This week, “True Blood” uses Sookie and Eric’s sensual Aryan lovemaking to bookend the episode, which can only mean one thing: It’s all going to be downhill from here, folks. That’s the problem with finally getting what you (you = Sookie, Eric, the audience) want, right? Everything is great in the beginning, but suddenly you notice how your perfect scenario can’t live up to your expectations.
Look: I am all for New Eric. But New Eric is also kind of a little bitch, right? Like right in the middle of his first hookup session with the love of his (admittedly short-term) life, Eric has to fight off Bill when King Pouty-Face runs in to fangblock him. And since Eric is the older, stronger of the two vamps, he almost kills Bill (part one) until Sookie tells him not to, because that’s his king. Immediatly, Eric bends his knee and is all, “Your highness!”
Except why would no-memory Eric care who his king is? It’s his memory that was erased, not his personality, right? New Eric is sincere and naive to the point that it’s ridiculous to think that even as a human he acted like such a dopey-eyed idiot. I think Alexander Skarsgard went back and just watched “Titanic” a bunch of times to study for this character.
“Never let go … because I’m immortal.” – Eric Northman, 2011
But because he is just so New Eric, he is totally cool with this stranger calling himself king putting him in silver and taking him to a prison/dungeon. It’s a different part of Bill’s prison/dungeon from where he’s keeping Marnie, because there aren’t any really bright lights, and he’s not in a padded room.
Yet for some reason Eric is given the same cell as his rotting progeny Pam. Terrible idea, right? If Bill actually believes Eric is faking the whole amnesia thing, maybe he should just keep those two apart? It is a real oversight in the vampire prison system, but you know how it is, with all the overcrowding these days. Pam tells Eric he used to be a goddamn Viking warrior to try to get him to snap out of it, and Eric’s like, “I’m not the vampire I used to be. Not anymore.” Shut up, plaintive New Eric.
Pam also tells him that King Bill is a self-hating pompous little dork (or something to that effect), but since Eric is currently a self-hating, infatuated space cadet he doesn’t really get where she’s coming from. But it’s true: That self-hating pompous little dork Bill is going through the proper vampire channels to finally give the “true death” to Eric Northman. He’s such a slimy little twerp, made even worse because (spoiler alert) he can’t even go through with killing Eric after the blond vampire gives a speech about Sookie teaching him what love is (oooft), and how she deserves to be happy, even if it’s with Bill.
On a better show, or one that didn’t have to answer so completely to its fans, Bill could have been like “Mercy is a woman’s folly” (or something to that effect), and gone on with the staking. But instead Eric’s maudlin words melt the king’s heart and he lets the potentially dangerous vampire go have sex with his ex-girlfriend in the woods. (Let’s talk about them woods in a second.)
Bill letting Eric go doesn’t even make sense in the reality of a show populated by imaginary creatures. At the very least, Eric is under a spell, and has already eaten a fairy. Who knows what else he’ll do? And get this, Bill also lets Pam go, because Eric asked him to. Sure. Anything for the guy you were about to kill before he won you over with his innocent, boyish charm, right?
Pam takes her seriously disgusting face out of Compton’s house of horrors to go check up on kill Tara and her girlfriend. Oh yeah, Tara’s girlfriend has come down to confront her about not actually being Tony, the cagefighter with a shady past who she fell in love with. Who has this woman been telling her secrets to for the past six months?? (Wait, they’ve only been dating six months? Call me when you find out your husband has been lying to you about his entire life, à la “A History of Violence.” Six months is nothing. I don’t even know most guys’ last names until we’ve been together a year.) But then they end up making out on Lafayette’s floor and Alan Ball decides that he can throw another character onto this grill, no problem.
Also! This week we get to the bottom (sort of) of Arlene’s haunted house/ “Insidious” baby. It wasn’t the ghost of Renee who lit their house on fire and burned it to the ground, but some ghost nanny who is somehow linked with that charred doll that Jessica stole from Hoyt to give as a present to Arlene. And Alan Ball decides that he can throw a ghost nanny onto this grill, no problem. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with. Like the full moon later that night …
Sookie gets fired from Merlotte’s because Tommy accidentally shifted into his brother Sam’s body (ooft-ooft), and as Sam calls her out for being the worst waitress in the world. Fair point. Sookie is the world’s worst waitress. Oh welp. She bounces her little ponytail down the road to find her brother, Jason (who is basically Tommy but without any superpowers), handcuffed to his bed in case he turns into a werepanther. Sookie reminds Jason that if he morphs, the handcuffs will slip right off. I guess we’re all supposed to laugh and go, “Typical Stackhouse!” Except that I’m actually wondering who put the handcuffs on him in the first place. Right? Was it Hoyt, or … no, it actually must have been Hoyt. So that’s cool.
If I were Jason, I’d be sick of spending half of every season chained down to a bed. He just escaped a two week were-rape session that left him tied to a bed all day, wounds all festering: it’s weird that his first thought is to go right back to the cuffs.
