Summary

• The existence and connection of doppelgängers in The Vampire Diaries are a result of immortality and the disruption of the balance of nature.
• The Petrova doppelgängers, including Tatia, Katherine Pierce, and Elena Gilbert, play significant roles in the series and are linked to powerful witches and vampires.
• While doppelgängers are a central aspect of the original show, they are not featured in the subsequent spin-offs, The Originals and Legacies.

The Vampire Diaries doppelgängers and their connection to the supernatural world took five seasons to unravel. After Elena Gilbert fell in love with Stefan Salvatore during season 1, she discovered she bore an uncanny resemblance to his ex: a 500-year-old vampire named Katherine Pierce, aka "Katerina Petrova" and later seasons provided answers. In the First Century BCE, there existed powerful witches known as Travelers. The two most powerful of these Travelers were Silas and Qetsiyah who wanted their love to be eternal, so they concocted an elixir that would make them immortal.

On their wedding day, Qetsiyah discovered that Silas took the cure and gave the other dose to his real true love, Qetsiyah's handmaiden, Amara. Qetsiyah's and Silas' actions had far-reaching consequences since immortality upset the balance of nature. Therefore, nature found a way to restore the balance by creating doppelgängers. They were Amara's and Silas' shadow selves - living, breathing exact replicants who could die in place of the immortals. They were naturally occurring mystical beings, but they were susceptible to magic. Katherine and Elena were the first doppelgängers introduced on the show, but they weren't the last.

Tatia

She Is Linked To Amara Through One Of Her Siblings

The first Petrova doppelgänger, Tatia, lived during the late 10th/early 11th century. Amara had no children, so Tatia was linked to Amara though a child of one of Amara's siblings. The series established all Petrova doppelgängers were Amara's descendants even if it didn't always clearly connect the dots, including how the bloodline remained intact over multiple generations. Tatia lived in the same village as the Mikaelsons - a Viking named Mikael, his wife Esther, a witch, and their six children. Two of the Mikaelson sons Klaus and Elijah, fell in love with Tatia.

Klaus and Elijah told Damon and Stefan Salvatore about Tatia during season 3, recalling the "allure of the Petrova doppelgänger." After Henrik was killed by a werewolf, Esther and Mikael decided to cast a spell making their children the first vampires, the Originals. Esther killed Tatia and used her blood to turn them. Season 2 revealed the truth about Tatia, who willingly gave her blood to Esther, unaware of Esther's intentions. Unable to control his thirst, Elijah killed Tatia. After Klaus became a vampire, he triggered his werewolf side, and Esther used Tatia's blood to prevent Klaus from turning.

Katherine Pierce

Katherine's Daughter Is The Ancestral Link To Amara

After Katherine gave birth to an illegitimate daughter in 1490, Katherine's father banished the Bulgarian beauty to England where she met Klaus. Katherine questioned Klaus' romantic interest in her, and she learned from someone in Klaus' inner circle his true intentions: to use her doppelgänger blood to suppress his werewolf side. Katherine used the information to turn herself into a vampire, knowing this would render her useless to him since he needed human doppelgänger blood to complete the ritual to undo Esther's spell.

Klaus and Elijah created the legend of the Sun and Moon Curse to locate the next doppelgänger, but if Klaus knew she would be a Petrova descendant, it didn't make sense for him to murder Katherine's entire family effectively ending the bloodline. He also appeared not to know about Katherine's daughter Nadia, so his murdering them all was a questionable move on his part.

Katherine's daughter established the ancestral link between herself and Elena, but Katherine's knowledge of doppelgängers was limited. Katherine was also a descendant of the Travelers, but her father turned his back on the outcast witches and their magic. This explains why she wouldn't have known about Amara and the origin of the doppelgängers. Katherine understood doppelgänger blood was used to suppress Klaus' werewolf side, but she told Elena during season 2's "Katerina" that a doppelgänger was also a loophole: one created to undo the spell. Doppelgängers were a loophole, but they were created for a larger purpose.

While Katherine hated Elena, she was friends with Elena's mother, Isobel Flemming. The latter told Elena that Katherine sought her out not long after she turned into a vampire. Isobel believed it was out of genetic curiosity. Katherine used Isobel to gain access to information about Elena, whom she planned to hand over to Klaus as a peace offering for fleeing a half-century earlier. Given Isobel made it her life's work to study the supernatural, her lack of understanding of doppelgängers was surprising, particularly since she was a descendant of Amara. Isobel simply viewed Elena as a biological curiosity.

Elena Gilbert

She Was A Descendant Of Petrova

Since Elena was a Petrova descendant, that meant her mother Isobel was as well. Unfortunately, the link between Isobel and Katherine was unclear. When Katherine's daughter Nadia Petrova, arrived in Mystic Falls during season 5, she revealed she became a vampire so that she could track down Katherine: a task that required time, skills, and resources Nadia didn't possess as a human. Nadia never mentioned having children, but since Klaus killed Katherine's entire family, there was nobody else to keep the bloodline going except for Nadia's offspring. The Vampire Diaries never addressed the plot hole.

As a naturally occurring, mystical being, Elena's blood (and that of all doppelgängers) contained power that, when compounded with magic, could create spells such as the ones Esther concocted to try and kill her children during season 3, or Qetsiyah's attempt to complete the Anchor swap. Her blood could also be used to undo the magic, such as the Sun and Moon Curse. Some spells required human doppelgänger blood, and others did not, although Elena's blood was a more sought-after commodity before she became a vampire.

