#to commentary

From the very beginning of this show there was a very troublesome aspect of the narrative around Marcel and the Mikaelsons. Marcel was a former slave who was rescued from slavery by Klaus and adopted as his son. They used a white savior idea to explain how this black man became the son of this powerful white man and got integrated into this all white original family. Instead of tackling this dynamic on screen the completely glossed over it. They never tackled how Marcel felt about that, if it had any effect on his mentally, how the mikaelsons adjusted to his presence in their life given his different racial background. It’s convenient to just pretend that the Mikaelsons and Marcel never even blinked at the racial difference because the Mikaelsons have been around for so long that race doesn’t register to them at all. Just like it’s convenient to pretend that Marcel never cared that the people that he now lived with were just sharing a table with and share the same skin color with the very people who have abused him and people who look like him. They basically painted a narrative where Klaus was an empathetic white savior for marcel...even went as far as to have marcel actually call him his savior more than once in canon, and Marcel was just incredibly grateful to have been saved. That’s as far as the discussion went.

They never addressed this aspect of the dynamic on the show and I suspect that it’s because they never sat down and thought about the racial implications of having a black former slave be  adopted into an all white family that saved him from slavery. The choice was careless and problematic from it conception.

The only reason this aspect hasn’t been super unsettling for 4 seasons now is because that little bit of history has been pretty much background noise in the narrative and they’ve avoided addressing anything about race explicitly. We all know that the way it was set up is troublesome but we don’t actively think about it during every interaction because we believe in Klaus’s genuine love for Marcel and their father and son dynamic. They basically took the easy way and lazy way out and said “let’s pretend that a racial difference doesn’t exist here” and they’ve gotten away with doing this for 4 seasons now.

This actually reminds me of Julie Plec’s comment about her practice of “colorblind” casting for her TV shows. Colorblind casting in theory is good for diversity since it would theoretically increase the likelihood of a minority being selected for a role. Colorblind casting is how Kat Graham was selected to play Bonnie Bennett despite the fact that in the books that inspired TVD Bonnie was white. Like I said,in theory this is great...however that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for how you handle these characters that you have made a minority in your narrative. Making Marcel a black man instead of a white man and having him considered a part of this family could be seen as a plus for diversity, but that doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility to handle the racial difference that are at play in a manner that doesn’t offend or push racist ideas. They don’t get to skate responsibility here by having the characters not openly acknowledge the racial difference, the racial difference is still there at the end of the day even if the writers are too lazy to tackle it.

It’s actually their reluctance to address the racial aspect from the very beginning that makes what happened in the episode last night so impossible to divorce race from the narrative that they have set up concerning marcel. (I have to give credit to my friend Amy being the one who originally raised this point during a discussion)

Let’s take a look at the build up to last night:

Marcel started the series as the King of New Orleans. Klaus comes to town and is envious of what Marcel has built and wants to take it back for himself. We learn that Marcel was actually Klaus’s son, he adopted him when he was a boy and raised him up until adulthood. Klaus was the one who even gave Marcel his name since he didn't’ have one previously due to being a slave. Klaus and Marcel have their share of clashes but in season 1 in particular we learn that Marcel has scars that Klaus couldn’t heal, but that there is still genuine love and a father son bond between the two of them.

This carries over into the rest of the seasons where Klaus and Elijah have an up and down relationship but from Klaus’s eyes that’s still his son. Along the way they introduce a past close relationship between Elijah and Marcel. Marcel was very close to Marcel until Klaus became jealous. Elijah, in an effort to appease Klaus and because he saw Marcel as Klaus’s path to redemption, very harshly distances himself from Marcel without explanation to Marcel. In their present day dynamic Elijah shows an open annoyance and hostility towards marcel. The audience gets no real explanation to the root of Elijah's present day behavior towards marcel and we see the two of them co-exist but it never goes beyond that.

