay, this was probably just a form of Alaric that he created in his mind, but it still made us smile to see Matt Davis again.

What did you think about this episode?