The promo for Thursday’s midseason finale of The Vampire Diaries (The CW, 8 p.m. ET) shows the unthinkable happening: Stefan (Paul Wesley), now trapped in the tomb with Katherine (Nina Dobrev), giving in to her. If the teaser is any indication (watch it below), it could be the hottest captive sex scene since a certain cage encounter on Lost. “First, Jeremy getting trapped in the tomb was like, Katherine wins! When Stefan came in, she’s like, ‘Wow, I couldn’t have planned this better if I tried. The one person I want to be stuck with, here he is, and now he’s got nowhere to go. I will seduce him, I will tease him, I will anger him.’ The line between love and hate truly is very, very thin,” Dobrev says. “So she has a chance to egg him on, and he can’t do anything about it. He has no choice but to listen, and yeah, it is a very kind of sexy, manipulative scene, and he gives in. It’s pretty crazy.”
As we’ve noted in our recaps, the walls on this show’s sets must be seriously reinforced — people are always getting thrown up against them during fights and/or foreplay. (Not that we’re complaining.) “I especially have been thrown around the set on a number of occasions,” Dobrev concedes with a laugh. “They try to make sure we’re safe when we do those things, but we as actors can’t help but get into it. We want to feel the pain. We want to make it real. So sometimes, we go overboard and slam each other a little too hard. Like that scene in particular, they padded it a little bit, but you can only do so much before you actually see the padding. It was a lot of throwing around.” So she sported some bruises afterward? “Oh, I have bruises on a daily basis. I always have bruises on my body. I’m black and blue all over,” she says. “Thank goodness for Arnica.”
Moving on to Dobrev’s other role, Elena, the synopsis for the episode says, “Elijah (guest star Daniel Gillies) makes an unexpected appearance with an offer that could change everything.” Elena wanted to sacrifice herself last episode to spare the lives of her friends, who are trying to save her from Elijah (and the as-yet-unseen Klaus). Will Elijah work that angle? All Dobrev will say is this: “Elena is in a predicament in the sense that she has a challenge, and she is out of control for the first time in a long time. When Elijah comes into her life on this day, it’s even more challenging, and tempting. Elena is the one who has to make a decision, and this time, she’s not in control, which is very frustrating for her. Elena doesn’t like to not be in control.”
Dobrev agrees that the introduction of Elijah and the concept of The Originals has been great for the show. “It’s gonna keep getting gorier and better and darker,” she says. “It adds a whole other layer. As difficult as it was for all the characters before, now they’re faced with an even more epic danger. Everyone is at risk.” But not Katherine, right? She won’t be getting a stake in the heart anytime soon, we hope. “I can’t imagine what the show was before Katherine came around,” Dobrev says. For a second, you wonder if that’s the sleep-deprivation from her schedule playing the doppelgängers for half a season talking. But it’s not. “If she ever left, I think that would be a really big mistake. She’s like another Damon,” she continues, “but now Damon is getting a lot softer, and you still need that kind of playful bad character.”