With less than a month left before the season 7 premiere of the CW's "The Vampire Diaries", the official title of the premiere episode has been revealed as "Day one of twenty-two thousand, give or take."
The episode, written by Caroline Dries and directed by Pascal Verschooris, will be the first season premiere without Nina Dobrev's character Elena Gilbert. Although Dobrev exited as a series regular, she will still be a character on the show, and we'll hear the other characters mentioning her throughout the season.
However, the central storyline will be the relationship of the Salvatore brothers – Damon and Stefan – with their mother, Lily.
"It's this love triangle, if you will, which we've created between Damon, Stefan and Lily," Dries told The Hollywood Reporter. "Lily has naturally entered as the third point in the triangle."
The brothers have a very complicated relationship with their mother; they love and hate her at the same time. "They love her, and care for her, in different ways," Dries acknowledged. "They hate her, they have mixed feelings towards her, they have resentment, they love her, because they used to love her and she raised them. They feel guilty because she died and they didn't know she was still alive. There's just a million emotions."
Things will further be complicated by the presence of Lily's other family, the heretics. The vampire witches will wreak havoc in Mystic Falls, costing a lot of human lives. Their relationship with Lily's biological children will also be a tensed one.
"It's not cool at all that she left us and had this entirely new family that we're not even a part of," actor Ian Somerhalder, who plays Damon Salvatore, told TVLine. "She treats us like we're outcasts, like we're the bastard children. There are a lot of dynamics floating around, so I don't know where Damon's going to go from here."
"The Vampire Diaries" returns to the CW in October.
