If you liked the awkward, haphazard honesty of the Fishers and their assorted loved ones on Six Feet Under, let me tell you that you are about to shoot into awkward, haphazard hyperdrive. What a fucking lovely, perfect, cheesy, hilarious, loving, compassionate, scary view of love and sex and nature at the nth level. Asleep, awake, alive or dead, apparently telling the truth has spread from Tara to everybody. Needless to say, Tara continues to be the total greatest of all time ever in the history of the universe.
We pick up on last week's cliffhanger with Sookie telling the super-scary vampfang gothtards to stow it because she's not susceptible, then the impromptu vampire party at Bill's house gets all cheesy vamp-FF and bisexual and blowjobby, then Bill tells everybody to quit acting like stupid ridiculous vampires. Then he talks all Civil Warlike, and you start to figure out that Bill's a lot hotter when he's not talking like he's reading from a Bowdlerized copy of Vanity Fair. Sookie tells him to take a long walk in the sun and leaves, but dreams that she's totally bored of being a virgin and tells Bill so, but wakes up before they bone because she's a total virgin and doesn't know what happens . In the end, they're kind of dating again although I don't know if Bill's aware of that.
Awakingly, Adele is even ten times prettier and more senile-slash-hilarious-slash-insightful than before and continues to be totally awesome: strip-mall coffee is good for you, Sookie's boyfriend is a totally cute murderer who cannot legally wed and drinks blood, Sookie needs a boyfriend with an opaque brain, Adele's husband had the same psychic shit going on, isn't being psychic fucked up due to "everybody's dark secrets," but it also saves lives so it's good, so grow the eff up, because it's never as easy as 1 or 0.
As per usual, Jason's the most interesting storyline. He gets out of his cliffhanger restraints and jumps Dawn in a Nagel dressing gown and elbow-length gloves, pretending to be the serial killer. Dawn is into it, so his whole reveal -- plus his sudden gay/vampire/whatever-panic related impotence, plus his disinclination to take off the creepy velvet gloves while they're trying to fuck -- is awesomely stupid enough that she gets her gun out and starts shooting it all around, making her the coolest person of the week. I guess of all the billion other metaphors that vampirism now represents, we're also in Pleasantville and fangbanging (IT'S ERIC I KNOW IT'S YOU ERIC I LOVE YOU ERIC SEE YOU WEEK ERIC) is just one more way of figuring out your total Joan Allen awesomeness and shooting at Jason Stackhouse, who frankly deserves it. Mostly, he is naked and having weird hallucinations of fucking that one horrible tattoo loser vampire when he's supposed to be fucking Dawn. Color us both (not) shocked and relieved, not to mention in total gay love with gun-toting Dawn. Meaning that there is literally nobody on this show that isn't totally awesome.
Anyway, speaking of forthrightly announcing your sex stuff like some kind of socially impaired weirdo instead of approaching other people in a way that suggests you are relatively sane, Tara explains to Sam that it's probably best that they fuck. Sam, being the hottest dude on this show, takes some convincing, but eventually bones her. It is awesome. Bonus: He snarfs and barks in his sleep as though he were an obviously-telegraphed shapeshifting collie. (Who, like Pluto and Goofy, owns a pet dog of his own! Freakout fakeout!) day, Tara realizes that while her mom is close to being just like your average horrific alcoholic mom, she is maybe as full of Satan as she is of liquor. I hope she kills the bitch, frankly. Tara heads over to Lafayette's house, where he gets her stoned and introduces her to his lover, a Louisiana state senator. That should have pain-free consequences!
Later, Jason shows up at Lafayette's house, evidencing a totally awesome longstanding relationship based on mutual respect and adoration, not to mention that Lafayette is a crack dealer of all kinds. Turns out L sells v-juice, and knows it's just the thing for what ails our Jason. And normally I would cry foul, but my goodness is this shit exactly what Jason needs, because L's a guide, and any tool is a weapon if you hold it right, including drugs. Jason's going to have to walk this whole trail to come out the other side, which we knew the first time we met him. It's nice, honestly: Lafayette and Sookie is a house that's not been built yet, but Lafayette and Jason is a house with basements we'll never see. Then there's some straight-boy porn, which is to say "this is a scene with Jason Stackhouse in it," Sookie decides it's appropriate to masturbate on her front porch, Sam interrupts said proceedings and sends her to Dawn's house, who I am guessing is... And yeah. Dead as shit. Later, Dawn.
week: WHO CARES IT'S ERIC I LOVE YOU ERIC SHUT UP EVERYBODY LOOK IT'S ERIC
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see where you know Sheriff Dearborne from in our guide to this fall's Familiar Faces!
We pick back up on Bill's porch with the two ridiculous vampires in the doorway and the bald one behind Sookie with his tongue going the usual amount of crazy. His name is Liam, the Foxy Brown one is Diane, and the goatee one with the silly accent is Malcolm (an unrecognizable Agent Schlatter, last seen experiencing the joys of home improvement first-hand on Weeds). He invites Sookie inside with all kinds of hypnotism happening in his eyeballs, and Diane is also shooting brain lasers, and finally Sookie's like, "Hey, are you trying to glamour me?" They pull up short and look at each other, and Malcolm's like, "...Yes?" She informs them, in her Liddell way, that it doesn't work on her, and Liam blurts, "Why not?" She turns back to him like this is a conversation people have, all, "I dunno, but whatever." Everybody stares at everybody else, completely flummoxed by her implacability as usual, and finally she just asks if Bill's around. His voice echoes out into the foyer as he commands them to let her in. Diane leans in, all creepy, and he barks: "Diane! Let her in." Disappointed, Diane's like, "Oh, fuck him." Malcolm giggles that she already did. I kind of love Malcolm.