One other wrinkle to the Mikaelsons and Marcel dynamic that was introduced was that when Marcel was a boy, Kol was jealous of how accepted in the family Marcel was while he still felt like an outsider. Kol was the first to truly express the opinion that Marcel was almost unworthy of his position in the family and to show resentment. There is an uneasy idea being perpetrated by Kol’s resentment, a white man resents a black boy for taking his place in the family. A white man can’t comprehend how this black child can be embraced by his brothers but he feels like an outsider looking in and resents the child and his family for it.

Once again the racial dynamics are never factored into this narrative, we are just to assume that Kol doesn’t see Marcel as a black child but just a child. We are to assume that he doesn’t see a former slave as unworthy of a position in his family over him, he just sees this colorless person who’s soaking up attention that he wants for himself. Once again the racial difference and how an idea like that might affect a black child who was born into oppression at the hands of people who look and at times act like Kol is never addressed.

Like with Elijah, Marcel is aware of the hostility Kol feels towards him, but the narrative never addresses how he felt about that beyond a simple “it hurt his feelings”. The narrative wants us to ignore the racial factors and go along with the idea that Marcel doesn’t question if these two white men show hostility towards him because of his blackness even though any child in that predicament would in fact wonder if his blackness is a factor in the behavior of the people he now sees as family. We are to never question if the racial difference is a factor in the dynamic. We are supposed to pretend that it would be exactly the same way if Marcel was white, even though there is no way of knowing that (and it’s highly unlikely) and even though Marcel would have never been a slave if he was a white character. His blackness is just supposed to be ignored for the sake of their narrative that lacks the sophistication required to address it properly.

They were already dangerously close to being blatantly racist at this point, it was mostly subtextual and they didn’t cross any big lines with the problematic things they did have in play so as a viewer it was easy to let it slide. It wasn’t perfect, but I, and I suspect many other viewers,  give their narrative the benefit of the doubt.

That changed in season 3. In season 3 we saw Elijah take his disdain for marcel up several notches. His previous annoyance and condescension turned into disdain and open hostility. He constantly talked to marcel like a child, used him as a flunky, and constantly went out of his way to make marcel feel less than. In season 2 they provided some basic explanation for his behavior, even if it wasn’t at all satisfactory, there was something there to explain why there was tension on both ends. However, in season 3 there was no exploration into why Elijah behaved the way he did with Marcel. His behavior got progressively more hostile with Marcel at a time when Marcel wasn’t an enemy. Marcel had aligned himself with their family. He protected Hayley, he protected Klaus even when he was no longer linked to him. He went along with all of Elijah’s plans and yet as the season went on Elijah started to treat Marcel worse and worse.

The way he spoke to Marcel all of last season and at times before has always made me particularly uncomfortable and the longer it went on without explanation the more it became harder and harder to divorce Marcel’s race from the equation. There have been times where Elijah has spoke to Marcel with such disdain and condescension he seemed one step away from calling him “boy”.

If you look at it at its most basic level you have a white man, an elitist white man, who speaks to a black man who was supposed to be a part of his family with open disdain that’s unexplained. None of this is addressed in depth. Marcel is allowed to talk back at times and argue with Elijah but Elijah’s behavior never shifts in a positive way, instead it gets increasingly hostile. Watching a white character speak to a black one with such open hostility consistently was unsettling a lot of times. This behavior was also never checked by any of the other characters. Everyone let it fly, including Klaus. The narrative never treated Elijah as if how he was behaving towards Marcel was wrong, it was just brushed off as just Elijah being Elijah. When you’re dealing with a black character who’s been thrust into a racial dynamic like the one Marcel was placed in with the Mikaelsons, Elijah being Elijah has different implications, especially when you add that to the already troublesome behaviors towards Marcel I mentioned before.

Elijah’s disdain towards Marcel often felt very targeted and unnecessarily harsh compared to his behavior with other characters and at some point it becomes hard to see Marcel as a colorless person who just so happens to be on the receiving end of elijah’s elitist condescension at that moment. When the abuse becomes that targeted and consistent it’s almost impossible to unsee Marcel’s blackness and how that blackness is at the receiving end of behavior that’s often perpetrated against black people in this inherently racist society. It’s also almost impossible to do when the narrative, in an effort to draw the least amount of attention to the racial dynamics on the show as possible, has never actually ruled out his race as a motivator for the behavior against him.

