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Legacies Review: Welcome to Kai Parker’s World

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Photo: Bob Mahoney/The CW

Kai Parker made his triumphant return to the Vampire Diaries universe last night on the latest hour of Legacies.

As the title “Kai Parker Screwed Us” suggests, anyone and everyone orbiting Kai’s prison world wound up cursing our favorite villain.

Some things never change.

When we last left off two weeks ago, Ric, Lizzie, and Josie arrived via Alyssa’s revenge spell. Sebastian greeted them, exposing Ric’s deception to his daughters.

Naturally, he’s not the first student Ric and Emma shipped off to the land of Kai. There’s also a witch, a werewolf, and a vampire roaming the world.

The Saltzman family did the absolute worst thing any family can do in a horror movie situation: they split up. Disaster ensued.

Chris Wood continues to relish playing Kai every bit as much as we love watching him. Kai brings the sarcasm just as often as he double and triple crosses everyone he meets.

It’s so very fun to watch.

Photo: Bob Mahoney/The CW

This time Kai teamed up with his niece Josie—who he’s tried to murder multiple times—to find a way out of their predicament. Neither trusted the other, but they still shared information.

Here are the basics of what we learned: people banished to the prison world can’t die there (Kai, the three students, and Sebastian). Those visiting (the Saltzman family) can. Not great news for our heroes.

Next, Kai conned Josie into giving up Bennett blood, ditched his cohorts, and planned to hightail it back to the mortal world during the meteor shower. Except Josie tricked him—there was no Bennett blood.

However, Josie also shared the inner workings of Malivore with her uncle. So he headed for the nearest pit to travel back that way (kind of a genius plan, right?).

Kai also gave Josie a bit of parting advice: break the hourglass, absorb the dark magic, and build your own way out of the world. She had about ten seconds to make the choice before he dipped into the portal.

Is he telling the truth? Who knows? It’s Kai! But let’s lean toward yes since it seems to be a gesture of begrudging respect for his niece. She did, after all, outwit him.

That said, once Josie absorbs the dark magic, it will turn her into a monster. So it’s win-win for Kai at that point.

And now, after emerging in the Necromancer’s lair, Kai’s back in the real world and ready to wreck as much havoc as possible.

Josie did what she had to do to save her family. Will it really turn her into a monster? Maybe. Or maybe it will only make complicated moral choices even harder than before.

Time will tell.

Photo: Jace Downs/The CW

Speaking of moral choices, Ric’s being hunted by his former students because he trapped them in a prison world. Seems almost fair, doesn’t it?

Except it’s a complicated question. They did viciously murder a bunch of people. The vampire discovered she was a ripper (because apparently that’s not even a little rare?) and shut off her humanity.

But the kids made a good point: Ric was their teacher. He was supposed to protect them. And he only cared about protecting his own kids.

There’s some truth to that. Ric would do anything for his three daughters (yes, Hope counts). And in order to protect them, he has to keep their secret. So they can’t let dangerous supernatural students run loose.

Sending them to the prison world is more humane than outright killing them, probably. But perhaps further rehab would have made an even better choice? Isn’t that the whole point?

At the very least, step one should have been separating them.

Meanwhile, Sebastian invited Lizzie to see their private world with him. He likes it there. It’s quiet like the olden days where he’s from—he wants to stay. And he wants Lizzie to become a vampire and live there with him, too.

There are obvious Klaroline/Delena parallels with this ship. And the romance is old fashioned and sweet on the surface. So it’s understandable why Lizzie considered the idea.

She’s thought about being a vampire before; both to stop the merge and to preserve her youth. Plus, she didn’t say it, but she obviously worships her mother and wants to be just like her.

But she also wants the ability to grow old and have kids if she so chooses. She’s not ready to make any forever choices at this point in her life.

Photo: Jace Downs/The CW

(Lizzie matures more and more with every passing hour and it’s a beautiful thing to witness).

However, Sebastian took the choice from her hands. He fed her blood without her consent and probably would have killed her had she not drained him.

Oh, and he called her his ex-girlfriend’s name, killing any and all hope Lizzie had of any kind of old fashioned fairy tale ending.

So she did what any self-respecting woman would: told him they needed to see other people and used her syphon powers to temporarily desiccate him.

Again, Lizzie is much stronger than anyone gives her credit for.

Fictional ships don’t have the same rules as real world ones so it’s possible Sebastian could be redeemed at some point.

But as of now, leaving him in the prison world would be a charitable response to his bad behavior.

Unfortunately, Lizzie is in mortal peril: once Josie absorbed the dark magic, it hit Lizzie via their wonder twin powers and she crashed the car.

She better not die, show. She’s come too far to have this choice ripped away from her. If she wants to be a heretic in the future, that’s her decision to make.

Next week, dark Josie emerges and Kai meets Hope.

Mandy Treccia
Mandy Treccia has served as TVSource Magazine’s Executive Editor since 2016, formerly as Editorial Director from 2012-2016. She is an avid TV watcher and card carrying fan girl prone to sudden bursts of emotion, ranging from extreme excitement to blind rage during her favorite shows and has on more than once occasion considered having a paper bag on hand to get her through some tough TV moments. Her taste in TV tends to rival that of a thirteen-year-old girl, but she’s okay with that.

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