But Sookie, having totally forgotten about Bill and Eric for the time being, decides to help her brother out by promising not to shoot him in the head if/when he morphs. But when the moon comes out, Jason’s vanished, and Sookie takes her shotgun* into the woods to find him. And boy are these woods bustling tonight. There’s Alcide and Debbie, on their way to a werewolf pack meeting, who stop long enough to give Sook some very helpful information about were-creatures needing to be born that way. They don’t change just because of a bite. Good to know, and also that is something that was just made up on the spot by the writers. I think a lot of werewolf mythology is based around the fact that getting scratched or bitten can change you into a lycanthrope, but what do I know? I’m not part of the Werewolf Cathedral, I don’t make the rules.
Jason is having a panic attack in the woods, which he takes as a sign that he’s shifting. Since he drank Jessica’s blood to heal himself, she vampire-runs out of work because she can feel his fear and a little piece of her will now always be inside of him. Like when you bake a cake for your boyfriend and then cut your hand so that you’ll always be inside of him — right, ladies? Not creepy! Jessica and Jason have a semi-romantic interlude in the woods, talking about … stuff. God knows. Jessica tells Jason he’s special, which I agree with, but for different reasons.
Not in the woods tonight are Jesus and Lafayette, who are visiting Jesus’ Wiccan pop-pop out in Mexico. His grandfather is sort of an asshole, but he seems kind of down with his grandson dating another guy, so who knows, maybe his family is more accepting of different lifestyles than most evil Mexican warlock dynasties. Then again, he does make Jesus catch a sacrificial rattlesnake only to let it bite his grandson in the jugular before locking him alone to die in a room with Lafayette. Luckily it’s all a test (of some sort) … Lafayette gets possessed by the spirit of a guy named Tio Luca, and chants some bruja B.S. to save his man.
The possessing process is actually kind of terrifying. It looks like that part of the ring where Samara can just sort of disappear and then reappear right in front of you, like a TV signal you can only half pick up. Getting possessed is almost exactly like that in “True Blood”: we see it both in the Lafayette scene, and when Marnie finally has that dead witch Antonia take control of her body fer keepsies. We also get another flashback to why Antonia hates vampires so much. It’s because one of them named Luis kept raping her during the Inquisition. Conveniently, Luis works for King Bill now. And he just has to go downstairs and check on what is up with their captive when she starts staring directly into her cell camera and creepy-smiling. Bad move, Luis. Now Antonia/Marnie is going to go exact revenge on all the vampires. Again, I blame the vampire prison situation; there should have been more than one guy hanging out in the control room when shit goes down. What is this, a “Die Hard” film? Where are all of Bill’s military henchmen during this situation? That is what you have henchmen for, Bill!
So now the prison is empty, the moon is full, and all the were-things are out in full force, except for Tommy, who kind of accidentally sleeps with Sam’s girlfriend while still in his body, and then feels bad about it and … overdoses? It was kind of hard to tell, but it looked like he tried to kill himself. Wish that it was that simple broheim: these days it’s almost impossible to get yourself killed off on “True Blood” unless you are dating Jason Stackhouse. Or your parents, whom you managed to wipe out last episode. (And for which all are very grateful.)
And yes, now we’re back to the Sookie-Eric sex scene, which happens by a burbling brook on top of a nice piece of well-lit moss. It’s very gentle and tender and you almost expect Bambi (or a werewolf, or her brother) to stumble upon this Adam and Eve scenario. But they don’t. Instead we just get a shot of Bill looking forlorn on his porch, no doubt sensing all the sex Eric is having with Sookie, since she also drank his blood at one point. It must be really awkward to be able to feel your girlfriend get soft-sexed by your frenemy. But hey, that’s what comes with being (the worst) king. Don’t feel too bad for Bill, he could always go back to having sex with his great-great-granddaughter. Let’s all just take a minute to enjoy the Sookie-Eric relationship before it gets as cloying and sentimentally stupid as the Sookie-Bill one did. I give it till the second half of next week’s episode.
* Sookie never uses this gun, which I find interesting considering Chekhov’s rule about firearms: if they show up on the mantel in the first act, they will be blowing Eggs’ brains out by the third. R.I.P. EGGS!
Screenwriter Brian McGreevy did a guest stint on Vulture today with a diatribe on the emasculation of vampires in modern media, specifically in “True Blood” and “Twilight.” “True Blood,” at least, began with McGreevy’s ideal sexy/dangerous vampire — if not in Bill Compton, than in Eric Northman. Of course, now that Eric has lost his memory and Bill is playing at being a prissy little king, it’s totally reasonable for McGreevy to assert that these characters “have taken the Romantic vampire and cut off his balls, leaving a pallid emo pansy with the gaseous pretentiousness of a perfume commercial. We are now left with the Castrati vampire.”
Unfortunately, this argument smacks of chauvinism. McGreevy (currently adapting Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” for the big screen) blames this on a new, dangerous “female gaze” — as opposed to the misogynistic “male gaze” as defined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The female gaze, he suggests, makes these non-threatening vampires “pornography for tweens.” When he asserts that “Mad Men’s” Don Draper is actually more of a vampire than any of the “True Blood” or “Twilight” characters, what he’s saying is that Draper is more of a man.