They’ve never had the characters explicitly or implicitly say “marcel what I’m doing right now has nothing to do with your race, your race doesn’t matter to me, your race is not relevant to my current feelings or how I view you”. They’ve never had the mikaelsons express any views on race at all, not even in a context outside of Marcel. Just like they’ve never had marcel himself actually question if his race plays a part in his treatment, not even as a way to rule it out within the narrative. There is only so far you can take a narrative like this, the audience won’t be able to keep pretending that my some miracle all of these characters are the super special exceptions who have nothing race related register to them in a society where race is a huge factor. We can’t just pretend that they are all the most open minded color blind people to ever exist forever. The audience definitely won’t be able to keep pretending that race isn’t a factor when the narrative starts to blatantly push racist tropes and ideas and when Marcel is consistently ostracized by the mikaelsons. That’s where I am with with originals at the moment.

Elijah’s disregard for Marcel in season 3 goes as far as having him take his life. When he killed Marcel I didn’t automatically think “wow this is racist”, but the way he handled killing marcel and the aftermath did leave me feeling uneasy. Marcel was a grieving man who had just lost his surrogate daughter because of a decision by elijah and freya. After initially trying to smooth things over with marcel Elijah reverts back to his usual uncaring and condescending attitude towards him. Marcel is placed in a scenario where Klaus, his father, is trying to convince him of his love for him to prevent him from making a rash decision that could harm them all. Klaus had spent almost an entire day with Marcel, trying to make him see that he’s still his family, that he’s still his son and that he doesn’t have to take this path that he is close to taking. Klaus proclaims that Marcel will always be his family. From Klaus’s POV there is still something redeemable in Marcel, still something valuable even if he’s currently a threat to his well being. That was important to establish in the narrative and Marcel is this close to accepting that and possibly reigning in his rage when Elijah shows up. Elijah comes and immediately contradicts everything Klaus had worked so hard to establish.

Elijah has no such empathy or care for Marcel. He immediately starts to hurl his vitriol towards him. Marcel even goes as far as commenting that Elijah is eying him like he’s a rabid dog. They actually made a black man compare himself to a rabid animal in the eyes of his white family member and they do nothing to suggest that Elijah doesn’t in fact see him as a rabid animal. It’s very hard to hear that and not be reminded of how black people, particularly black men have historically been viewed through a lens of suspicion and seen as uncontrollable animals that need to be brought to heel. The racism is bleeding through the seams of the narrative at this point.

Marcel is also in a position where a white man who has actually wronged him now gets to use the privilege of his inherent superiority to cast suspicion on to him as if he’s the bad guy, and he has to prove himself to this white man despite the fact that, as I said before, he’s the wronged party in this dynamic. This pushed the racist idea that no matter what, blackness is always the offending party. White people can abuse, kill, hurt people of color as much as they want, but the suspicion of malice will still fall on the shoulders of the person of color and the person of color will always be in a position of having to prove themselves. Whiteness is always given the benefit of the doubt. Elijah is absolved of his wrong doing towards Davina and Marcel because “it had to be done”, but blackness is always seen as inherently malicious, wrong, and intending to do harm no matter what. Marcel’s pain doesn’t matter, his hurt doesn’t matter, him being the victim doesn’t matter, the nuance to his behavior is irrelevant and never considered. He must prove that he’s not the monster in this dynamic despite being the party who has just been wronged and the true monster now gets to use his inherent privilege and serve as his judge,jury, and executioner.

Elijah ends up killing Marcel on the bridge. The funniest thing about this action is that it was allegedly done in the name of protecting the family, the family that Marcel no longer feels he is a part of, but it ends up being the very thing that leads to their downfall. When fandom talks about Elijah killing Marcel it’s always said that “he had to kill him he threatened Klaus” but there was a choice on that bridge. Marcel’s death was avoidable. Marcel could have changed his mind, he could have changed his path, he could have been given the benefit of the doubt. He took the Serum but he could have decided to never make the transition and even if he made the transition his relationship with Klaus could have been repaired. If any of that was considered the outcome of season 3 could have been completely different. Elijah didn’t care to consider any of those things though. He saw inherent evil in marcel, irredeemable evil and therefore he was disposed of as if he never mattered to begin with. It’s very difficult to take the fact that Marcel is a black male out of the equation here, but I tried to, I know many other people tried to, and were successful for a while but I can no longer view these events from a colorless lens.