As ridiculous and OTT as they are, I like them, because their props and clothes and activities pretty much span every kind of vampire we've ever seen; it's a neat twist. Malcolm is Vamp Classic, all pretension and image; Diane is the Vamp Madonna, spanning looks and personae from blaxploitation to her Jewelle Gomez/Billie Holliday roots; Liam is the postapocalyptic redneck fratboy Vamp Bubba. Just like everybody else on the show, they're trying to find somebody to be and how it fits with who they are and who they used to be. Everybody's in costume; everybody's wearing a mask in front of a camera, all the time. There's something inherently lame about vampires because they are always these drowsy bisexual polyamorous drama queens, but here it's a double-twist because no matter how hilariously lame they are -- to say nothing of the whooshy sound they make when they zoom around -- they will still kill your ass and suck your blood, and that's scary.
Sookie enters, Malcolm and Diane on either side of her; Diane darts in for a quick lick of her face, and then laughs all crazy. Diane continues to laugh like an insane four-year-old playing dressup for the rest of the scene, and in fact whenever she's onscreen. Unnecessarily, Malcolm does the fangzoom over to the door, closing it behind her. In the parlor, there's a butterface heroin girl strung out on one couch, and a gogo boy with an insane body and cutoffs lounging on the other. Bill sits in the corner in shadow.
While Liam and Diane attempt to be menacing, touching her hair and sniffing her and generally acting like dogs at the pound, and Malcolm darkly loiters, Sookie asks them to give her a moment with Bill. Diane and Liam agree that she smells "fuckin' sweet," and Malcolm -- who is now acting something approaching normal, comparatively -- laughs at Bill. "Just five minutes ago you were telling us how you were living mainly on synthetic blood, you big poseur." Diane offers the opinion that Sookie's not a snack, and possibly a virgin, which of course pisses Sookie off: "That's none of your damn business, you nosy bitch." And Bill sits in the corner, watching how she does this. He's the camera, but she's not wearing a mask.
Diane grabs her head and calls her "cupcake," explaining that virgin blood is the best-tasting blood there is... second to baby blood. Liam pulls Sookie up against his crotch, talking about how hard he gets just thinking about baby blood. That is troubling, y'all. Malcolm, zoomiest of all vampires, reaches around and exposes Sookie's neck for Liam, so their arms are all wrapped around her and each other. They are incestuous and touch-hungry, like band geeks. "Ladies first," he chuckles, and when Diane leans down, Bill finally stands up. Everybody stares at him. "Stop! Suckie is mine."
After the excellent credits, Malcolm apologizes and backs off. The smackwhore on the couch is the unspeaking Janella, apparently your basic fangbanging familiar on her way to a bad end; she's interesting mostly because she looks scarier than any creature of the night. "That's why I always bring Jerry with me, wherever I go. He's like mad money!" He takes the gogo boy by the wrist and sits down; Jerry straddles him and snuggles in tight. "Somebody needs to get down on m'johnson," Liam says matter-of-factly, and Janella finally rises from the couch and shambles over to commence. Sookie is, of course, appalled by everything that is happening in the room, which Diane finds hilarious.
Bill reiterates, to Diane's irritation and Sookie's, about how Sookie is his, and Diane asks why she's not over in the corner servicing him: "Can't you see how hungry he is?" Malcolm looks up from Jerry's neck helpfully: "Uh Bill, if you're hungry you're more than welcome to have some of Jerry..." He taps Jerry's giant muscley back and Jerry stands up, considering Bill. Malcolm smiles, Diane laughs, Jerry prances across the room in his tiny shorts and collapses languidly against the other couch, breathing hard, stretching out an arm and offering his neck. It's all very vampire-oriented. Liam, on the other side of the room, draws a pretty obvious connection here, talking simultaneously to Janella and Bill when he grunts, "Come on, suck it!"
Jerry leans back hungrily as Bill lowers toward him, fangs out, with an eye on Sookie either measuring or apologizing: (Stick 'em in already and get infected, you fucking vampire asshole. Come on, do it, let's see how you like Hep D. You fuckers won't be able to move for like a year...) Sookie screams at Bill to stop, and then asks what Hep D is. Jerry rushes her, screaming, and puts his hands around her throat. (How does she know? There's no way, I didn't tell a soul...) "These fuckers killed Marcus!" he screams, and remembers Marcus leaving, hooked on V, while he cried. (We would've been...) Bill zooms over and breaks Jerry's wrist getting him off her; everybody zooms around and Sookie coughs roughly while Liam comes really loudly across the room. These people.
Malcolm knows when it's time to make your exit, which is one point in his favor. "...Well! This has all been very illuminating, but we've got a long ride back to Monroe, and I'm sure we'll all wanna have a little talk with Jerry when he wakes up." He picks Jerry's gigantic hot self and throws him over a shoulder easily. "Out, Janella. We're being evicted." (I have a question and I don't really want to ask it but ... it's actually a two-parter having to do with A) the magical effects of vampire bodily fluids and B) whether Janella swallows, and I can't come up with a decent way to ask the question so I guess we'll find out, plus honestly the way things are going, probably Jason Stackhouse will be the one to find out, so we'll explore this then, I guess, if we have to go there at all, which ... really we don't, ever.)