“It is a killer’s heart that is the motive force of masculinity and predation its spirit. This is not to suggest nature is immutable, or that one ought to act in blind obeisance to it, but that ‘ought’ is not in the vocabulary of want, and choosing is meant to have consequences.”
But one could argue that original vamps like Stoker’s “Dracula” and Max Schreck’s Nosferatu are way more emo than Draper: They both are obsessed and stalkerish with women they like, stay secluded from the rest of society instead of engaging in it, and are ultimately tragic figures because they are so sexy, yet so sad. And if we want to get technical about the timeline, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” actually predates “Dracula” by 25 years, and revolves around lesbian vampires. So maybe that “female gaze” will come in handy after all.
McGreevy is arguing for vampires who are manipulative, coldhearted Patrick Bateman types — charming sociopaths like the “American Psycho” character who understand the human morality structure and can play the game, but whose nature compels them to kill in order to live.
In that way, maybe there is one television character that would be less of a “Castrati” vamp than Edward Cullen or Bill Compten: Cersai Lannister from “Game of Thrones.” That soul-sucking pit of evil puts on a pretty face in public while using her sexuality to stay in power. Her only desire is to protect her progeny; behind closed doors, she engages in incestuous taboos. She knows what’s expected of her in public, but could care less once the curtains have drawn. “You win, or you die,” says Cersai about the game in question, implying that holding onto power is its own version of immortal life — and the mark of a true vampire.
Last week’s episode of “True Blood” ended with a spell which caused Pam’s face to fall off. This week opens with Tommy killing his dad (on purpose) and his mom (accidentally). Since absolutely no one cares about the Merlotte family of trashy shape-shifters, this storyline unfolds on the sidelines without much fanfare or emotional resonance. Just so we won’t have to revisit this later: Tommy goes to Sam with their parents’ in the back of his truck. They decide to dump the evidence but get pulled over by Andy Bellefleur. Tommy turns into a crocodile to scare off the sheriff, and then the brothers bond as they throw their murdered folks into a swamp. Sam tells Tommy that he once killed two people. Also that gators love marshmallows.
Phew: Now the important stuff! Lafayette, Tara and Jesus freak out at Marnie for getting possessed and making Pam’s face do that thing that happens when you open the Arc of the Covenant. If I were them, I would chill out; Marnie seems to have the vampire population pretty much in check these days. Tara wants to go back to her cage-fighting life in New Orleans, but she can’t because her girlfriend opened her mail and is asking questions about this “Tara” person. (This is why I never change my name when moving to a new state.) Lafayette and Jesus go to see Jesus’ grandfather in Mexico for answers, because one time pop-pop gave Jesus a pet goat and then made him kill it. Afterwards, he let baby Jesus lick the goat’s blood off the knife. So… road trip!
The newly amnesic and totally nice Eric is still hanging out at Sookie’s place, watching her sleep (totally normal), and hey… look who’s back! It’s Ghost-Vampire Godric. Has anyone noticed that Godric has had way more screen time since he vampire-died than when he was vampire-alive? Ghost Godric tells Eric to bite Sookie, because he (Eric) is a vampire and totally damned. (Except he says it all in Romanian.) Erik argues that Sookie can redeem him, but he gives in to temptation and bites her anyway. Then he wakes up from his bad dream. (Show’s writers: “Gotcha!” Me: “Nope.”)
Eric’s dream makes him hungry though, so he goes to Sookie’s room to actually try and eat her. Luckily, she wakes up in time to tell him to knock it off, which he does, so they have a nonsexual sleepover in her bed. Sookie loves this new Eric, and it’s easy to see why: she can boss him around and he’ll keep telling her how pretty she is while they platonically cuddle. It’s like a vampire friends-with-benefits situation.
Sometimes I forget that part of the reason Sookie is so uptight is her telepathy. In the first season, it was physically impossible for her to tune out the voices of everyone in a room. Now, I can’t remember the last time Sookie’s psychic powers were used. But just to remind us that she still has her fairy skills, Sookie listens in to a new waitress’ thoughts in order to find out where Marnie works. That seems sort of a waste of her power, seeing as there is only one store called Moon Goddess which has recently opened in town.
When she actually meets the witch, Sookie plays dumb until Marnie tells her that she’s in contact with the spirit of Sookie’s Gran. (Aw, Gran!) The ghost just wants Sook to be happy, and maybe also to steer clear of this “temporary” love interest. It seems like a con, but when Sookie listens into Marnie’s thoughts, she does actually hear her grandma… though the voice tells her to run away from the evil woman. Marnie starts arguing with her possessed brain and Sookie’s all, “I’ll show myself out, thanks.” No wonder Marnie is so nutty: she’s like Sybil, except those voices in her head are real.
I’ll be honest, I sort of feel bad for our hippie witch. Later on, Bill kidnaps and glamors Marnie into telling him what her true intentions are. “To assemble peacefully,” she says. She also doesn’t know how to undo any of those spells, since technically she was possessed by the spirit of a 16th-century Necromancer priestess when she cast them. From where I’m sitting, Marnie is getting a really bad rap here. Sure, she’s a little too into the Wiccan stuff, but every time someone threatens her or her friends, she’s taken over by a 500-year-old witch. She’s just a vessel, y’all.