I personally do not think that if that had been Hope on that bridge Elijah would have done the same thing. I think that the narrative would have shifted towards their being possible redemption for Hope, that some part of Elijah would have wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt even if it was proven to be a mistake later down the line. I do not think that Hope would have been regarded as having pure malice in her heart and as disposable in the way that Marcel was. Whiteness, especially white femininity, is seen as having innate purity and innocence. Even in the worse of situations white women are hardly ever viewed as pure evil completely devoid of any innocence. Black women and black males don’t have the luxury of getting that sort of treatment, not even when we are pure and innocent. If Hope was put in the same position as Marcel I don’t think the writers would have been able to stop that idea from bleeding into how they crafted the narrative. There would have been some sort of innocence still there for her, none of them would have seen her as truly being disposable the way marcel was viewed, they also would have more than likely allowed Hope the room in the narrative to actually be the victim and would have used her victimhood to excuse her threats and justify why she inevitably doesn’t meet a deadly end.

This whole thing is made worse by how they proceed to handle the aftermath of Marcel’s death. Klaus is gutted, and he questions if Elijah’s actions were truly necessary. Later Hayley is sent to Klaus to try to compel him to forgive him for his actions. Klaus makes a very good parallel by asking Hayley is she would be saying this if it had been Hope and Hayley immediately shuts down the comparison. She wasn’t the first character to shut down a comparison between Marcel and Hope, but the question was an extremely valid question. Everyone else was treating Marcel as if he wasn’t truly Klaus son, therefore it should be recoverable.

Their callous attitude towards the authenticity of Klaus and Marcel’s father son relationship is never addressed. It’s never explained why they might feel that way, they just do. By doing that they pushed a very problematic narrative about Marcel vs Hope because in Klaus’s eyes they are indeed the same. Marcel is his son, he looked him in his eyes and told him that he was just as if he was his blood. Hope is also Klaus’s child, so would everyone be telling him to let it go if it had been Hope? This question is never answered explicitly in the narrative but it’s clear that the implied answer is no.I also personally believe that the answer is no because If they truly believed that Marcel was his son they would have been more empathetic towards his grief. Hayley, who grieved the temporary loss of her own child in season 2, would have been able to understand klaus’s grief and would have probably never asked him to forgive elijah mere hours after Marcel had died.Hayley would not be okay with it if it had been Hope, no one would have been okay with Elijah doing that to Hope. So what’s the difference between the two of them?

Any answer you come up with is troublesome because the most basic answer is that Marcel is not Klaus’s biological son, which pushes a very harmful narrative concerning biological vs adoptive children. If the difference isn’t biological vs adoptive then we have to look at race next which makes it  even more troublesome. Can we really definitively say that if Marcel was a white girl like Hope, or even a white male he would have been rejected so fervently as an equal to Hope? Honestly we can’t and I personally don’t believe he would have been. So we have this narrative crafted where the black male adoptive son of a white man is not regarded as an equal to his white female biological daughter. It’s a very ugly and racist narrative to have in place, and it’s never addressed or corrected, instead this idea is actually allowed to proliferate further into the narrative later on in the series and it becomes even more offensive.

When the current season picks up Marcel comes face to face with Elijah again, he expresses his rage and hurt to both Elijah and Hayley about how Elijah, who was supposed to be his family killed him while klaus stood back and did nothing. Later Marcel expresses bitterness about how his family, the mikaelsons didn’t stick together with him and Kol completely dismisses Marcel’s feelings and tells him that he was never a Mikaelson so he needs to just get over it. Not one of the Mikaelson siblings correct Kol or show any open feelings of unease towards this statement, not even Klaus.

