By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 4 | Aired on 07.07.2013
Holy moly, this episode had everything. I am pretty sure this is my favorite episode -- and almost certainly my favorite season -- in all the five years I've been writing about this show. I am just so impressed with what's going on here. I think this might be one of my favorite TV shows, which isn't something I maybe ever would have said, even back when I majorly loved it. This was a thing of beauty. They've taken everything good from the last five seasons, blown into it like a Nintendo cartridge, scraped off the best parts and made that into a TV show. It is brilliant.
The Bellefleur Girls cross over into their twenties come nightfall, so Bill and Jessica have to rejigger their plans to kidnap them and synthesize their fae blood, but it works out. In the short term, I mean. In the slightly longer term, Takahashi can't seem to get it right, and while Bill is going God-crazy on him about that, Jessica accidentally eats them. It is horrific and sad and terrible, but that's life at Castle Compton.
Sam ditches Lafayette, turns into a horse and takes Nicole and Emma on the run. Once Emma's asleep, they hook up, not in spite of her friends and Luna dying a second ago, but because of it. Meanwhile, the Pack cleans all the VUS off themselves and calls in Alcide's dad to help track Emma, and the whole thing is dumb and boring because this part of the season is not about them, so just chill.
Eric (finally doing some Eric stuff that reminds you why Eric is a big deal) ditches Tara and Pam (who is now a guest of Camp Anna Camp, along with Nora) and plays a neat zero-sum trick on Willa Burrell where he turns her into a vampire. If she convinces her dad that vampires are people, great. If it goes haywire and she eats him, great -- and also hilarious. What nobody's counting on is that Sarah Newlin is sleeping with Burrell, so she's there when Willa fangs out on him, and now Willa's in her own dad's concentration camp too.
Meanwhile, before even the credits, we get confirmation that Ben is Glory, when he gives Jason some of his faerie-vampire blood to heal his weird head wound from last season. This gives Jason some excellent (excellent) Ben & Jason Sex Dreams, but also helps him and Niall to figure out that Ben is Warlow. Niall dumbly leads the charge despite his whole thing about Sookie killing Warlow, and is drained and tossed into Claudine's pocket hell -- after a fairly cogent explanation of exactly how Ben is Warlow and a vampire and a faerie all at the same time -- while Jason is glamoured and forgets the entire day.
But Sookie has also maybe figured this Warlow thing out, and spends the episode playing both our and Ben's perceptions about whether or not she knows (or cares!): She invites him to dinner at her house in person, salts his food with colloidal silver and just when you think she's given him the all-clear and they're doing it on the couch, boom. I said BOOM! She's got the nuke going and she's ready to roll.
An astounding, perfect ending to an intricate, moving episode full of sex (which is never actually about sex), Sookie being fantastic, Ben having lost the ability to shirt himself altogether, Jason finally up and running and being a total champ, and everybody's storylines (less shifters and weres of course) moving forward about a hundred steps more than you might have expected. So proud of the show this week, and this season in general.
Week: Sookie chases Benlow around the house yelling about all the wrong men have done her in her entire life, Lafayette gets back into the séance game, Andy comes to Castle Compton to find his dead daughters, and I'm guessing we'll finally see what goes on in Camp Ire now that Pam's a prisoner.
It’s funny how all the wordplay in this storyline is like the opposite of how bad it makes you feel when Sam or Raccoona says shifter or were things. It is just wonderful. And the whole concept of them being little Mean Girl bitches to him about this because they don’t know how sad he is or how much we love him, that is wonderful too. I am very proud of this part of the show, which is wild because it seemed like it would suck the most.
Andy: “You guys need to leave him alone, okay. He is all dicked up.”
Pre-Teen Sensations: “But we’re just fast-growing elf people, we don’t understand conventional ethics. And then also we’re awful because kids are pretty awful, because they’re not done growing up yet. It’s a metaphor for how parents have to be better people, and not get frustrated by that simple fact that children aren’t done.”
Andy: “I know, that’s what I’m here for. Your mom said it was my sacred duty, and she fingerblasted me about it when we first did it and then again when she shot you out of her magical vagina. But I am happy about it nonetheless. Stop reading my mind and go to bed, please. I love you and I love being your dad for three whole days.”
Pre-Teen Sensations: “Weird things are about to happen, Daddy.”
Andy: “Well as long as you don’t go through a strange pubescence like Charles Dodgson wrote this episode and then get kidnapped by God, just tell me about it in the morning.”
They go through a strange pubescence, as if Charles Dodgson wrote this episode. So they raid Arlene’s closet and head out into the night in Andy’s Sheriff car — “Let’s go drink beers!” — for an actually very valid reason: What if they completely miss their twenties while they’re sleeping?
See what I mean? It’s like all the painful worldbuilding of shifter language and the nonstop nonsensical fuckery of Vampire Politics in years past were somehow transmuted into something amazing. And speaking of…
Bill: “Well Ah was shore they were merely children. Perhaps this is merely another mystery of womanhood Ah have yet to discover.”
Jessica: “I think probably it’s a normal faerie thing we don’t know about because they are a secret. Maybe once Takahashi gets over being kidnapped by me dressing sexy for no reason he can tell us.”
Bill: “Do you smell their perfect womanhood body smells? Life’s fecund blessing!”
Jessica: “We need to work on your language a little bit.”