Pam, who doesn’t quite see it like that, wants Marnie dead (she also wants her ear to stop falling off, but you know what they say about wishes and horses and corpse-rotting faces). Bill, however, is totally against killing humans. And any vampire that harms a human will be put to the “true death.” That’s a little harsh, Bill. Couldn’t you have just stopped with your YouTube edict?
In the meantime, they will just continue to keep Marnie in his brightly-lit vampire prison, which looks almost exactly like Eric’s brightly-lit vampire bedroom under Sookie’s cabinet. Maybe they both shop at some minimalist vampire IKEA.
But just when you thought Godric and Gran were the best of the night’s cameos, here comes Tara’s mom, helping her husband get rid of the Renee ghost who is haunting Arlene’s house and newborn. Even Terry knows something is wrong with her kid now, as it was able to write “Not Your Son” on the walls in non-washable crayon. They are going to have to redo that whole wall now! Tara’s mom burns some sage and sings a couple songs with a tambourine about driving out spirits, just like in “Poltergeist.” If there is one thing movies have taught us, it’s that ghosts hate nothing more than tambourines.
Jason, sort of recovered from being violated for weeks by a bunch of werepanther women out in the boonies, decides that God is punishing him for having too much sex. His buddy Hoyt has got problems of his own, as his girlfriend, Vampire Jessica, has been acting all weird lately. Jason, understandably, doesn’t quite see how these problems are comparable. Then he has a sex dream about Hoyt, which is probably God telling him something, too.
Luckily, not all the Stackhouses are so self-centered when it comes to their problems: Sookie has Tara over for a girl’s night to discuss her best friend’s lesbian dilemma. I mean, this woman just heard her dead grandmother’s voice in the head of a crazy witch, but sure, now it’s time to break out the Ben & Jerry’s and listen to Tara whine about how hard life is. That is some good friendship right there… or at least it is until Eric comes home and Tara freaks the hell out. She does have a point, as Eric just tried to eat her a couple days ago. But he’s different now (he put on a purple American Apparel hoodie he found somewhere, a true sign that he has moved from darkness to light), and we all know that there is nothing that Tara likes to do more than yell hypocritically about stuff, so it’s hard to take her raging that seriously.
Before slamming the door in a self-righteous huff, Tara gives Eric a run-down of all the terrible things he did before he lost his memory, and he finally gets it into his clouded vampire brain to ask Sookie why she’s letting him stay at her house if he was such a doucher. (Even though it is legally his house, but New Eric isn’t that bright.) Sookie’s answer boils down to “Because I like you, silly-billy!” But Eric is worried he will turn evil again and tries to leave. Sookie asks him to stay. He really can’t. But she really wants him to! This debate ends with them making out on her porch. Finally! That only took… what, four seasons? (Still worth it.) The music during this scene really captures the mood of thousands of “True Blood” fans all over the world who are throwing little internal ticker-tape parades.
Yet their love is not to last: Bill has called a meeting of vampire sheriffs to deal with the witches and find Eric. Turns out that the 16th-century witch that has become BFF with Marnie’s subconscious kind of ended the Inquisition when she burned at the stake. Her final spell forced all the priests and nuns to walk in the daylight and expose themselves as vampires before burning up and dying. Crazy, right? Last season the vampires were Nazis, now we find out they also lead the Inquisition? Good thing that the fangers no longer ingratiate themselves into religious sects or dictatorships. As Bill puts it, “Now we’re into Google and Fox News.”
Then he cupped his hands to make that sliding trombone noise: “Waaaah-waaaah.” No, wait, that was just me.
I think the real point of this episode is to show that vampires are the worst, and have always been the worst, throughout all of fake history. I mean, at least the werewolves are shown to be a little more group-oriented, as evidenced by some greasy-haired Alpha coming to Alcide’s house and demanding that he register for the neighborhood pack. Totally. How else is he supposed to get the monthly were-newsletters and sign up for shifts on the were-co-op board? TBD!
During the Vampire Sheriffs pow-wow, Pam lets slip that she knows that Eric has been hiding at Sookie’s. Bill is so angry that he is going to Vampire speed-run over there! Wonder what he will find (Eric with Sookie) and if it will make him abuse his kingly powers to get rid of his frenemy for good (yes). Meanwhile, Pam’s got to pull herself together. She’s really falling apart this season. Totally going to pieces. And so on.
I can’t tell you how long I have waited for this moment. Not even a minute into the show, and “Dazed and Confused” Vampire Eric refers to Sookie as “Snooki.” It’s amazing. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about how these two annoying pop culture caricatures have incredibly similar-sounding names! Finally, one of the writers on the show has recognized this, which also means that “True Blood” is now in-universe with “Jersey Shore.” (Fingers crossed on Bon Temps being the surprise location for the sixth season of MTV’s reality show.)