You have this black man who is very clearly hurt that the family he loved turned their backs on him and the response to that pain and bitterness is that he was never one of them. As usual there is never an explanation for why they may feel he was never one of them. The imagery alone is uncomfortable because you have this herd of white people who have pledged allegiance to each other collectively rejecting the sole black member of their family. It’s all of these white people against a black man. To add even more insult you have Hayley included as a part of the Mikaelson fold, a woman whose sole claim to family relation is through a child she birthed. Hayley, a white woman is eagerly accepted as a part of the family, yet the black adoptive son who they have all played some part in rearing since he was a child is the sole person on the outside looking in for no real explainable reason. It was established that it was only his recent actions making him an outsider it would be different, but that’s not the narrative, the narrative is that he’s always been an outside. It’s hard to look at the scene and not see the racial divide. It sticks out like a sore thumb and yet were are expected to ignore it. It’s hard to look at their rejection of Marcel and not see a rejection of blackness in a dynamic that is exclusive to white people. It’s hard to look at that scene and not see a message that says to a black person that regardless of your proximity to whiteness, ultimately you are not good enough to actually be seen as an equal among them. They might even pretend that you are for a while, but eventually you will get your rude awakening that you aren’t. Black people deal with that harsh reality all too often in white spaces in real life.

I think in the writers minds this entire exchange is okay because Marcel is seemingly the one with the power here. He’s the one who can chose whether they live or die, can stay or leave but that power they give him is superficial at best. Where it truly counts in the narrative he is powerless. They hold all of the power in the family dynamic with is the true core of the dynamic. They hold the power to accept or reject him as an equal and given the racial differences, placing that power solely in the hands of whiteness perpetuates the racist idea that for a person of color equality is not inherent to your identity, it is completely at the mercy of whiteness. Regardless of how powerful you are, their privilege and power always reigns supreme.

They think that they allow Marcel to regain his power here by proclaiming that he’s proud he’s not a mikaelson, but when you look at the character you can’t erase the hurt and pain the he just expressed and the nuance to his behavior. He proclaims that he’s proud he’s not a Mikaelson but it is a shallow show of power, we are all still very aware of who holds the true power in the dynamic because narratively he is indeed still very hurt and bitter about his rejection. His entire speech was given out of a need to cope with his rejection in the first place. So this facade they make Marcel put on is just that, a facade, which does nothing to erase the racism embedded in the narrative. The fact that he even has to feel the need to prove himself better or that he’s perfectly okay without their validation is bothersome because it’s something many black people have to do to cope with a lack of validation we often experience in white spaces.

They could have used that opportunity to assert that Marcel was family, they could have at the very least made Klaus correct Kol, but they did nothing. Instead they just let the idea that Marcel is not an equal just continue sit unchecked in the narrative like they had been doing before.

While we have this ugly family narrative going on the writing also manages to find itself in more hot water by unnecessarily vilifying Marcel. Granted this offense is smaller than some of the others but it’s still an offense.

Hope Mikaelson is affected by a deadly curse. Marcel allows the mikaelson family to return to Nola to help her. It’s finally explicitly said in the narrative that Hope is Marcel’s little sister and he’s empathetic towards her plight and the plight of children so he temporarily ends their exile.

All of the characters are aware that they are only back because Marcel has shown some come compassion. He’s doesn’t even interact with them again once they return….and yet when Hayley decides to go to try to talk to him Elijah feels the need to stop her and warn her to be fearful of him. Marcel has never ever tried to harm Hayley in any way. He’s actually protected her several times. The entire time the original family was put down Marcel never tried to harm Hayley and he actually tried to protect her and Hope from the henchmen of Klaus’s enemies. Elijah has even seen Marcel’s unwillingness to harm Hayley with his own eyes. So you have to ask the question why did Elijah feel the need to instill a sense of fear or weariness towards Marcel in Hayley? Why was he vilified when he was the one currently allowing them back and had done nothing towards Hayley to deserve it? Why did Hayley have to be careful? It was unnecessary and unwarranted, and yet this vilification was still there.