Ultimately, it was Elena's blood that was used to break Klaus' curse in "The Sun Also Rises." To do so, Klaus had to kill Elena and use her blood but some well-timed magic and a sacrifice by her birth father John Gilbert allowed her to come back to life. That little loophole also made it so her blood became even more valuable as Klaus needed to keep her around to make sure he could fully turn his hybrid army.

Stefan Salvatore

Stefan Was Silas' Shadow Self

The season 4 finale of The Vampire Diaries showed that Elena and Katherine weren't the only doppelgängers. Stefan met Silas, who revealed that Stefan was Silas' shadow self. Just as Amara was the progenitor of the Petrova line of doppelgängers, Silas had a doppelgänger bloodline of his own - the Salvatores. Stefan's relationship with Silas was as antagonistic as Elena's was with Katherine.

Season 5 established a strong connection between male and female doppelgängers: they were fated to find each other and fall in love. Qetsiyah told Damon that during the centuries she was trapped on the Other Side, she watched "destiny trying to get the doppelgängers together forever." The series canon didn't support the assertion that there were more than five doppelgängers. The idea that male and female doppelgängers were meant to be together was debunked by Markos, the leader of the Travelers. He revealed they were drawn together because of magic.

Season 5 focused heavily on the consequences of the Amara-Qetsiyah-Silas love triangle ( TVD's Vampire cure). Nature created doppelgängers to restore the balance disrupted by Qetsiyah's and Silas' immortality spell, and witches parlayed the existence of doppelgängers into a way to punish the Travelers for Silas' and Qetsiyah's actions. While the series devoted multiple seasons to exploring the complexity of the Petrova doppelgängers as individuals and their relationships with each other, revealing Stefan to be a doppelgänger felt like an afterthought. Being part of a doppelgänger bloodline didn't impact him in the same way it did the Petrova doppelgängers.

After Qetsiyah learned Silas made Amara immortal, she created an antidote. During season 5, both Amara and Silas drank the cure for immortality, and they died, putting an end to the doppelgänger saga. Damon stabbed Katherine, and Enzo St. John killed the other mortal doppelgänger, Tom. During the series finale, Stefan sacrifices himself to kill Katherine and save Mystic Falls, leaving Elena as the sole surviving doppelgänger. The Petrova and Salvatore bloodlines would continue with Damon and Elena's children, but doppelgängers would become extinct.

Tom Avery

He Is Another Descendant Of Salvatore

Since there were multiple Petrova doppelgängers, it made sense there would be multiple Salvatore ones as well. Tom Avery was a Salvatore descendant introduced during season 5 (Damon and Stefan's father had an affair that resulted in a child.) Tom was a paramedic who lived in Atlanta, and he had no knowledge of his connection to the Salvatores or that he was a doppelgänger. Katherine and Elena found their lives constantly intertwined, but Tom and Stefan never met.

The Travelers learned of Tom's existence and dispatched Caroline Forbes and Enzo St. John to kill him. The Travelers' plan to defeat the witches rested on the blood of the last two doppelgängers. If this was taken literally, Tom would have been the last (as in most recent having been born after Stefan), meaning the Travelers would have considered him indispensable. If it was the last pair, then his death was the only way for the Travelers to succeed. Of all the doppelgängers, Tom was the least significant.

Are Silas And Amara Doppelgängers?

Because all the doppelgängers are copies of Silas and Amara, there is some confusion about whether Silas and Amara count as doppelgängers themselves. Silas and Amara aren't doppelgängers but proto-doppelgängers. There are distinct abilities doppelgängers possess that Silas and Amara don't.

The key difference is that doppelgänger blood has intense magical properties, including linking supernatural beings and being a key ingredient in Witch's Spirit Magic that can turn a vampire back into a human corpse or remove the lycanthropy gene from werewolves. Silas and Amara's blood has none of these properties. What's more, doppelgängers have a notable weakness to magic that the progenitors of their line do not. Some spells targeting one doppelgänger will affect all of them, for example, but Silas and Amara themselves won't be impacted.

Silas and Amara don't end up together. While multiple Silas and Amara doppelgängers have found each other throughout the ages, the progenitors of the line never manage to achieve their happily ever after. Qetsiyah turned Amara into the Anchor to the Other Side, a position she maintained for 2,000 years while Silas was doomed to walk the Earth without his true soulmate.

The pair, who were the first immortal beings on earth, nearly reconciled in The Vampire Diaries season 5, but this sadly ended with Silas being sent to Hell and Amara dying a mortal death, going forever into a peaceful afterlife. Since Hell was destroyed in season 8, there is a chance Silas' soul found its way back to Amara — but it's equally likely that he never found his way to Heaven, and his soul was destroyed along with the billions of others condemned to eternal torment in Hell.

Are There Doppelgangers In The Originals & Legacies?

Although The Vampire Diaries concluded in 2017, the franchise lived on through the spin-off series The Originals and Legacies. Considering how pivotal doppelgängers were to the original show, it was believed they might be seen or mentioned in some form in the follow-up shows. The Originals did a bit to expand on doppelgånger lore, explaining more about the history given the relationship Tatia had with Klaus and Elijah but there was nothing more afterward.

Meanwhile, Legacies brought in more supernatural beings than any other iteration of the franchise thanks to something of a "monster of the week" format. Necromancers, unicorns, dragons, mummies, and more were seen but there were no doppelgängers. That might seem disappointing to longtime The Vampire Diaries fans of the franchise but it actually makes sense. Doppelgängers are meant to be rare and given the fact that they all looked like Elena and Stefan, they couldn't be shown unless Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley were returning in some form.