Hopefully this joke, tossed as a casual aside after Sookie punches Eric in the nose (like a shark!) for trying to eat her, is a harbinger of the return to “True Blood’s” better writing days. King Bill’s whole scene where he lays out that any vampire caught feeding on YouTube will meet “the true death” is pretty baller, if only because it reminds us (and not in a bonk-you-on-the-head kind of way) that these characters live in a world where viral videos, along with “Jersey Shore,” exist. The concept of the Internet having a place in the world of “True Blood” is 20 times more interesting than ghost were-panthers. Let’s 2.0 this bitch up! Give Eric back his cellphone for texting!
Speaking of the shirtless Nordic vampire, Eric still has no memory of who he is after Marnie invoked the spirit of a generically hot brunette to cast a spell on him. Well, he knows what he is, which is a vampire. And he knows that he loves Snooki/Sookie… or at least he figures it out after he tries to eat her. He also knows, as we’ve determined, what a Snooki is. But not much else. He’s lost his mojo, and Sookie agrees to help him out, because this new Eric persona is less sexually threatening. We’ll just conveniently forget the fact that last week Sookie was pleading with her ex to essentially take a hit out on him; now she’s going to invite him into her house. Though it’s technically his house. (Sookie doesn’t tell him that part.)
And as Bon Temps turns… Jason is still tied up, probably dying from were-panther wounds. If this season ends with Sookie’s brother kicking the bucket in some farmhouse due to the lack of penicillin, I might be OK with that. Crystal, Jason’s ex who is trying to make him into a panther (don’t ask) makes him take Viagra so he can mate with her and all her sisters/cousins/whatever. It’s a testament to how sick I am of Ryan Kwanten’s bewildered, doofy face that I start to zone out during any scene that he’s in — even when it involves male rape, incest and references to a “ghost daddy” during intercourse.
Lafayette and Tara are still all shook up about Eric Northman trying to eat them, but Marnie is excited! She’s a real witch now, she knows it! Later on, crazy lady tries to invoke the spirit again and ends up slicing her wrist open instead. But then the brunette spirit is actually there, so I guess cutting yourselves is really the way to commune with the dead, just like that documentary “The Craft” said. This can only end well.
Lafayette has a different idea when it comes to dealing with Eric: He’s going to go over to Fangtasia and beg for forgiveness for being in a coven, with the hope that the vampire won’t torture him in his dungeon below the bar again. As Lafayette is one of the smarter characters on the show, this was a surprisingly stupid move: Tara and Jesus figure out his plan just in time to save him from Pam, who is unsurprisingly torturing Lafayette in the dungeon to find out what happened to her master. In “True Blood,” all roads lead back to Eric’s BDSM basement.
This ostensibly life-threatening confrontation ends with everyone deciding to work together to find Eric, because when you stop and think about it, all the major characters on the show grudgingly have each other’s back. Maybe that’s why they have to keep introducing new, evil residents to the town: At this point, it’s not conceivable that even Pam would hurt Lafayette… not really. Nor would Eric harm Sookie’s best friend, as he looked like he was going to do last episode.
And again, this is where “True Blood” seems to be getting back on the right track, because despite what I said last episode about it being impossible for Bill’s character not to be as morally uptight as Ned Stark, he is developing some interesting traits. He’s unapologetic about having his bodyguards kill off the YouTube vamp (he almost seems a little smirky), and after a quick lecture to his sire Jessica about why she needs to tell Hoyt that she drank some other guy’s blood (OK, dad), it’s posited that maybe Bill did send Eric into the coven in order to get killed. Hey, it’s not like he hasn’t tried it before.
Now that he’s king, Bill is dangerous precisely because he’s so self-righteous: All that doubt and guilt that plagued him from the show’s beginning (and made him basically a surrogate Angel character from “Buffy”) has been replaced with an arrogant confidence in his ability to dole out justice. The thought that those years of Bill’s nagging and exasperated “Soookehs!” might have just been lead up to his becoming a power-crazed ruler makes me very excited. Let’s hope it’s not just a red herring.
Oh yeah, back to Jessica and Hoyt: she bit another guy, which is supposed to be a metaphor for cheating, since everything is a VAMPIRE ANALOGY on this show. Then she glamours him to make him forget it ever happened, which is a metaphor for drunk makeup sex, I guess.
Hoyt’s mom is sitting on a natural gas goldmine, and Sam’s brother plans to exploit it for the dollars. Sam is busy being in love with a shape-shifter who can turn into her mom. (Kinky.) Arlene still kind of wants to kill her baby. And at the very end of the show, we see the return of Claudine, Sookie’s fairy godmother, who demands that she come back to their glowing kingdom. Before Sookie can get in her full 10 minutes of lecturing on how she is a grown-up and will do what she likes, Eric whizzes by and eats Sookie’s fairy godmother. To be fair, afterward he seems very apologetic about it. New Eric is great!