The boys head toward the door with Janella, and Diane's like, "HEY! Isn't anyone even the slightest bit interested in how this little bitch knew about Jerry?" Bill leans down and tenderly tells Sookie to shut the fuck up: "You can't speak yet, can you sweetheart?" Diane offers to make her talk, and they revisit the reiteration about how Suckie is Bill's, for the third time in five minutes. Heading out, Malcolm is hilariously irritated: "Jerry, you stupid bitch! Nobody fucks with me and gets away with it." I love how Malcolm is at once the biggest tryhard of the bunch, and yet issues every statement with this totally normal human intonation.
Alone, Bill takes her face in his hands and then lifts her to sitting on the pivot on one skinny finger. It looks cooler than most of the phang-physics shots we've seen. She pulls away and they both stare into separate distances; he eventually stands up and wanders around, checking out the floor and eventually speaking: "I'm sorry you had to witness that. Their visit was unexpected." (You know what? I kind of hate Bill. Not the character exactly, but just ... the way that he talks is excruciating to me. Especially when it's total exposition like this, because it's ten times more ponderous when he's issuing it in this weirdly enunciated, weirdly emphasized accent from the country of Antebellumnia. I respect this actor's process and I'm not saying it's a lack of craft or whatever, he's got the physicality and body language right, it's just the voice itself that bugs me. Like how no matter how cool and sincere Zach Braff is, I still want to punch his face.)
"Hepatitis D is the only blood-borne pathogen to which we are susceptible. Malcolm must be furious... A mutation -- relatively harmless to humans, oddly enough." (See? Like this. No actor could credibly sell that chunk, but you're adding insult to injury with the voice.) Sookie admits she's never heard of that strain, and Bill smiles because of course they kept it out of the media. "And it makes you sick for a year?," she says, fascinated. No, that's one thing on a very long list of the myriad things Jerry was confused about. More like a month. "The biggest danger to us from Hep D is being captured and staked during that time." Sookie's not loving the implications here of the whole "we control the vertical" thing he just said, given that she came over tonight in the first place because she just figured out the shadowy vampire conspiracy that killed the racist Reverend Newlin in Dallas earlier, and quotes Bill back to himself about how they don't want their weaknesses to be public knowledge. He's like, "You're getting it now! Precisely!" She's like, oh, so not the point.
"-- And what the hell did you mean, Sookie is mine?" Bill exposits some more about how this was about communicating (and recommunicating and reiterating said recommunication) to the others that she's "his" human, and therefore only he can feed on her. "You most certainly cannot feed on me!" Sookie shrieks, standing up. Bill's all, "Well of course I can't, Suckie, but had they known that they'd have considered you fair game! I wouldn't have been able to stop them from attacking you. It'd be three against one, and Malcolm is much older than I am, and quite strong." Sookie keeps running down the list in decreasing order of ickiness: "And ... you and Diane dated?" Bill admits they had sex, once: "Just after she was made a vampire, back in the late 1930s," and Sookie is hilarious: "What? Gross!"
She explains that this is gross mostly because Diane, and her compatriots, are totally mean. Bill agrees: "Evil? Yes, they are. They share a nest, and when vampires live in nests they become more cruel, more vicious. They become laws unto themselves. Whereas vampires such as I, who live alone, are much more likely to hang onto some semblance of our former humanity." Sookie's like, "Yeah, and you're doing a bangup job with that, Chief." She hands over the contact info for two electricians willing to come give him quotes at night, and she backs up, ready to bounce. "May I kiss you goodnight?" A world of no. "I couldn't stand it after them." She leaves, and he makes a very intense face. Guess she failed the test.
Sam's stocking the bar, closing up for the night; he and Tara say goodnight to Dawn and Tara asks for a beer, saying she can't go home yet. She tips it way back. "Sam? You think Sookie's getting serious about that vampire?" Sam doesn't really want to talk about it, and keeps working as he plays it off: "I think she's getting to know him. And once she does, I don't think she'll be getting too serious about him." Tara piques his interest by noting that Bill seems to be getting "pretty damn serious" on his own dime, and tells him how Bill showed up at Adele's house last night "all cleaned up and smellin' nice, lookin' like he just stepped out of some piece of shit movie about plantations and shit. Do you know he actually owned slaves?"
(It didn't click for me last week, but this is actually a totally interesting question. They're real people, not history -- they're like time travelers. And while you might not necessarily hold a history person from the Olden Days accountable for everything, given context and culture and all that -- Mad Men is only moderately horrifying because it stays in its box fifty years old -- you'd be hard-pressed to give the same out to somebody who'd actually lived through the intervening centuries. And by the same token, no matter how much TruBlood you drink, your history of murder still follows you. Even the most recovered addict still has a thing hanging over his head; even the most reformed abusive ex-boyfriend is still a guy with history. So what I read last week as Tara being oppositional and weird -- which she was being with Gran, if not Bill -- is a little more textured than that, because it's a fairly fascinating part of the What If. What If Bill not only owned slaves, but owned a slave in Tara's bloodline? Or Rene's? Would that make him better? Worse? Do people actually change? Do we trust epiphanies? Do we need people who have crossed lines -- adulterers, killers, ex-cons, sex offenders -- to always be a little bit sad about their past, so we can stay firmly on the high ground?)
