“Julie Plec: In that scene where she's crying in the Salvatore great room as she's coming out of this memory, I finally found my voice for the show, which was this is a show about the fear of loneliness and the fear of being left behind and the fear of getting to the end of your life and not having loved or been loved in the right way, or losing your love and not ever being able to see them again. Moving forward, every episode had to have that emotional core in it as well. So we're building the formula for Vampire Diaries writing in real time over the course of the third season..... And the ratings started going up, which never happens. That's the moment I took a breath. The ratings, which had been pretty steady for two seasons, started ticking up. We all were like, 'Okay, no one's fired, no one's getting canceled.”