We’ve got to wait until October 11 to see new episode of The Vampire Diaries on The CW. In the meantime, here are a few words from executive producer Julie Plec on what to expect from the fourth season. There’s vampire hunters, Klaus in love and oh yeah, Elena’s a vampire now. We won’t delay this preamble any further. Here’s Julie Plec.
Fanhattan: What should we get excited about for this season?
Julie Plec: We’ve got our heroine, Elena, who last we saw was waking up with vampire blood in her system so she has a choice to make of whether to be a vampire or whether to die. Since she’s the hero I think we can all guess where that goes and it gives us the opportunity to kind of go back to the beginning of the series and tell the same kinds of stories only with a different context. Instead of a young girl learning the secret of vampires in Mystic Falls, she now is a vampire in Mystic Falls and she’s got to keep her own secret. She’s got to learn how to live and how to feed and what to do. All of her emotions will be so heightened and she herself will become a little crazy so we’re going to watch her go through a pretty startling and traumatic journey, which is not going to be helped when a new vampire hunter comes to town in the second episode.
Fanhattan: Does that also shift the love triangle, to make her closer to Damon than Stefan?
Julie Plec: In a weird way it resets the love triangle. She made a decision about who she was supposed to be with and who she wanted and who she loved as a human, and now she’s not human anymore. So by no means is it going to change her mind overnight, but it’s definitely going to add some complications into both sides of that triangle. Does she want to be the kind of vampire that Damon is? Is she drawn to that or does she now more than ever want to stay as far away from it as possible? Can she still be as close to Stefan knowing that he loved her as a pure innocent human? Does she have insecurity about what that means for their relationship? And can he hang with her as she’s feeding on blood when he himself has issues with that.
Fanhattan: Right, how does Stefan feel about it?
Julie Plec: Well, Stefan is devastated. Stefan is devastated. He knows that she never wanted this. He would do anything he could to make sure she didn’t have to go through it but it’s kind of inevitable that she has to. So now he’s got to be her champion and her partner and her true love, and yet also adjust to he having to be a vampire when he himself is not very good at being one.
Fanhattan: Is the new vampire hunter a character from the books?
Julie Plec: No, no, it’s a fresh character.
Fanhattan: How do you create a vampire hunter that’s different from Alaric?
Julie Plec: Alaric came in hunting vampires because he had an axe to grind. He had vengeance on the brain but he himself was not a living breathing from the guy vampire hunter. The Gilbert family, Elena and Jeremy’s family, has a long history of hunting vampires but in that same way that is something they feel like is their family duty. This is the first time that we’ll see a vampire hunter who is made, created, born, lives and breathes to kill vampires. It drives him. He doesn’t care who gets caught in the crossfire and that is his purpose in life, so he is going to be a much more difficult and formidable opponent than what our heroes are used to from a typical humor.
Fanhattan: What’s coming up for Jeremy and Caroline?
Julie Plec: Well, Jeremy is now the man of the house which is going to be an interesting role for him to try to step into, because Elena as his big sister is still going to try to be bossing him around. But he himself comes from a long line of people who have hunted vampires and now he is living under the same roof as the brother to one. So he’s going to have some interesting exploring to do. Caroline of course is the object of affection of the original vampire Klaus who is nasty and dark and evil but who secretly loves her. So not only is she going to have to deal with his evil master plans but also his diabolical desire to break her up with Tyler. So she is going to have to deal with trying to keep him at bay while she tries to be a good girlfriend and remain in a committed relationship with Tyler.
Fanhattan: Are you torn between loving these characters and wanting good things for them, but knowing that great drama means messing them up?
Julie Plec: Yeah, I always say that there’s no conflict in happiness, yet I watch Grey’s Anatomy and Meredith and Derrick have been happy for seven years and I enjoy them happy and the one year they weren’t happy, I stopped watching. So I do think that there’s a potential for people to be happily in love. I just think that we’re not there yet. Honestly, I think that as much as anybody thinks they want something to go their way, after about five episodes, they might say, “Oh, what’s next.” So we’re always trying to keep it fresh and keep it interesting and switch things up as much as possible.
Fanhattan: How involved is Kevin Williamson while he’s working on The Following?
Julie Plec: Well, Kevin is launching The Following so he’s my soul mate in life and my life work partner and my work husband, and he’s on the other end of the phone for me 50 times a day but his focus right now is getting The Following up and running.
Fanhattan: Do you feel like you’ve paved the way for The CW to do shows like Beauty and the Beast?
Julie Plec: Well, I think what we’ve done is shown that you can have a commercial success with a genre show that is rooted both in scares and tension but also love, so we’ll see if that’s true, if the audience says, “Yeah, we want more of that.”
