Everything You Need To Know Before 'TVD' Returns

Guys, the time has almost come. I know, it's been painful for me too. Waiting for The Vampire Diaries Season 6 to premiere is a real bite in the derriere. *Insert pun about teeth, biting, blood or the undead here* We've only roughly two weeks until October 2 when the series' returns and all our questions are answered. Like, is Damon like, dead-dead or is he TVD dead? Because those are two very different types of dead. And Bonnie was already dead, right? Or was she alive-dead, or dead-anchor-alive/dead? I don't know. All I know is we'll probably have to wait until Season 6 returns in order to figure out what's really going on. Until then, let me get you prepped and ready for the upcoming season by refreshing you on all the gory details of TVD Season 5.

So, what'd you miss in the wonderful fifth season of life in Mystic Falls? Well, to put it plainly, everything. But let's start from the beginning. (Deep breaths, everyone).

Introducing: The Other Side, Silas, & Human Katherine

We ended Season 4 with a mini apocalypse that dealt with, you guessed it, the Other Side. That and that pesky little antagonist named, Silas. Said villain had locked our beloved Stefan in a safe and ditched him in a lake where he was left to drown, die, wake up and do it all over again for a full summer. And you thought your parents forcing you to go to summer camp was shitty.

Katherine was force fed the cure by Elena and is now a human. Bonnie gave her life to bring Jeremy back from the Other Side and is now a ghost. Caroline and Elena are now freshmen at Whitmore College. Damon finally "got the girl" and now gets to have crazy good, um, "relations" with Elena whenever she's in town. Which makes Damon pretty much the worst brother ever because while he's exploring all of Stefan's ex-girl's no-no squares, Stefan is drowning over and over again, on the daily, in a Sentry safe full of water. Way to be a good brother, bro.

Got it? Dope. Now let's delve into the rest of the major plot points of Season 5:

Whitmore College

We start out Season 5 with Caroline and Elena as freshmen at Whitmore College patiently awaiting the return of their supposedly living roommate, Bonnie, who is, in fact, super dead. Things at Whitmore get weird when Elena meets a window of dramatic plot points in the form of a fellow freshie, Aaron Whitmore. Aaron's last living relative and uncle Wes Maxfield is a professor at the college. And, we'll later find out, a little bit on the weird side as he secretly specializes in vampire experimentation. What kind of vampiric experimentation? The kind that gets rid of vampires by programming them to feed on other vampires. In TVD world?! Aw, hell no, boo-boo.

Enter a chance to delve into a juicy part of Damon's past. These vampires Maxfield and people like him are experimenting on are called Augustine Vampires. They've been tortured by those of the Augustine society through the kind of experimentation that, if performed on bunnies, would cause PETA to lose its shit. We find out that a long time ago, Damon was one of these vampires. He lived in a cell next to a vampire named Enzo. Long story short, when we walk down memory lane we think that Damon let Enzo die in a disastrous and fiery situation, but it turns out Enzo survived and has been some version of the Augustine Society's experimentation bitch.

Enzo and Damon go in and out of a love/hate relationship that finally ends in Enzo shutting off his humanity and becoming an enormous problem for the gang. So, Stefan, with some questionable help from Enzo himself, kills Damon's friend... then Stefan pulls the "your absolutely-not-dead-friend Enzo went to go live on a farm where he can run and play," card, telling Damon that Enzo fled the scene. You're lying, Stefan... and I'm now coming to realize, so was my mother in grade school.

Dopplegangers galore

The CW, like most of the world, must find Paul Wesley and Nina Dobrev damn attractive because there are plenty of dopplegangers of them in Season 5. As we found in Season 4, Stefan is actually Silas' "shadow self." We later find out that it's not just Katherine and Elena in the Dobrev doppleganger world but another named "Amara." She's the first immortal woman, Silas' true love, oh, and she's batshit. Basically, what you need to know about her is that she used to serve as the anchor to the Other Side.

What is the anchor? It's what and who a supernatural being needs to pass through when they die to get to the Other Side. When Amara feeds on Silas (whose blood is the cure for immortality) she's no longer the anchor and dies. That's where previously dead Bon-Bon steps in and trades her ghost status for a place in the living world as the new anchor (which is super painful, BTW). Sorry, Bonnie.

Oh also, Stefan and Elena went through this weird bout of being cosmically attracted to one another because of their doppleganger-being status. It was weird and made Damon jealous. But don't worry, I think we're done with that now.

The situation that is Katherine Pierce

Ding dong, the bitch is dead. But how'd it all go down? Well, it started out with Katherine loving her time as a human. Then she started hating it because she was getting older than the term "LYLAS." Oh, one more thing, remember when we found out K. Pierce had a baby that was murdered by those heartless Originals? Surprise! That baby is still alive, her name is Nadia (played by Olga Fonda) and she's been looking for her mother, Katherine for literal centuries.

Then, Katherine was a few hours short of a hip replacement, because the cure was making her age super fast and she was, therefore, dying of old age. It really sucked for Nadia who was trying to get to know her new mommy. Well, here's where the fun part comes in: Nadia is a member of the Travelers. So while Katherine is on her death bed, surprisingly at Casa del Salvatore, she does the most Katherine thing she can think of. She uses the tricks she's learned from her Traveler daughter and makes herself a passenger in Elena's body. Yikes! And we all know how great the two are at impersonating one another. Disaster alert? Definitely so. Because Katherine spends quite a bit of time inside Elena's body and raises hell by trying to get back with Stefan and officially breaking up with Damon, as Elena. This of course causes Damon to self-destruct and go on a killing rampage with his good ol' buddy Enzo. Juicy? Yeah. No shit.

