" Lost Girls "

Elena always knew Stefan was one of those quiet, mysterious types. But now she senses there’s something truly different about the boy. She’s noticed that elderly folks around town recognize him from their childhoods and say he hasn’t aged a day. And so she confronts him and insists he tell her everything.

He does—complete with flashbacks to Civil War-era Mystic Falls, where he and Damon both fell in love with a beautiful vampire named Katherine. We see Stefan and Katherine in bed together right before she takes a bite out of his throat, and we learn that she turned both brothers into vampires in the hopes that they could all be, as the show tactfully puts it, "together forever."

Stefan implores Elena not to tell anyone his little secret. "You can hate me," he says, "but I need you to trust me."

Meanwhile, Damon is killing handfuls of Mystic Falls "druggies," and he turns one of them, Vickie, into a vampire for his own nefarious (albeit unknown) purposes. Evidently it’s a complicated four-step process: First, he must drink her blood. Next, she must drink his, so he rips open one of his own veins with his teeth and lets it spurt into her mouth. She hungrily sucks the red stuff down, thus kick-starting another addiction in her already drug-addled (underwear-clad) body. "Can I have another hit?" she asks Damon later. "That blood was so good."

She has to die before her transformation can be complete, of course. And to make that happen, Damon breaks her neck with a sickening snap. After she comes to, she staggers out of the house, needing to feed on human blood.

She finds her mark in a small-town television reporter who, coincidentally, is searching the woods for vampires with a magic, vampire-detecting watch and a gun loaded with wooden bullets.

They ultimately don’t do him much good. The vampires in Diaries are demigods—preternaturally fast, strong and good-looking with few of the weaknesses traditionally associated with vampires. They can walk in the sun if they wear special rings. Crucifixes and holy water have no effect on them. And Stefan professes a love for garlic.

In this episode, we see an inkling that being undead isn’t quite the party it would seem to be. Vickie’s quite distraught by her transformation. Stefan finds her crying in the woods, still needing to feed. "I don’t want this," she tells him. And earlier, Stefan confesses to Elena that he never wanted this "life," either.

But for viewers, those sporadic messages of moral regret conflict with what the series celebrates: That it’s awesome and cool to combine a chiseled jaw and perfectly coiffed hair with the ability to move so fast it looks like you’re vanishing and rematerializing at will.

On the CW, those are the guys who get the girls, after all.