"Least he could've done was apologize to me," she mutters, and Sam asks how Adele felt about vampires up in her parlor. Tara remembers how weird that was: "Sam, she seemed like she was in seventh heaven. It was fuckin' weird." He groans to himself and she stares him down: "You know you don't have anybody to blame but yourself." He avoids her gaze, even as she's pointing out that his "big one" for Sookie has been apparent as long as he's been around. Sam protests that it's none of her business, but she's on a roll. "She's always been peculiar around men, I mean, she's not gonna make the first move." Sam gets uptight and reminds her of their working relationship, but hey: she's off the clock. "Aw come on, Sam. Don't even try to pull any of that working for the man shit with me. You should've said something, and you know it. How come you never have?" Sam rises to the occasion and asks point-blank why she's never said anything to Jason Stackhouse. And, now that he's gone to the Tara place, her respect for him rises accordingly. She tells the truth, and she laughs as she does.
"Because I'm comfortable with him being right where he is, which is unattainable. Which is part of my whole fucked-up thing. Low self-esteem, childhood trauma, blah-blah, snore. What's your excuse?" Sam shrinks from it and says not everybody likes to lay their guts on the table like that. "Yeah, they might not like it, but they all dream about finding somebody they can do it with." They both drink, because true stuff is louder than other stuff.
One of the best things about this episode is how deftly it furthers the theme of Tara and Sookie mirroring each other all the time: almost every scene has its double in the other's day. Like here, Tara's pushing for intimacy for the first time we've seen, while Sookie's backing off Bill as quickly as her fine ass can move -- but they both want the exact same thing, and are denied that thing by the same fears and afflictions. Hearing other people unfiltered, unavoidable intimacy, is what drives Sookie crazy; hearing herself unfiltered, unavoidable introspection, is what makes Tara crazy.
I think when all is said and done, I will love Tara most for her rage, because it comes straight out of her intelligence and the fact that the opportunities and circumstances she finds herself in are nothing like what she deserves. She should be a CEO or a famous standup, not a waitress. And every assumption you can make about her, pushing in at her all the time... Just because we can't hear them doesn't mean the impressions and pressures of everybody else aren't constantly pushing at us, trying to make us into objects and change us and tear us down. Do you think there's really a difference between Sookie hearing some guy think about her tits and Tara seeing somebody obviously staring at hers? Being Sookie is exactly like being a woman.
"Funny thing is, I kind of did let Sookie know, for the first time night before last. Not even a minute before that vampire walked in my front door." Huh. So was he playing her? Was that half-intentional, with extra you-smell-so-good stuff on top? I like that. I like the idea of him using her power to say things he can't say, considering how many times in this episode people find unorthodox ways of expressing the stuff they can't say. And the fact that he knows damn well how much Sookie must love the silence, which entire conversation we've apparently forgotten this week.
Tara says, "If I were you, I would get in there right now while you still got a shot," and he reminds her that, according to herself five seconds ago, she certainly would not. She drinks to that, because he's right, and he looks at her while he thinks, quietly being totally hot, before telling her the part about the silence. Tara's surprised to know Sookie can't read Bill, but not surprised about the implications: "That explains everything!" Sam tries to explain about how he told her not to worry about hearing his thoughts, and Tara's like, "No way, Mr. Intimacy." She explains that this is the opposite of what Sookie wants: "She wants to not hear them. That requires constant work on her part." She reminds him of what he said like two days ago, which is that this makes Bill awesome. "Aw man, you don't stand a chance, I'm really sorry but you don't," she laughs, and he tells her to go home again; she tells him again that she can't, and wanders out into the bar.
Dawn gets out of her car at home, laughing and excited about the totally hot dude tied to her bedposts; she runs straight to the bedroom. The bed's empty, and she's disappointed for a moment before he grabs her. It's the killer! He's wearing a hilarious '80s-print shortie robe, black with hot pink abstract shapes, black elbow-length gloves, and something over his whole head, erasing his face, replacing it with nothing. "You kept me waiting," it says, and Dawn gasps. "I don't like to wait. I need to taste you again." Dawn tries to get the adrenaline under control and tell Jason to cut it out -- because who else would be in her house, even talking in this bizarre Batman voice?
It pulls her head back, makes her scream, throws her on the bed: "I probably should've told you I've got a highly addictive nature... I'm gonna get some more of that sweet stuff out of you. I guess you don't have too much of a problem with that... Don't fight me, because I will hurt you. What are you to me? Just another idiot slut who puts out for vampires." Under the weight of it, Dawn lies still, panicking, and it realizes she's responding, dealing with the situation. "Oh yeah, here we go. I know you liked it." She strains, up, against him. "Slow down, I'm in no hurry. I just drained that poor fuck you left tied up to the bed. Very considerate of you, by the way..."
She stops straining and goes back to resisting, screaming, "Oh, God! Where is he?" The killer asks which part of him she means, and Dawn speaks into muffled hands, erasing her face, replacing it with nothing: "This isn't happening!" The killer admits it didn't have a choice: "You laid him out like an all-you-can-eat buffet!" She crawls away, back across the bed, and the killer laughs, "Although he did put up quite a fight..." And the killer laughs, and takes off its mask. Jason does a little dance.
Dawn hits him in the chest, babbling: "You! That is not funny. That is not funny! You..." Jason laughs at her and tells her to think of it as foreplay, like tying a poor horny boy up and leaving him alone all day. She slaps him, and he tells her to do it again; she starts to smile and his voice gets insistent: "Do it again." He takes off the robe, but leaves the gloves on. "Give me some of that sweet stuff... Raahhh!" he says, in the killer's voice, and they laugh together, and make love.