I can’t help but think of the historical context of what was demonstrated. There is a history of portraying black men as evil waiting in the wings to harm fragile white women. White men have seen it as their duty to protect their women from these savage men, you can’t trust them, it doesn’t matter how they behave, they are inherently unhinged and unpredictable. They were seen as rabid dogs just waiting to take a bite out of fragile and pure white woman. White women must always stay on alert when they’re around these black men, they can never be too careful.

If felt like that same idea was being pushed here with Elijah and Hayley. There was no reason to have that scene with elijah and hayley in the narrative it did absolutely nothing for the plot or the characters so I can’t help but wonder if it’s there because once again their racism is seeping through the seams of their writing. It felt completely unwarranted and inappropriate given the racial differences and yet no one in the writers room stopped and said “you know what this isn’t even needed and it has some uncomfortable racial undertones so maybe we should cut it”. If they would have had that conversation they maybe they would have seen some of the ugly undertones, but that never happened.

I honestly wish it had because maybe if they talked about these things we would have never gotten the blatantly racist scene between Elijah and Marcel in the most recent episode. The scene at the end of 305 is was the last straw for many of us minority viewers. There is no way around how uncomfortable it made many of us feel and there is just no way it can be glossed over like many of their past offenses have been.

They made Elijah come to Marcel as he’s  imprisoned in a dungeon and taunt him with the idea that he is pretty much worthless because he can no longer serve as a conduit for Klaus’s redemption. He mocks him with the idea that he maybe saw him as a son in the past, further pushing the idea that marcel really wasn’t family at all to him. He throws the fact that Klaus’s daughter, not marcel, had changed Klaus in his face and then harshly tells him that he is not needed, welcomed or wanted. Then he tells him that he’s only still breathing because his brother is weak but then pledges to do to Marcel what Klaus was too weak to do. He’s

appalled that Klaus, when faced with the same decision he had in season 3, would choose to risk it all for Marcel instead of kill him like he did and pledges to show no such mercy to him.

It honestly made my skin crawl watching it. Elijah’s behavior was unnecessarily cruel and the level of disdain he displayed towards Marcel, combined with his words made it all feel blatantly racist.

Here you have a white man admit that the only reason he saw any worth in this black man was because he thought he could be used as a conduit for redemption for his white brother. You have to remember that Marcel was a slave, so the only reason he ever saw any value in his household for this little black boy his brother rescued from oppression was because he made his brother a good man and could be used to further his development into the person he wanted him to be. Now that he sees that he is no longer useful for this goal, and might work against his progress he sees him as nothing more than a pile of flesh just sucking up air and getting in the way. He rejects Marcel in every way possible, completely taking away all of his value. Now that  Klaus has his pure white biological daughter Marcel is as useful as a stranger off the street to him. He’s nobody, he’s nothing. All of Marcel’s worth was tied to how he could serve a white character. Having a white man cruelly degrade a black man in that manner to prop up a white character is so blatantly racist I’m honestly flabbergasted that no one stopped it from happening.

How could they see that and not see how horrid it was? Or maybe they did see it but they felt like the blatant racism was just an unfortunate consequence of their writing and the payoff from the scene was worth putting it out there despite the racism. Either way it was such a terrible thing to do. As I mentioned when I first started this meta analysis, they had a responsibility to handle Marcel’s character with care and they grossly failed at doing that. You don’t have to treat Marcel like a special snowflake because he’s black, but because he’s black you absolutely can not push a narrative where his entire value as a living being is tied to a white character and where once that value has been maxed out treat him as disposable flesh. It’s careless and offensive.

It is almost impossible to divorce Marcel’s blackness from that scene and from the dynamic they set up. Elijah sounded like a slave master taunting his property with the idea that they are running out of value so they are probably gonna be dead soon. He lorded over Marcel, cruelly taking blow after blow to his worth as a person before threatening to basically kill him. This is why I had such a problem with the scene where Marcel tells the Mikaelsons that he is glad he wasn’t one of them and called it shallow, because in 3x05 it’s confirmed that the person with the real power is Elijah. Marcel is physically stronger than the Mikaelsons, in every way possible he is their better, and yet at the end of the day this black man is still completely and utterly powerless and this white man is the one with the true power. Marcel lives and breaths according to his will only and apparently it’s been that ways from Elijah’s eyes since the day Klaus took Marcel in.

