Not long into the fifth season premiere for

The episode gets off to a steamy start between the gymnastics of Elena/Damon and Matt/Rebekah/Nadia, but there are already signs of impending weirdness. Despite getting killed off, Bonnie is still part of the equation, which makes me wonder if being dead will make her any more interesting or relevant. And Katherine is on the run from the many enemies that she made while being a vampire. Oh, and Stefan is doing his best Angel impression, locked in a safe in the ocean, drowning over and over again.

Rather than take its time with introducing the new status quo, The Vampire Diaries ramps up the plot acceleration by having Silas tip his hand to just about everyone and then launch his search and eviscerate mission against Katherine on a community scale. Silas is not one to mince words, despite loving to hear himself talk, and that means killing Bonnie’s father and threatening to kill Caroline’s mother, all with a relatively casual attitude about the whole thing. It sets a standard that may be difficult to maintain.

One wild card in the whole business is Megan, the short-lived surprise roommate of Elena and Caroline. She seemed to be intentionally introduced as a long-term problem, an unexpected intruder into the lives of our favorite vampiric coeds, and one that knew a lot more about vampires than she was admitting. And then she was killed. Not that death means much on The Vampire Diaries, but that was a bit of a twist. Not to mention that Megan had a picture of Elena and her father on her phone, which definitely portends more to come.

It was also nice to see that the threesome in the opening wasn’t all decadent pleasure, as apparently Nadia was specifically targeting Matt and Rebekah for some dark purpose. While it may just be a plot-driven excuse for a potential crossover with The Originals, since Rebekah is supposed to be migrating over to the spinoff in short order, it’s possible that there is something specific to Matt and his story this season that will cover Nadia’s involvement.

Ironically, Tyler was mentioned more often than Rebekah, yet I have absolutely no desire to see Tyler return to Mystic Falls. Caroline was a lot more interesting in the early days, when she was a newly minted (and libidinous) vampire and unattached. With Elena locked in the endless Salvatore Family Drama, Caroline’s single vampire adventures could be fun. Yet when it comes to Matt, I really wish he could have stayed with Rebekah. They took all that time to develop the relationship, make it convincing, and now it’s effectively over.

It’s a solid start to the season, and with the main characters blissfully out of the high school years, maybe the show can wear its more adult trappings a little more comfortably. With the exception of Jeremy, the show is about the adventures of young adults (or apparent equivalents). And unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which struggled to figure out how to maintain its “high school as horror movie” theme after graduation, The Vampire Diaries has more freedom to branch out and explore new options.

John Keegan is Editor-in-Chief for Critical Myth, a partner site of SciFi Vision.