Eventually, the gang figures out that who they thought was Elena is indeed Katherine and they dupe her into the series finale of the seemingly never-ending telenovela that is the saga of unattainable Katerina Petrova. This, hereby releases Elena back into her rightful body. Thought the end of KP would never come, thank God you were wrong. But, this is The Vampire Diaries. In the end, does anyone every really die? So goodbye for now, Katherine Pierce, may you rest in the pleasure of knowing you were one of TVD's most sinister villains.

The Travelers get tired of traveling

Remember how Katherine was able to passenger in Elena's body because Nadia was a member of the Travelers and taught her a bunch of hacks to literal identity theft? Well, that plot point is amplified as the season goes on. The Travelers are tired of their hum-drum lives as nomads. They want to stop borrowing other people's bodies and go back to the good ol' days. How do they do that? You guessed it, doppleganger blood. After killing off all the remaining dopplegangers in the world, Stefan and Elena are the last two, which apparently is exactly what the Travelers intended. Their leader Markos enters the picture and has a serious case of Kanye-level narcissism. He breaks his way from the Other Side after a huge Traveler sacrificial inferno. It's incredibly painful for Bonnie and leaves the Other Side in utter shambles. Markos' plan is to swipe Mystic Falls completely of magic. Which would mean all vampires in Mystic Falls would die.

Oh yeah, and important fact: Tyler's body gets taken over by a passenger named Julian.

By some stroke of the universe's cruelty, Markos and his gang of Travelers do manage to rid Mystic Falls of magic.

Delena experiences a Taylor Swift album full of emotion

The very lovely Katherine took over Elena's body this season and she also broke up with Damon, causing him to go into a downward spiral of immorality. When Elena gets her body back, Delena is on again. Awesome, right? Well, when Elena finds out about all the crazy things Damon did when Katherine took over her body (things like kill Aaron Whitmore, Elena's friend), Damon explains how bad he is for her and breaks up with her. But don't cry yet, because, lucky for us, they make the classic mistake of continuing to have sexy time after their break up. Way Ross and Rachel it up, guys.

The feelings between the two clearly still exist and as the season continues we see how much the two really love each other, which makes the happenings of the season's finale so much more painful. Elena and Damon aren't great together but they're even worse apart.

The Other Side...WTF

Bonnie, our new anchor, is now our 411 to the Other Side. That being said, the Other Side is, again, going ape shit, everything is off balance. There's the kind of winds that wipe people away into oblivion, ghosts and other dead supernatural beings can interact with real live people.... it's a mess. So remember how the Travelers had a plan to rid Mystic Falls of all magic? (That includes witch magic and the magic that keeps vampires alive.) That spell only worked when both dopplegangers were alive. This is where things really start to go crazy when TVD writers just decided to completely disregard our emotions by doing the unthinkable. OK, hope you're sitting down. Julian, the passenger in Tyler's body, kills Stefan Salvatore by ripping his heart out. (Yeah, the permanent kind of vampire dead.)

As you can imagine, this is not handled well. Stefan Salvatore cannot just die. His hero hair and broody forehead are staples of TVD world. He has to live. Ergo, let operation "Get Stefan Back" commence...

Grab a Kleenex, it's finale time...

If we're being honest here, I did not cry at the Season 5 finale. I wailed. The gang develops a plan to not only get Stefan back but stop the Travelers from banishing magic from Mystic Falls (remember that's still a thing). But wait! Before save-the-day Bonnie is even able to come up with a solid plan for what's to come, the magic is already stripped from Mystic Falls. Tyler (still occupied by Julian at this point) is thrown past the border of the town as proof. Julian dies and Tyler is stripped of his supernatural abilities. He is now just a human. Say what?!

The list of people who need to be brought back from the Other Side grows and grows. We've got Stefan, Alaric, Enzo, Lexi and many more. In order to get these people back, we need a huge number of supernatural deaths to upset the balance and pass through Bonnie, the anchor. How? Traveler genocide. Sound complicated enough? Good. Sheriff Forbes gathers the Travelers to the bar, Jeremy and Matt start a gas leak and Damon, being the stupid, beautiful anti-hero that he is, plans to set this gas leak aflame by crashing his car into the bar.

Remember how we talked about how Delena's was a love that never died? Yeah, this is where Elena comes in, gets in the car with Damon and the two of them, together, drive into the bar until it explodes. Because she loves him like a fat kid loves cake. Daaaaaw, is right. Now we've got to get Bonnie to bring back Stefan plus Elena plus Damon plus Enzo plus Lexi and Alaric... jeez, this list is getting long. Seems like it would be no biggie but this is The Vampire Diaries and what can go wrong will go wrong. So here's a villain throwback for you, Silas is back. He's the one who taught Bonnie the spell to pull off this freak plan. Not to worry, he doesn't last long. He too is swept up into oblivion when Bonnie let's go of his hand in an intense Other Side wind spell.

Time's ticking and the other side is closing up fast. Those who need to pass through Bonnie from the Other Side are until Liv's brother Luke stops the spell that's allowing our favorite characters to pass through... right when Damon's turn comes around.

Translation: Damon and Bonnie are stuck on the Other Side. Gone. For good

. Now's a good time to grab that Kleenex I mentioned earlier because Damon and Bonnie aren't just dead for a little bit but they'll be back later. They're dead like Elena's-going-to-make-some-stupid-decisions-in-the-aftermath kind of dead. What this means for the future of these two fan favorites is unclear. We'll have to wait for Season 6 to premiere. In the meantime we can sustain ourselves by playing any pieces of the upcoming sixth season on repeat.

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