Despite being a spinoff of The Originals, Legacies seemed to have forgotten what made the vampires of The Vampire Diaries universe unique—until now. Legacies debuted in 2018, and since then the second spinoff has struggled to reclaim the popularity of The Originals and The Vampire Diaries. Focusing on a group of supernaturally powered students attending the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted, Legacies has all the ingredients to be a fun, fast-paced addition to The Vampire Diaries universe.
However, for its first three seasons, Legacies mostly focused on the central “will they, won’t they” romance between the show’s heroine Hope Mikaelson and her love interest Landon Kirby, leaving interesting supporting characters sidelined. Since Legacies season 4 began, the series has largely avoided this issue, but the show is still bogged down by byzantine lore. With mages, witches, werewolf-vampire hybrids, and golems in its cast, Legacies has seemingly forgotten that the spinoff is a part of the Vampire Diaries universe.
That is until the episode “See You On The Other Side” (season 4, episode 4). Originally intended to be the Legacies season 3 finale, this episode finally brought back a lot of what made the titular bloodsuckers of The Vampire Diaries feel original and engaging. When Hope finally awakened her vampire side by dying, the event allowed Legacies to bring back elements of vampirism that were a major part of both The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Unlike other fictional vampires, the vampire of The Vampire Diaries needed to feed on human blood during transition or else they would die, they were cursed with an often uncontrollable bloodlust and were conversely able to turn off their human feelings at the flick of a switch because it hurt too much to feel human emotion after their un-death.
Since the spinoff began, Legacies has had a campy sense of humor that neither The Vampire Diaries nor The Originals boasted, and this element of the series often made its fun watch. However, some fans felt that season 3 and 4’s chaotic plotlines, along with Legacies’ addition of many new mythical monsters to The Vampire Diaries universe, made the spinoff too hard to take seriously. As such, an episode that re-established the elements that made the vampires of The Vampire Diaries memorable was a welcome surprise to many fans. When Hope returned to life, she was still the same headstrong heroine as before her vampiric transformation, but her ability to permanently kill Landon to take down Malivore proved she had a vampire’s cold-blooded control of her emotions.
Meanwhile, the ruthless way that the now-undead, even more powerful Hope left the action of the episode further cements the fact that the Legacies heroine is a changed character, something that brings the tone of the spinoff closer to the original The Vampire Diaries. Death has been cheap in the world of Legacies, where Landon has died more times than many viewers can keep track of. As such, bringing back vampires and focusing on the darker aspects of their tragic existence lent some much-needed gravitas to the world of Legacies, and let the spinoff feel more like its original inspirations The Vampire Diaries and The Originals than it has in a long time.