Sookie parks outside Adele's and takes a moment to chill out as she wipes her tears away. All that adrenaline. Plus the loss of her brand new romance, turning her back on her first-ever boyfriend, everybody turning out right. They're from two different worlds: the night, and the day. She never should have... He's standing in front of her, on the porch, out of nowhere. "Goddamn it, Bill! How many times do I have to tell you, do not do that?" How much more seriously do I have to explain how much I love the silence but hate the blind spot that comes with it? How can I explain the intimacy that comes with invitation? He apologizes. "It wasn't intentional. I just got here. I wanted to make sure that you were safe," he says, coming down her stairs to where she's standing, arms crossed. Things go silent, the world fades away, the crickets go quiet, as she listens; they return again. "Why can't I hear your thoughts? Do you even have any thoughts?" Nice!
Bill explains some things in a totally off-putting speech. I have no problem suspending my disbelief for any of this; it's suspending my disbelief of the words coming out of his mouth being authentic in any way. Maybe he's lying and this is all some kind of amazing actor trick, but I don't think so. I think it's a perfect storm of bad expositional dialogue that's impossible to speak aloud with any kind of conviction, asking your actor to do a weird accent on top of saying these impossible things, and maybe having an actor who thinks these lines are as stupid as ... they actually are. So Bill says he has thoughts -- "many lifetimes of thoughts," in fact -- but maybe Sookie can't hear them because he doesn't have "brain waves," because he's dead, no heartbeat, no breathing, no electrical impulses in his body: "What animates you no longer animates me." I don't think what animates Sookie Stackhouse ever animated you, Compton.
Sookie does that thing she does where she gets so fascinated she forgets to be angry or freaked out: "What does animate you, then? ...Blood? How do you digest it if nothing works?" Bill offers the suggestion that it's "magic," pissing Sookie off to no end, but he's not being condescending. At least not the way she thinks: "You think that it's not magic that keeps you alive? Just 'cause you understand the mechanics of how something works doesn't make it any less of a miracle. Which is just another word for magic. We're all kept alive by magic, Suckie. My magic's just a little different from yours, that's all." Um okay, Deepak. If any real person gave me some patronizing, slippery slope, meaningless sentimental phrase-stuffed bullshit speech like that, I would dump him immediately. Mostly in order to feel less bad about punching my boyfriend, subsequently. Let's see what Sookie does. "I think we need to stop seeing each other."
And without even a moment's hesitation, he screams. "Why!?" It sounds like a bark, like an injured beast. He's scary and weird and talks stupid, and some but not all of that "Suckie is mine" stuff was not pretend. "Because you don't breathe, you don't have any electrical whatever-it-is, your friends would like to rip my throat out, and because vampires killed that preacher from the Fellowship of the Sun Church and his wife and baby. You look me in the eye and tell me they didn't do it." Bill gets all pissy about how "humans have killed millions upon millions in senseless wars. I do not hold you responsible for that." Um, did you notice how exactly one of those five excellent reasons for dumping you actually were about you specifically? And how you just added one more by completely validating my conspiracy theories by rolling your eyes and sidestepping the question?
"Bill. Night before last, I had to bury my bloody clothes because I didn't want my grandmother to find out I was almost killed. And tonight I was almost killed again. Why on earth would I continue seeing you?" Bill comes up the stairs, bearing down on her with his eyes, manipulative and scared and mean: "Because you will never find a human man you can be yourself with." She shakes her head and turns to go, and he tries to stop her. "Suckie..." She whirls, and tells him not to touch her. "Just go, please." She closes the door in his face, and he breathes, and continues to be menacing and creepy and dumb. I don't know guys, maybe he really is in love with her.
Sam and Tara have moved to the porch for drink #2, and Sam finally asks why she's not going home. "This right here," she says, and he laughs, confused. "My mama's a drunk. Not just a slurs-her-words drunk, a waking-up-in-her-own-vomit kind of drunk." Your mom's a college freshman? Don't worry about it! "I just can't be around her when she's gone like that... I know she may end up dying... Lighting herself on fire with a lit cigarette... but I can't. I won't." She laughs awkwardly and points out that guilt compounds the horror of the situation in the first place. He asks why she doesn't get her own place and she flips it on him, as usual, like a ninja: "Why don't you give me a raise?" They laugh as though this is a conversation they've had a million times before, even though he hired her ... two shifts ago? Sam asks if Mama's ever tried AA, and Tara's awesome: "She doesn't need AA, Sam, she's got Jesus." He's like, Gotcha. I think this is the moment Tara decides to fuck him. It'll take her an hour to get there, but she's sure. Being Tara Thornton is like being a woman, too.
She asks permission to ask him a personal question, and he charmingly downs his drink before allowing it. "Are you lonely?" Man! You know who needs a little Jesus? Tara. Girl's not right. "...Yes. I am, I am very... very lonely." He is; it's written all over his gorgeous furry face. "How come you don't have a girlfriend?" He laughs, but she's serious: "You're hot, you have a job, you're not a serial killer..." (OR IS HE? HE OWNS GLOVES.) Sam asks her, then, why she doesn't have a boyfriend. This is like watching tennis, only the people are naked. She arbitrarily decides that we're only talking about Sam's life right now, and he looks out into the night. "Yeah, well... I have a hard time opening up, that's all." Tara asks a rhetorical question: "Please, what have you got to hide that's so fucking bad --" he looks at her sharply, taking it let's say less-than-rhetorically, "-- in this fucking town?" But that's not her burden, it's his, and he reiterates he's not going to open up.