The second episode of “True Blood” starts where last week ended. Do you remember how last week ended? I mean, for each of the 10-1,200 characters that we the audience are supposed to have an emotional stake (ha!) in? No? OK, here it goes …
Jason Stackhouse wakes up tied to a bed in the “Hills Have Eyes” community that he has been entrusted with after his V-addicted girlfriend Crystal went away to have sex with her brother. (Side note: How can something that is so hot on “Game of Thrones” be so disgusting on “True Blood”? Incest, she is a fickle turn-on.) Turns out Stackhouse has been conned by these young rednecks who eat raw meat and lick his head wounds, because he is just that dumb. Crystal and her half-brother Felton are back, and they want Jason to spawn little werepanther babies and continue their totally non-defected, inbred gene pool. But first Jason has to become a werepanther himself, in a ritual that looks a lot like the vampire’s turning process: draining (or in this case, clawing) a person till they are almost dead, then waiting for the next full moon. I think they are a missing a step where Jason needs to drink (claw) their blood? So now he’s all infected and gross. Man, Stackhouse, if only you were smart enough to outthink a family whose cumulative IQ adds up to less than Forrest Gump’s. Alas.
But that’s already too much time spent on Jason! Because last week actually ended with Sookie realizing that Eric bought her house, and is now free to roam around it and menacingly flirt with her as he pleases. He even built himself a little underground sleeping bunker in a cabinet! (Weird, doesn’t she already have a basement?) Eric still wants Sookie to be his, which must be because of that damn fairy blood, because it is in no way due to her stellar personality.
Sookie marches over to King Ex-Boyfriend Bill’s house, where he has finished biting and boning a lady from Lafayette and Jesus’ Wiccan support group. After making her Sookie-judgment face, she demands that as king, Bill make Eric leave. Bill makes some vague remarks about Eric having powerful friends, but he’ll still see what he can do. After barging in on Bill having sex, yelling at him to do her a favor, and then berating him for not being able to do it immediately, Sookie stalks out. Class act. By the way, this is usually how I convince my ex-boyfriends to do stuff for me.
But the mention of “powerful friends” makes Bill go all flashback-y: He’s in London in the ’80s, trying on his worst Cockney accent (surprisingly terrible for an actor who is actually British), when he runs into Nan — she of the Vampire League of television pundits — who promises him that one day he will be able to drink non-human blood if she joins up with her growing group of progressive vampires. Apparently True Blood was created by Louis Pasteur, we find out.
“Wait … Louis Pasteur is a vampire?”asks Bill, as my head unconsciously starts reaching for the remote.
The purpose of this whole awkward flashback device is to show that Nan and Bill have been in on it since the beginning of the show: The plan was always to set Bill up as a dummy king, so they could take down the feudal system of vampires that are still attached to the old ways and replace them with peace-loving, True Blood-drinking hippies like Bill. In another flashback, we see Nan’s stealth commando army kill off Queen Sophie Ann during that unresolved “Matrix” fight between her and Bill last season.
OK, so now there’s no more Queen of Louisiana. Why does Bill get to be king? Why not dismantle this whole weird monarchy system (with the sheriffs and the magistrates and such) that the vampires have going on, instead of setting up a fake dictator? Oh well, the best laid plans of mice and vamps …
In tangential character news: Hoyt and Jessica are still having domestic trouble, because she wants to be sexy and bite people other than her boyfriend at Fangtasia. But also those religious zealots are still picketing the bar (“We’re living in a post-Russell Edington world,” says one of the characters, referring to the best scene from last season), and Hoyt gets in a fight with one of the anti-fangbangers. Jessica starts to show her teeth, but one of the guys has a smartphone and threatens to upload the video to YouTube. (Timely!) Jessica could be the next “Do you know how many degrees I have?” subway lady!
Sam is in love with one of his shape-shifting buddies named Luna, and they have an innuendo-laden conversation while completely naked (no worries, they just transformed back from horse form, nothing weird here). For all his hotness, Sam is actually the worst at picking up women: If you are lying down naked in a field with someone and she has to ask if you are trying to hit on her, then your game is kind of off, bro. Apparently not, though, since later on Luna comes to Merlotte’s and makes out with Sam in order to convince him to … come to their weekly Shifter get-together? Doesn’t he do that every week, anyway? These two are perfect for each other.
Another thing is, Luna is definitely something you name a horse, not a person, so I hope the twist this season comes when Sam realizes that his girlfriend is actually a shape-shifting horse that is pretending to be human. Court her with apples, Sam!
Arlene, still on her “Rosemary’s Baby” kick, stares at her newborn so hard she breaks a blood vessel in her eye. Then she blames it on the kid. World’s best mom! Or maybe the baby really is evil, “Pet Semetary”-style.
Lafayette and Jesus’ witch group bring a dead bird back to life for half a second. It’s all very “The Craft.” Bill’s sex buddy in the group brings him the news because she is a sleeper cell Wiccan or something, and he calls on Eric to make the witches stop their necromancing. See, if they can control the dead, they can control the undead. At first I was excited, and thought “Zombies!” but then I realized they were still talking about vampires. Zombies are next season.
Oh yeah, and Tara comes back. Hi Tara! You seem so happy! Let’s see how long that lasts.