It was honestly so ugly that I almost couldn’t even watch it all the way through. There is no way you can expect a black viewer to just ignore the historical context of Elijah’s words and actions and Marcel’s blackness to make it all just okay and not be offensive.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if we had some indication that Elijah isn’t a racist and none of his behavior towards Marcel are racist microaggressions, but we don’t know that and honestly often times that’s exactly how his behavior comes off towards Marcel. Maybe this wasn’t intentional on their part, but at some point a certain level of awareness has to come if you are going to have any real integrity as a writer. There should have been more awareness here but there wasn’t and as a result many of us were left offended and frustrated.

I don’t believe for a second that Elijah would have treated Hope the same way or told her the same cruel words that he told Marcel. I’m sure many people will try to argue that he totally would, but I honestly just do not see it if not for the basic reason that I don’t think his disdain towards hope would ever be allowed to be as strong as it is towards Marcel.Just like I don’t think they would have ever insinuated that Hope’s only value to the world is as a conduit for Klaus’s redemption. Elijah wouldn’t tell Hope that she’s unwanted, unwelcome, and unneeded and then pledging to kill her. What Elijah told Marcel was basically the equivalent of telling him he could have stayed a slave, I don’t think they would ever tell Hope she would have been aborted by Hayley that day she considered it in season 1. They have built her up as this super special child who comes before them all, while Marcel has been the habitual afterthought and torn in their side so to my it would have been different.

Since the episode aired I’ve seen several justifications for Elijah’s behavior. The main one being that Elijah wasn’t being racist, he was just being elitist which is typical for his character. I feel like this is probably how the writers saw it in their heads, but honestly the elitist justification doesn’t fly with me because in most white dominated spaces where Elitism persists racism also co exists. You would be hard pressed to find a real life hyper-elitist like Elijah who is not also racist. White dominated spaces like Academia have always been accused of being incredibly elitist, and one big problem with this elitism is the rejection of blackness in these spaces that often goes hand in hand with this elitism. Many of the people who inhabit these elitist spaces are guilty of stereotyping and having a racial bias that leads to discrimination and racism. Now I know this isn’t a perfect parallel for Elijah, but I think the principle still basically applies. Among white people where an elitist mindset persists usually so does a racist mindset as well. An Elitist enacting their beliefs against a person of color is usually enacting racist behavior.

It’s for these reasons that I don’t think that Elijah can be absolved of his racism in this racist narrative, he’s the tool they used to push all of the ideas they set forth. If this was indeed not out of character for him then Elijah Mikaelson just might have some race issues that the writers need to check or think about when they decide to write for him in his dynamic with Marcel. If they don’t then we will continue to see the racist narrative they’ve set up in the future.

Maybe if they had actually spent time thinking about Elijah as a character and finding ways to flesh him out they could have avoided the blatant racism they showed in that last episode and some of the racist undertones that have been present in the past. They failed to do this, which did a major disservice to their story and If they don't’ check themselves and the messages they are sending they will continue to do a disservice to their show and in the process alienate viewers who at one point genuinely enjoyed the writing.

I used to love this show, I used to see such great depth to the writing, but I’m at a frustrating crossroads now. There is only so many times you can watch a TV show and have the narrative offend you or blatantly insult your intelligence before you completely give up. Based on the responses of several fellow black viewers after the episode I’m not the only one who is at this crossroads. The Originals needs to do better. They have to do better if they are going to keep this show going and keep expecting us to trust them with minority character that are important for representation. How they handle characters like Marcel matters, the messages they send with these characters matters. That’s why despite my initial reluctance I decided to write this long winded take down of their racism. These things might seem small or overblown to some of you, but as a black viewer these things are important, they register to us even when they might not register to a non-black person. As a black woman I don’t have the privilege of being able to escape my race and how my blackness is handled and perceived on the day to day basis, not even when it comes to fiction. This is why more thought needs to be put into narratives that involve people from marginalized groups.