One of my favorite things about Caroline and her girls are that they are both like her. Josie is exactly who Caroline started out as, and Lizzie is exactly who Caroline ended up as. Neither one is more like her or more different from her. They are just her at different times in her life.

I can't believe that the Gemini twin curse has been around since the beginning of the trilogy and we still then get a wrap up on it at the end of the series. No origin story, no confirmation on the way around it, no confirmation on what happens if you go past your 22nd birthday. Nothing.

For having maybe 20 minutes of screen time in all four seasons, disappearing 14 episodes in, and barely being mentioned again, Penelope Park really is one of the most iconic Legacies characters and I think a big part of that is because they just let her be so unapologetically herself.

I wish, if anything, that Lizzie got to remember the Salvatore School from the genie worlds and got to tell Josie. I feel like they took that place for granted, not just the money and the breakfast bar, but also the safety and inclusion. It was always just kind of a given that their mother and their father had made this school for them. I think Lizzie didn't appreciate that until she saw what her life and her twin would have been like in a human school.

It's kind of unspoken for the rest of the series, but that school changed both of their lives. Both of them were worse off not being coddled and spoiled. As much as I think Alaric not raising them with any sort of discipline whatsoever led to a lot of the issues with them, they fared much better than they would have in a human school with no/neglectful parents.

There's something so sad about how absolutely sure Lizzie is that she's broken. She's had this ingrained into her head since she was eleven that there was something wrong with her. Her parents tell her there's not, of course, but they're hardly around. Their influence is so small compared to the one family member who is a constant in her life that is always making her feel like she's less-than and a burden.

Josie's the only one around her to see what's going on, to see how much she suffers and struggles, and she takes every opportunity to remind Lizzie that being there for her isn't free. She's already convinced there's something fundamentally wrong with her and now she thinks she's accruing debt just for asking for help, just because Josie demands payment in return for empathy.

She tries so hard to help people. She makes the Sewing Club for a girl in her class who is feeling left out, she gives new kids tours of the school and offers to be their friend, she makes all of the witches come up with a new dance routine to cater to Josie's ideas, she tries to join the Honor Council so she can do things like convince her dad to let kids like Landon stay and have a home and things like making sure the school is a safe place from these new monsters. And then at every single corner, she gets these attempts thrown back in her face or her peers pretend like they never happened. She's so sure that it must be her. There must be something wrong with her that makes them hate her so much.

Even when she finds out that her sister read her diary to the class and was the one who told everyone about her bipolar diagnosis, she's so forgiving. She lets go of a ten-year-long feud with Hope the moment Hope apologizes and acknowledges her. She's always forgiving MG for crossing boundaries and hurting her. She thinks that if she's nice enough to them, maybe eventually they'll be nice back. She kills herself trying.

She sacrifices her life over and over and over again without batting and eye and this is perhaps the most concerning thing about her mental state but she thinks it's the greatest and only thing she has to offer. She's willing to die for her friends and her family and her classmates, only for them to immediately turn around and call her selfish for it, to laugh at her funeral after she's laid down her life for them again. And she just doesn't understand how that's possible. She thinks it has to be her fault. It must be, she must have done it wrong.

She tries to be the strong one, she tries to shoulder the burden her sister always talks about, and then she gets beaten down for taking up too much space, for casting too big of a shadow. She tries to be the hero, breaks her back trying to save the day, like her father always talks about in Hope, and then she gets lectured about how that's not important. She tries to live her own life, tries to not suffocate Josie, and in turn, she gets told that she was too self-centered and distant. No matter what she does, it's never enough. She's convinced that she's not enough.

Her whole life she hears that her disorder isn't an excuse, that she should just take her meds even if they make her feel awful, that she should just try harder, that her disorder isn't real, that it's her own fault, that she's just doing it for attention, that she's delusional or lying or crazy or all three.

She has no idea how deeply that's sunk into her very being until Aurora starts telling her that people will always try to tell her that she's broken and that she can't believe them. And Lizzie's so close to figuring it out. So close. She knows what Aurora went through wasn't her fault, that Tristan was the problem. She's almost figured out that what she went through isn't her fault, that Josie is the problem.

She's adamant that her family would never have done what Aurora's did to her in her day. She doesn't see that they've done worse. It's such a shame that she only finally got there in the last season and her story was cut abruptly before it really got started.

I hope wherever Lizzie Saltzman ended up, whatever Season 5 would have had in store for her, she remembered that she's not broken.

No because Caroline keeping the dress that Klaus gave her through all those years and handing it down to her daughters and Lizzie keeping it tucked away safely in the top of her closet for a long time thinking it's the most beautiful dress she's ever seen so it obviously has to go on the most beautiful girl she's ever seen without knowing that it belonged to that girl's dead father is just so poetic and brilliant.