We’ll be posting more material from the recent Vampire Diaries press Q&A on KSiteTV as the week progresses, but for those of you who have been loyal VampireSite.net visitors, we’re also going to post Executive Producer Julie Plec‘s take on the rumors that there will be a lot of deaths before the season finale.

“The term ‘a lot of deaths’ is something that has been circulating on the Internet a lot from different sources. I think all I’ve ever said is that there will be some severe and tragic consequences, and the loss of life would be extreme over the last several episodes, so I wanted to dispel any number value that has been placed on anything in the spoiler universe,” she says. “But, you know. We said from the beginning it’s a vampire show, and in vampire shows, the stakes are high and the death count has to match that, because if we don’t follow through on the stakes that we’re setting out – if you don’t believe that the consequences are life and death, then we’re not doing our job. And unfortunately, we’ve set into motion, unfortunately for our characters, this ritual that needs a lot of sacrificial elements, and so if that ritual happens, and when it happens and how it happens, if it goes off without a hitch, there will be a lot of loss of life. Maybe what we were thinking of at the beginning of the year, we could have modified it a little bit, but yeah. We had to pay off what we set up.”

“For us, it’s actually the pain of having to let go of somebody in the family, because it has nothing to do with the job they’ve done or who they are; it has to do with story, and it’s a very, very, very painful decision to have to make for the family. So we think about that first. And if story still prevails, taking all of the emotional stuff out of it and the personal stuff out of it, then we know it’s the right decision, and we hope that the audience trusts our decision as storytellers to make those right decisions,” she continues. “There will be decisions that are not popular, always. There will be characters that you think are gone – as we’ve seen, we’ve seen again…. Lexi was one and done, and then [we] made her return. So we do have ways of letting our audience see their fan favorites again over time. It does not come lightly.”

Stay tuned for more Vampire Diaries coverage in the coming days and be sure to watch “The Last Day” Thursday, April 28 on The CW!