Another coven meeting attended by Lafayette, Tara and Jesus is interrupted by a cocky Eric, who demands they disband. Head witch (and total weirdo) Marnie gets all First Amendment on his ass — because everyone has, like, the right to assemble, man — and Eric decides it’s time for a snack. Then he attacks Tara, and even though Lafayette gets PTSD every time he sees Eric (remember season one?), his desire to protect his cousin leads him to take up a chant that causes the witchy crazy lady to turn into a different witchy crazy lady and suddenly Eric goes from being like this:
To this:
Earth to Meekus!
(Remember how Eric was in “Zoolander”?? Amazing.)
Sookie goes to Fangtasia to demand that Pam do her this favor of getting Eric out, except Pam isn’t so polite about saying no (because she is the best, and apparently the only character who consistently sees through Sookie’s bullshit). Our waitress makes a short pit stop in the bathroom to chide Jessica for necking with another guy in the bathroom, because it’s not a day in Bon Temps if our heroine ain’t up in your business, judging the shit out of you.
On her way home, Sookie finds her new vampire landlord kind of shuffling around without a shirt on. What happened to his shirt, we wonder. He doesn’t know; he’s forgotten everything. Including who Sookie is, and why he shouldn’t just take a delicious bite out of her fairy neck.
Unlike the last episode, this cliffhanger is actually suspenseful; though it’s never been clear why a vampire incapable of “love” like Eric wouldn’t drain Sookie at every opportunity, we suspend our disbelief and swallow the idea about him secretly having feelings for her. But without any memories, Sookie’s sweet-smelling blood makes her nothing but a tasty meatbag to this airheaded vamp.
Do you remember the first season of “True Blood?” It was so good! It combined the elements of a dark Southern gothic Anne Rice novel with the pop-culture savvy of Joss Whedon’s “Buffy.” It was by turns sad, funny, and really scary (kind of like Ball’s best work to date, “Six Feet Under”). I was initially resistant to watching “True Blood” because I had heard all the silly accents in the trailer and it just wasn’t my thing, but I defy anyone to watch the title sequence of that show and not get hooked by the disturbing imagery coupled with the sinister riffs of Jace Everett’s “Bad Things.”
Unfortunately, “True Blood” has gone consistently downhill since its inception. I can buy into maenads, vampire caste systems, and religious right megacults, but not when the whole package is shoved into an hour-long episode. By season three the writers were throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix to make up for the lack of emotional depth or nuances in their now cartoonish characters. From a show about vampires, it turned into a cabaret of werewolves, were-jaguars, kings and queens, vampire PR syndicate, warlocks … you name it. Oh, and Sookie was part fairy, as it turns out. There was too much going on; too many plotlines and political allegories and characters popping up out of nowhere, to give the show the emotional resonance of that first season episode where Sookie comes home to find her grandmother murdered. When the trailer for the fourth season came out with Sookie saying, “Oh great, now I have to deal with witches too?” I was right there with her.
Still, “True Blood” remains a guilty pleasure, and while watching the premiere there was still that glimmer of hope that maybe half of Bon Temps would die in a fire, and we could cut the cast down by half. Instead, we were introduced to fifty new characters, and only one death. Boo!
We open with Sookie going flash-sideways into fairyland, which is how we ended the last season. Fairyland is all shimmery and awesome; a place where everyone is beautiful and eating glowing fruit. We know this means trouble, since Maryann from Season 2 also threw beautiful parties with lots of fruit, and that was because she was actually an immortal follower of the greek god Dionysus, who eventually took over the entire town with her Ecstasy-raves and blood sacrifices. Hate it when that happens.
Sookie’s fairy godmother Claudine is already kind of pissed, because even in paradise Sookie is bitching about how this woman sucks at her job. Give it a break, Sookie! I don’t see anyone coming down to Merlotte’s and telling you how to be the world’s worst waitress.
Also at the fairy party is Barry the Bellhop from season two, who could read minds as well. His godmother is a Calvin Klein model named Lloyd or something. Barry is super-happy to finally be in a place where he doesn’t feel like a freak. Sookie wants to ruin that feeling as soon as possible but … what’s that over there? Why, it’s Sookie’s grandfather, Bill Lumbergh from “Office Space.” He doesn’t remember Sookie, but he’s going to need those T.P.S. reports by this afternoon.
Apparently time moves differently in fairyland, so even though Mr. GrandSookie has been missing for 20 years, he thinks he’s only been chilling out in the magic kingdom for a couple hours.
Sookie, realizing something’s afoot, tries to psychically warn her granddad to get out. Whoops! Turns out all fairies can read minds, and suddenly this garden of Eden is less awesome. There is a queen fairy who tries to force Sookie into eating a lumière (lightfruit!), but Sookie realizes that these delicious glowing snacks are actually people? Or people’s souls? Maybe? And that the fairies have been harvesting these souls to feed themselves? ** Okay, that in itself is enough exposition to warrant an entire season, but this being “True Blood,” we’re still at the 10-minute mark.
