question, since you seem to be fairly solid on the meta of being human: why would Hal's blood make it a "true trinity" when the only requirements is "blood of a vampire, werewolf, and ghost". What made Hal special and why wouldn't the other vampire's blood work?
It’s a good question: did it really have to be Hal’s blood that was used in the ritual to destroy the Devil, back in 1918? If so, then it was Hal’s fault that the Devil escaped and, ultimately, many of the tragic events of series 5 can be laid at Hal’s door. But was it really so critical that it was Hal’s blood — and if so, why? I can think of various explanations.
Firstly, it’s possible that Emil was wrong. Maybe the blood could have come from any vampire, and the ritual was performed by a true trinity, after all. The reason that it didn’t work was that the ritual itself was flawed or inadequate, and that it never had the power to kill the Devil.
(The people whose blood was used in the ritual — Catherine and the unnamed vampire — died as a result. However, that only proves that a person was linked to the ritual once their blood has been used. It does not prove that a specific individual had to provide the blood in the first place. And those deaths don’t prove that the ritual went wrong. In 5x06 the Devil claimed that, even if it worked, the ritual would result in the deaths of all participants.)
Alternatively, Emil might have been correct. Perhaps it had to be Hal’s blood, not the blood of any other vampire — and that brings us back to the main puzzle: why Hal?
Maybe there was something inherently different, or more powerful, about Hal that made his blood more effective. I don’t see that as very likely, though. As far as we know, there is nothing particularly unusual about Hal. He’s not the oldest vampire in the world and there are no ancient prophecies about him. He’s not even the only vampire to periodically rediscover a conscience.
Perhaps it had to be Hal who performed the ritual because he was the leader of the vampires, just like Catherine was the leader of the werewolves. However, Hal was a local (or military) leader, rather than the overall leader of the vampires. (That would have been Mr Snow.) And surely Emil could not have been the leader of the ghosts. Unlike the vampires and werewolves, we’ve never seen the ghosts banding together to form communities and hierarchies. (Perhaps that’s because most ghosts only stay on earth for a relatively short time, while they complete their unfinished business.)
But if there’s nothing inherently unique or powerful about Hal himself, then why would it have to be his blood that was used in the ritual? Perhaps because the ritual named (or otherwise identified) the participants, and the blood had to belong to those participants. The parts of the ritual that we saw in 5x01 were quite elaborate, involving incantations and a magical circle on the ground. Maybe the participants were named in the incantation, or perhaps they had to stand in a particular spot. In this way, the ritual might have identified the specific individuals who were supposed to provide the blood, and so it would fail if the blood belonged to a different person.
But 5x01 was not the only time we saw the ritual performed … and this is where the waters become even muddier. In 5x06, the current trinity made two attempts to perform the ritual. However, both attempts happened when the trio were inhabiting the “dream world” created by the Devil. (To clarify, in case this differs from generally accepted wisdom, I believe that the trio inhabited a form of artificial reality from the moment that the Devil first “pulled the trigger” in the TV studio, and that they stayed in a form of fake reality for the rest of the series.)
But even if the dream world was not real, then it must have been realistic. Hal believed that he was facing the Devil, and he believed that he could use the ritual to destroy him. He carried out that ritual in a way that fitted with his existing knowledge of how the ritual worked. And the ritual as Hal performed it in 5x06 was a lot simpler than what we saw in 5x01. There were no incantations or other magical trappings, simply the act of mixing and drinking the vampire and werewolf blood. In 5x06, the ritual did not seem to include any way of magically identifying who would provide the blood. That argues that it was unimportant whose blood was used, as long as it belonged to a werewolf and a vampire.
Of course, there is another possible explanation for the questions surrounding the ritual: bad script writing. Given the very patchy writing that was the bane of series 5, I’m afraid that I find this explanation the most plausible of all.
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