7 Questions The Vampire Diaries Fans Still Want Answered

It’s been eight years since The Vampire Diaries ended, but while the years have passed — and fans had two additional series, The Originals, and Legacies — to sink their teeth into, as is often the case with long-running series, fans of The CW supernatural drama have long been left with questions.  Following the life of Elena Gilbert, a high school student in the fictional town of Mystic Falls, the series sees the young woman become entangled in the mysterious and dangerous world of the supernatural after meeting a new student at school who happens to be a vampire.

Over eight seasons, The Vampire Diaries saw Elena herself become a vampire, as well as her best friend Caroline, be embroiled in a love triangle, and she and her friends and allies end up dealing with a host of threats including not just vampires, werewolves and more. While the series finale in 2017 wrapped up the series’ major storylines and offered fans a satisfying ending to not just Elena’s story but the story of just about all of the series’ main characters, there are still some questions from the overall series run that fans still find themselves asking. From questions about vampire physiology, final messages from family members, the use of magic, and more, here are seven questions that fans of The Vampire Diaries still want the answers to, all these years later.

Who Really Were the First Vampires?

Season 3 of The Vampire Diaries established that all vampires descend from one family, the Mikaelsons. Deemed the Original Vampires, the family was said to be the first humans cursed with vampirism, making every other vampire related to one of them in some way — the concept of Sire Lines was a thing in The Vampire Diaries. However, later seasons introduced Amara, Silas, and Qetsiyah who were then presented as the very first immortals. Amara was the handmaiden to the witch Qetsiyah and while Qetsiyah was engaged to another witch, Silas and created an immortality elixir to share with him at their wedding, Silas was actually in love with Amara. Silas betrayed Qetsiyah, taking the elixir with Amara with the whole affair kicking off, well a whole lot of drama.

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The series presents Silas as a vampire-like creature so it begs the question: who really was the first vampire? Is how Silas and Amara were made immortal fundamentally different than how the Mikaelsons were created? A close watching of The Vampire Diaries sort of answers this question, suggesting that Silas and Amara are merely the first immortals while the Mikaelsons are the first true vampires, but even with that explanation, the whole thing is very confusing.

What Did Sheriff Forbes Write in Her Letter to Caroline?

In Season 6, Sheriff Forbes becomes sick with cancer and dies. It’s a devastating development for Caroline, but before she dies, her mother writes her a letter. However, fans (and Caroline) never find out the content of that letter. Grief-stricken, Caroline turns off her humanity and during an attempt to get her to turn it back on, Elena tries to get Caroline to read the letter her mother wrote her. Caroline instead burns the letter. Caroline is horrified by this once she comes to her senses, but the damage is done — and neither she nor viewers ever find out what her mother wrote.

As it turns out, this is a question that doesn’t actually have an answer, even for the show’s writers and creator. Showrunner Julie Plec revealed in 2017 that they never figured out what Sheriff Forbes actually wrote in the letter, though they certainly tried.

“The only dangling thread that we never answered — and we tried all year — was I could never find a way to learn what Sheriff Forbes wrote in that letter that Caroline burned.”

“We came up with a bunch of really bad pitches but really couldn’t figure it out,” Plec continued. “Perhaps if the entire finale had been set in peace where all these characters could talk to each other again then it would have been different.”

Why Didn’t Bonnie Just Use Magic to Find Her Mom?

Bonnie Bennett was a witch who came from a long line of powerful witches, which meant that, at some point, Bonnie was going to have to find her long-absent mother, Abby. To do this, Bonnie enlisted not magic but a more mundane method of search: looking up every “Abby Bennett” in the general area of Mystic Falls. Seems logical, for a normal person but Bonnie’s a witch and locator spells are a thing. So, why didn’t Bonnie just use such a spell to track down her mother?

While fans have questioned this for years and the series never actually addresses it, there’s a pretty logical (well, logical in terms of the series) explanation for why Bonnie would use normal methods to find her mom. You see, Abby was a witch and while we eventually find out that Abby was drained of her magic to the point that she could no longer use it after imprisoning Mikael, Bonnie didn’t know that while searching for her mother. It’s possible that Bonnie merely assumed that her mother wouldn’t be able to be located using magic.

What Happened to Damon’s Powers?

In the first season of The Vampire Diaries, Damon had some interesting powers. Namely, he could turn into a bird (a crow) and could also control fog. It’s something that doesn’t really last but fans have long wondered what happened to those powers — especially since the ability to turn into a crow is something Damon has in L.J. Smith’s books. So, where did those powers go? Turns out, he never actually had them. The series sort of explained the crow away as being something Damon was merely controlling and series co-creator Kevin Williamson later explained was something they abandoned early on.

“Damon traveled in the form of a bird in the pilot, because he was the crow in the book,” Williamson told Entertainment Weekly in 2019. “We went, ‘Nah, we can’t have him turn into animals so we’re just going to skip that part of the book.’ We dropped that real quick. We killed that bird by episode three.”

What Exactly is the Supply Chain Situation For Vervain?

Every vampire story gives the immortal undead some sort of weakness and for the vampires in The Vampire Diaries universe, a major one is vervain. The herb both weakens vampires and serves to protect humans because of its effects on vampires but there’s one thing that the show was pretty inconsistent about: how readily available vervain actually was. Some storylines saw the vervain being plentiful while other times it was a hard-to-get commodity. At some point, it’s noted that the growth, use, and sale of vervain is tightly controlled in Mystic Falls, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case leaving fans wondering what the deal with the herb really was.

Who is Nadia’s Father?

Season 5 of The Vampire Diaries introduced a major surprise within Katherine’s backstory with the introduction of her daughter, Nadia Petrova. Arriving in Mystic Falls as an adult and also a vampire, there are plenty of questions about Nadia. It’s revealed that Nadia was born to Katherine in Bulgaria in 1490 but was taken away from her mother at birth and given away. Katherine looked for her daughter years later after having escaped Klaus but never found her. The series offers only light details about Nadia’s life — that she was looking for her mother in Northern Europe circa 1520 and then again in France in 1720, but we’re never really told who her sire is or who her biological father was, or if it had any significance.

This is another “unanswered question” that actually does have an answer, however: a deleted scene from Season 5 reveals that Nadia’s father was a Traveler, making him a member of a subculture of witches that has been around for millennia.

What Ultimately Happened to Katherine?

The series finale for The Vampire Diaries neatly tied up the stories for the series’ main characters, showing their fates and even giving a glimpse into their afterlives. Fans were able to walk away from the series knowing that Damon, Elena, Jenna, Stefan, Lexi, and the Gilbert family all found peace in the end, that Enzo got his own pocket universe, that Caroline went on to found the Salvatore School. However, Katherine’s actual fate is let a little ambiguous. Yes, she was destroyed by Hellfire with Stefan, but Katherine had previously been to both Hell and The Other Side and came back each time. Given her villain status, it seems unlikely that she would find peace. Did she end up in a pocket universe? Was she simply erased from all planes of existence? It’s suggested that the Hellfire destroyed her fully but given how the series played with the concept of destruction and bad guys, not getting a very specific breakdown of things has left fans wondering, at least a little.

The Vampire Diaries is now streaming on Peacock and Max.