"Don't you ever get horny?" (Needs! Jesus!) Sam's half-assed attempt to be scandalized falls by the wayside and he admits that yes, of course, he has needs. "How long has it been since you've had sex?" Sam laughs, after a moment, but I mean, I love this so much, because the acting's so good that you can actually see this plan forming, moment to moment. A boy who can't be heard with a girl who can't really be seen, moving further and further apart; a girl and boy in love with other people, laying themselves open like this, negotiating closer and closer. Like the naked tennis just turned into naked paintball. Trying to score without being seen. He admits it's been a while, and watches her face as she commiserates, and asks how long it's been for her. Eight months and three weeks. They laugh together, noticing the things they have in common: Men and women have been doing this forever. Sam offers her another beer.
"Are you kidding? I'm an adult child of an alcoholic, I'll need at least three more." Maybe the reason Sookie loves Tara is because of her complete lack of filter, the raw wound that is her mouth; she's the anti-Bill, but they both mean no effort, to hide. Tara is no masks and no cameras, just this unceasing update on Things We Don't Talk About. And when Sam goes to get her drink, she takes her hair down, and thinks about whether this is betrayal, of herself if nothing else, taking Sookie's castoffs. If anybody's actually capable of having sex without strings attached. Sam's a romantic, isn't he? Don't boys want what they can't have? Why the filibuster? Can't we just want things?
"So maybe you and I should sleep together," she says, following him, watching him laugh, gauging him every second. "I mean, we're grownups. No strings. Friends with benefits." He protests that she's his employee and she laughs in his face: "Sam! Aren't you sick of not getting laid? I know I am. D'you have condoms?" Sam's amazed, and just keeps repeating what a terrible idea it is. That he's going to walk into, once she's folded all his fears up and put them away for the night, with his eyes open. All men are dogs, looking only to be told that they're okay, and won't be punished for getting horny -- that pleasure isn't the sin they've been told it always was, that they're allowed to desire. Without masks. She drops onto his couch, looking up at him from between her legs. He stays safe in the kitchen.
"Whatever. I mean, I am not looking for a boyfriend. Especially one who could fire me. This would strictly be a one-time deal. We never even have to mention it again..." He says no again, and she's sad for a split second: "Suit yourself." But the seed is planted. He's just a man. The camera pushes up against him, as he watches her face at rest, apparently disinterested; it nuzzles him like a familiar pet. "...You think you'd be able to forget about it? And not let it affect our working relationship?" She stares at the ceiling: "I've had to do much harder things than that in my life. Believe me." Because if it got weird, he explains, he'd have to fire her. She looks at him, point-blank: "Big deal. Didn't even wanna hire me in the first place." She doesn't drop his gaze until he says yes.
He puts down his drink; she downs hers as he approaches. She puts her legs up in the air, to make a place for him to lie, and he does. "You feel nice," he muses, and she says she knows that. He kisses her, and they make love. It's quiet, and hungry.
It's loud, and raucous. Needless to say, Jason's having some more crazy sex. He keeps the gloves on; it's a little bit of a mask. He licks her foot while he's fucking her, and suddenly he's fucking Liam. He doesn't even know his name. He stops, freaked out, and Liam asks what's wrong, in Dawn's voice. Not even the gloves can save him from the truth: she's a dirty girl, she's touched the darkness. She's the truth about him, wearing a Dawn mask. He whines, and drops beside her, shaking with a secret. "I hate that you've been with vampires," he says, and she's offended: how is that his business? How is that his problem? There's a list of reasons: "They're fucked up. They're freaks. They're fucking dead."
He asks her what's wrong with her, letting something nasty like that even touch her; it's not rhetorical. He wants to know what's wrong with a person who would let something nasty like that touch them, let it creep inside them. How can we be normal, boy and girl, with things like this inside us? Charlotte, Light & Dark: if Tara is everything I loved about Brenda, Jason is everything I couldn't handle. Easier to take because I neither respect nor find him all that appealing on a level beyond the aesthetic?
"For your information, that was the best sex I ever had in my life." (Problem number one: sex is all Jason has, and being good in bed is all he is.) "And who are you to judge?" (Problem number two: he's not.) "You fuck anything with a space between its legs." (Problem number three: exactly. He's the one on top, he kills sex with every kiss. This isn't about getting inside anybody, this is about what got inside him. I don't want to know who did this to him, the first attack, because it makes me sad to think about. Plus, if he's a survivor that makes the hot naked sex a lot less hot, which would be a shame.) He cries out, working backwards: "Best sex you ever had? You told me I was the best sex you ever had!" Right before he stopped calling, she notes, and coming to see her at work. She thought it was just burnout, when he got weird and closed-off, but that wasn't it: she'd just given him what he wanted all along. A place to be.
"And then I met that vampire..." Jason asks if it was Liam -- "Bald-headed, tattoos, crazy?" -- and she laughs. "No! Actually, he had a lot of hair. I met him in Shreveport at the vampire bar." And then she let him bite her? Let him inside? "Yeah, and I'm not... I'm not ashamed of that." Touching something new and dark, exploring ways of intimacy; she reassures herself and then tells him to get off the high horse. "Is that who you thought I was tonight? When you started rubbing up against me like a cat in heat?" She swears she knew it was him, touching his stomach and his cock, soothing him, but he's not having it. He gets weird. "You're a lying sack of shit! You would fuck that vampire, and let him bite you, if he showed up tonight." Jason's imaginary vampire, his nighttime double, that killed Maudette, that chased him into Dawn's arms, that's getting closer: What if it weren't a vampire at all?
