EW has a new interview up with Julie Plec and it talks about the Finale and what’s to come next, if you have not watched last nights episode do not continue!

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How long have you known Elena would end season 3 in transition to become a vampire?
JULIE PLEC: The ending had been in the works for about two years. In the first series of books, that’s what happens to her. When Kevin [Williamson] and I first came on the show, we said, “Well, it can’t happen to her the way it happens in the books,” which is on, like, page 200 of the first book. [Laughs] That felt obviously too soon, and rushed, and we didn’t want to make a show about a teenage girl who instantly becomes a vampire. But we always knew that her journey would take her there eventually, and we just kept riding the wave of when it felt right. You’ve got a girl who just sorta lost her last adult living family member when Aunt Jenna died last year, so when we started this season, what we really wanted to do was begin this relationship with Alaric as her guardian and mentor, and then tear that away from her at the end leaving her and her brother with nobody. It felt like now was the time — when you’re left with no grownup, no adult supervision, no parent, no guardian — for Elena to experience the next evolution of her journey. All the stuff that we did with having her get stronger over the course of the year, training and getting in touch with her physical self, and all the grief and all the emotion that she went through, all the compassion that she has for everybody, it will all play into next year and what kind of person and vampire she will actually be — if she should choose to see the transition through.

Obviously, she will transition.
There will be a discussion to be had about it at the beginning, but the road we’re going down is pretty balls out.

It wasn’t until that moment when ghost Alaric appeared to Jeremy that I was like, wait a minute, they could conceivably kill Elena because Nina Dobrev would still be on the show as Katherine.
We’re pretty notorious for being willing to go there and do radical things that other people wouldn’t necessarily feel good about doing, so there was a sense of fun in that moment. People were gonna be thinking, poor Matt, he’s such a goner, and mourning him in that moment and not even thinking ultimately that Elena was in any kind of jeopardy. So when that happened, it’s just like, Oh s—! Continue Reading at EW