Julie Plec blogs the season 3 premiere of The Originals 

The Mikaelson family is extremely complicated, and who better to untangle that drama than Julie Plec? The

showrunner will blog each week’s installment throughout the season exclusively for EW. From answering burning questions to giving behind-the-scenes stories and more, this is a place for fans to hear directly from Plec about the episode they just watched.

For the first entry, we gave Plec five burning topics/questions to discuss in regards to the season 3 premiere:

It’s so great. A lot of times when you’re a writer on a show you seek out your actors’ special skills over the years — somebody knows how to sing or play an instrument, you try to find clever ways to write that in. Well Daniel [Gillies] has been hitting the boxing gyms pretty fiercely since the beginning of the series. In fact, one of our writers, Declan [de Barra], fights, [and] that’s how they met before the show even started — Declan was training at the same gym as Daniel. It’s been fun to integrate that into our New Orleans universe.

And for Marcel to be able to have his own space where he can vet future vampires and make sure that they’re strong of hearts and minds and body before he gets them into this mess is really important too.

It’s funny because when we were talking about what flashbacks to do and what era to set them in, we talked about everything that we’ve already done over all the centuries and we collectively realized that we had never told the story of how they became who they are. We told the story of how they became Originals but not how they went from the backwoods of 9th century undiscovered New World into the posh worldly European kings and queens that they are. So we wanted to start them from nothing and tell the story of how they became refined and creative and all those wonderful things. This was our way of doing that. 

What Lucien’s doing to self-mutilate ties into his backstory, how he became a vampire, and how he was put down by those who were of better stature than he. He definitely was a victim of cruelty. He scars himself again and again to make sure he never forgets where he came from. Believe it or not, it’s called a Glasgow smile. 

I think if anything this tea up of Aurora is telling the audience:

2. It’s meant to make us wonder, what’s wrong with her? She seems a little off-kilter.

We just caught a quick glimpse of her in the flashbacks and there are many more episodes to come in which we dig much deeper into her backstory and understand her volatility, her demons, and how ultimately she and perhaps one of our Original siblings might be very well suited to each other, at least in a beautiful, destructive way. This is just a little tease of what’s to come for her.

We get to see a nice smattering of flashback Rebekah this season and we do get to see a good visit with her in the present day. Obviously we like to time our Rebekah visits for Christmas. It’s like our tradition, so fans can look forward to seeing her bring in the Yuletide cheer.

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