"All right," Dawn says, finally offended, standing: "Now this is getting boring." She slips her panties on and asks him to leave, and he laughs. The prerogative of men, to go where they will, invited or not. She reminds him its her house, and he keeps laughing. Boys. She takes it to the Defcon: "God, just because you lost your hard-on doesn't mean you have to have a fucking meltdown. Believe it or not, the world does not revolve around your dick." He's offended, and she stalks off; when he whines at her she screams hilariously that she's going TO GET A CIGARETTE! He considers the condom on himself sadly, and takes it off, defeated.
"It isn't like I don't know that you're a great fuck," she says from the other room, over his protests. "It happens to every guy at some point or another," she says, returning with a gun pointed at his head: "...Except for vampires." He laughs at her, but she's not kidding around. It's the Jason Stackhouse filibuster: keep being adorable and doing what you want, and they'll give in every time. His response, awesomely, is to start flossing his teeth -- still in bed, still wearing the ridiculous gloves -- but she's not kidding around. "You do not own me, Jason Stackhouse. And if I want you out of my house, you better get your sorry ass out of here." He blows her off, flossing, and she shoots a bullet into the floor, startling him into the air.
"You are obnoxious and full of yourself and dumber than a box of hair," Dawn says seductively, crawling towards him on the bed, in her panties. "And now you can't even get it up? There's no reason why I should be seeing you anymore." Jason fumbles, trying to get his pants on. "You're fucking crazy!" She agrees, and tells him to leave again. "I don't think I feel like waiting," she says, as he stumbles away, his jeans half-on, and fires again. "Get the fuck out!" He's wearing unzipped jeans and elbow-length gloves. He should not be half as hot as he is right now.
"That's right, you get the fuck out of my house!", she screams, chasing him toward the door. "Limp dick motherfucker! Go try your fucking grandmother with that limp dick!" Jason screams at the closed door, standing on the porch in his gloves: "Bitch! I can get it up! Bitch!" A sour-faced neighbor sticks her head out, probably just to get a closer look at how hot he is right now. "Yeah, you heard me. Your neighbor's a crazy bitch!" She's horrified and retreats; I really hope Dawn doesn't get snuffed by the serial killer, or else the neighbor's going to talk, and I mean: you don't put a boy like this in GenPop. He gets in his truck, cursing bloodsuckers and punching the ceiling. They keep taking everything away.
It's a triptych: girls finally saying the things they're not supposed to say. First Tara and her Irish courage, then Dawn and her gun, and now? Spooky music floats us across the field, into the Compton house; the door floats open. Bill's reading a book in the parlor, lit by a million lanterns. It's not a scary place anymore. He zooms to a standing position, repeating her constant complaint: "Suckie, don't ever sneak up on a vampire. What are you doing here?" Sookie stands in her nightgown, never so tiny, and gives her riff on Tara's speech a moment ago. All the things she can't say, there's Tara to say them; in the nighttime world she can drop the filibuster and make her motion.
"All right, here's the deal, and this is a little embarrassing? I've never been with a man intimately, for all the reasons I told you about, but I feel things when I'm with you that make me think, and I know this could be a huge mistake, one I will regret forever, but it feels like you're the one that I'm supposed to, you know, do it with, and I'm really nervous about that, and frankly I'm scared to death of you, so can we just get it out of the way already so I can relax and get a good night's sleep?"
That is about the best speech I've ever heard. What if for just one day you could say what you're really thinking? What you really want? What if somebody gave you permission to be honest, even just for a second? For once, it's actually romantic. He smiles warmly, and leans in to kiss her, and she gives the other half of that speech, which is and always will be five words long: "Just don't bite me, okay?" And then she's spent, all talked out, everything on the table, guts and all. He kisses her, and they get hungrier -- it's a cross between both kinds of sex, the Tara and the Jason kind, the daytime and the nighttime kind. They help each other out of their clothes; she gasps as he takes her from behind.
Sookie wakes slowly from the dream, touching herself. The hideous Tina cat stares at her, and Sookie stares her down: "Stop that." But the cat won't listen. It never does. Sookie grins at herself, and looks up toward the sky.
Sam growls and woofs in bed, waking Tara. She smiles, and reaches over, but he yips sharply to himself, and she draws back. She watches him for a while bemusedly: chasing rabbits, chasing cars.
Jason comes home and grabs a beer, breathing softly. He turns on the TV; it's an old movie, a vampire getting staked. (Points for the fact that it's a female vamp, on this particular night, for this particular character.) He clicks to the , chuckling angrily, and there's Reverend Newlin's adult son, talking to a Jan Crouch analogue (and PS, old man: that reference is so dated almost half the posters in the forums had no idea what it was about) about his father's death: "...but the vampires assassinated my father, because of his campaign against the vampire agenda..." Paul's all, "Theodore Newlin is a hero! First casualty in World War III!" and Jan goes, "Amen!" and the kid goes, "It's Armageddon!" and Jan goes "Amen!" and Jason goes, "Amen!" and just as Newlin Jr.'s talking about whatever new witch hunt he's involved in, Jason changes the channel one more time. "Vampire bats are bats that feed on blood, feeding on the blood of animals like pigs and horses. The vampire bat requires about two tablespoon..." The footage: graphic. Turning off the TV: immediate. Cursing softly and drinking: heavily.