Sookie and her granddad escape the fairyworld, which starts crumbling and revealing the fairies to be some extras from “The Witches,” and land back in reality. But since pop-pop had been eating from the lightfruit, he immediately dies upon his return. Okay! Good to have seen you, Mr. Stackhouse! This is what I’m talking about in terms of the show’s pacing: it’s hard to feel bad when Sookie cries over her granddad, because we literally just met this guy. The implied logic is that granddaddy, Sookie (and Barry) are all part-fairy, which is why they can read minds. But Claudine, also a fairy, seems to be able to hang out in the human world just fine despite ostensibly eating human soul fruit. So why did it kill Mr. Stackhouse? Who knows. Moving on.
Sookie cries a bit, and then goes home, which is conveniently located on the physical realm right where she jumped off a cliff in fairyland. Except her house is all different! People are cleaning it up and taking away the furniture, and some guy threatens to call the police on Sookie for trespassing and she sniffs, “Oh, I’d love you to!” Because everyone in town knows who Sookie Stackhouse is, you stupid contractor who is just trying to do your job!
Jason Stackhouse shows up, since he is a cop now, remember? Also, he has that Rob Zombie hillbilly family to take care of back on the other side of town ever since his meth-head incestuous were-jaguar girlfriend entrusted him with it, but that won’t be mentioned till the end of the episode, since there are so many other plots to get through first! Like Tara is now a cage-fighter and a lesbian in New Orleans. Sam is in an anger management group after shooting his brother Tommy in the leg. Tommy now lives with Hoyt’s mom (what?) and is pretending to be a good Christian boy. Sam’s anger management group is actually a bunch of shape-shifting swingers that like to take off their clothes and turn into horses. (Which is odd, because two seasons ago Sam had never met another shape-shifter, and now there’s enough to hold rotating weekly dinner parties?) Sheriff Andy Bellefleur is addicted to V! Arlene had her kid, which she thinks is evil because it is the son of Rene, the psycho-killer from season one. Her boyfriend Terry Bellefleur thinks she just needs to relax, but at the very least that kid is pissed that mom tried to abort it with black magic, so watch out Arlene!
Lafayette is living with his warlock boyfriend Jesus, who prefers to be called a “bruja” because he is Mexican. Oy. Jesus wants Lafayette to hang out with this very cool witch coven (that he had previously disguised as his yoga class and then his Wiccan group), which Lafayette is rightly suspicious of. Turns out the head of the coven is Aunt Dursley from “Harry Potter,” and she summons the spirit of Milton from “Office Space” who was on the show’s first season as one of Lafayette’s vampire johns, Eddie. Ghost vampire Eddie gives Lafayette a ghost stapler rose, and Lafayette freaks out.
Also, Hoyt and Jessica live together now, but she won’t cook him dinner.
But back to Sookie! Jason shows up and is inordinately happy to see her. He thought she was dead! Haha, stupid Jason, dumber than a bag of hair. How can Sookie be dead? She is the main character of a show that’s not “Game of Thrones,” and the show always implied that Sookie’s powers were either the only thing keeping the town from falling into the hands of various monsters, or the reason all these baddies showed up in the first place. Sookie’s existence is necessary for there even to be a “True Blood,” (despite the hundreds of side-characters that also populate the show) because, as we’ve been told over and over, she is “special.”
Then Jason tells Sookie that she hasn’t been gone for two hours, or even two weeks. She’s been missing for over a year. (Damn fairytime!) So for everyone in town, Sookie has been dead. And yet somehow they kept going on with their lives, without any major threats from vampires, werewolves, or supernatural beings? If you didn’t think Sookie was useless before, this kind of proves it.
Of course, right after telling her this shocking news it is night time, and Vampire Bill and Eric use their vampire super-speed to drop by. Hi Bill! Hi Eric! Bill thought Sookie was dead! He couldn’t “feel” her presence anymore, yet despite all the times he’s tried to sacrifice himself for her, the knowledge of her death didn’t make him stab himself through the heart with a wooden stake. Instead, he became King of Louisiana. Okay.
Eric, meanwhile, proclaims he never lost faith that Sookie was alive. She tells them both to GTFO, and Bill actually does, which pisses Sookie off because he’s supposed to love her, damn it! Bill is kind of pimping as king though: Andy’s sister keeps making moon-eyes at him, and he’s banging a redhead who has infiltrated Jesus’ witch coven. Way to grieve, Bill!
Eric pretends to leave, but then pops up after Sookie’s late-night shower. Surprise! He’s the guy that bought her house, and now she can’t rescind her invitation and kick him out of the house via Vampire Logic. Loophole! That’s the major cliffhanger of the episode: whether or not Eric will now kill Sookie and drink all her blood. (Also whether Jason can find himself out of the refrigerator that his Leatherface wards lock him in when he goes to bring them raw meat and ice-cream.) I’m going to go ahead and say (spoiler alert) that unfortunately neither of these things are very likely.
** As a commenter pointed out, the “harvesting people” line may not be a reference to the lightfruit actually containing human-juice, but rather that all the half-fairies are being tricked into staying into the fairyrealm by eating the fruit. So whole-fairies are harvesting half-fairies? To what end, if not to eat them? Oh, this show. Your non-logic never ceases to amaze me.
Fangstastic! 
For bloodsuckers, does manliness matter? 
Anna Paquin in "True Blood" 