The Nest. The camera glides into the parlor, over their three coffins: Liam's is a hard-rocking Scott Stapp-esque number with gothique scripte all over it reading, no lie, Gott Ist Todd. (What's sadder than your average queerbutt Ayn Rand dork? A vampire one, who's convinced he's Evil Superman.) Diane's is classic, with a monogram and Erzulie's crown, while Malcolm's is tiresomely clichéd. Isn't that nice? Not to mention the plastic covers on all the furniture.
But there's another riff here, relating to the God Hates Fangs metaphor, that you might not immediately connect to. These are people who have stepped out of the daylight. Into the strange places, where there aren't any rules, which is to say they are not governed by what governs us. They are rebels. But the thing about having no rules or loyalty to social roles is that you're without a major tool most people have for constructing identity. What we're looking at -- and it's no mistake that the rightmost one Kinseywise, Malcolm, is also the most committed to playing to stereotype -- is three people who, having left humanity behind, have no idea who they're supposed to be. So they gather together, with their shared desires, and stake out a place to be, supporting each other and egging each other on. And, inevitably, out come the glowsticks and Judy Garland references and no wire hangers and gogo boys in cutoff shorts and the whole damn mess. The comfort of moving from one cliché to another.
Liam drinks blood from a big Kool-Aid-shaped pitcher; Janella hangs dead in a room off the front foyer, bleeding into a bucket to feed them. Diane drinks her blood from a martini glass and comforts Malcolm, who's feeling down. "Damn. I really liked Jerry." And it's true, he was very affectionate. "Don't worry. We'll find you another hot little blood bank," Diane says, and Liam offers a trip to LSU tomorrow night, to "raid us a frat house." Diane says "dumb, thick and juicy" is definitely on the menu, and I mean, let's keep Jason away from LSU for awhile, okay? There's a knock at the door, and Malcolm (as the senior vamp, I suppose) zooms to answer it. It's Bill; he comes into the parlor without noticing Janella.
"What luck, everyone's favorite buzzkill," groans Malcolm, but Diane and Liam greet him more warmly. Liam offers him blood; Diane offers him something else. She reaches out for his chest, remembering his "sizeable ... appetite," but he throws her across the room and through a wall. So I guess it's not a social call. The other two game up, and Diane stalks back towards him, pissed. "The three of you will stay away from me and Suckie from now on," Bill orders. Malcolm reminds him that he's Bill's elder, and that he has no authority in the nest. "There are higher authorities," he says portentously, and Malcolm says he's not afraid of Eric (!). "Higher than him," Bill says more delicately, and Malcolm says "she" can speak to him directly. (It's Aaliyah! I know it!) Diane gets in Bill's face: "She can suck on sunlight for all I care!" I love how Diane's got this whole level of hilarious vamp jargon that nobody else uses.
Bill reminds them all that they're not exactly advancing the cause, and Diane says the cause can additionally suck sunshine: "Not everyone wants to dress up and play human, Bill." Liam agrees: "Not everybody wants to live off that Japanese shit they call blood, either." And this part's interesting: "As if we could." Bill protests that they have to "moderate" their behavior, now that they're out in the open; he privately remembers to tell Sookie at least fifty more closely held vampire secrets the time he sees her, to help with this pursuit. Malcolm's ever so rational and sweet: "Not everybody thinks it was such a great idea. And not everybody intends to tow the party line. Honey? If we can't kill people, what's the point of being a vampire?"
Bill asks after Jerry, and Malcolm sadly admits that they left him on the side of I-20, minus "a souvenir or two" (about which he, happily, does not elaborate), and Janella got moved up the scale from a Sometimes to an Anytime Food. Bill checks her out, Diane laughing ridiculously the entire time: wrapped in plastic, come to a bad end. Bill says they make him sick, and Diane complains that he used to be fun. "This all on account of that little blond breather?" Kinda. "If you insist on flaunting your ways in front of mortals," Bill says one more time, "There will be consequences." He zooms away and Malcolm preens viciously at the closed door. "Asshole." I hear you, girl.
Sam wakes up alone, with a slight headache; she's already gone, driving back home. When Tara opens the door, she's immediately clubbed over the head by a large, heavy book that's used as a weapon more often than it really should be. "Where the hell you been, you dirty whore? Out all night doing all kinds of God-know-what. You the devil, child. You ain't no child of mine..." I have to say that all anecdotal evidence would indicate that a waking Momma would be less pleasant than a passed-out Momma, and it's nice to see that confirmed.
Well, I guess not so much for Tara, who backs up in advance of Momma's swing, causing Momma to bust ass on the floor. Tara's like, "Oh, Jesus," but Momma's fairly certain Jesus isn't interested in helping Tara at this time. "That's been clear for quite some time," Tara says ironically, towering over her mother's weakness. "You sass the Lord and I will kick your skinny ass, you hear me?" Tara reminds her that, currently, she's not even able to stand. Emboldened, brave, still high on honesty, she steels herself for bravery and says it: "...You pathetic, ugly old bitch." They are both shocked. Momma starts to cry, and Tara immediately drops to help her. "I ain't ugly," Momma whines, and I gotta say even Jesus would probably call bullshit.
"Momma, why do you wanna do this to yourself?" She clucks over her mother; she's just skin and bones and wild eyes. "If Jesus was here, he'd take one look at you and he'd apologize for giving me such a spiteful child." Tara notes that, given the stench of her, Jesus probably wouldn't make it through the door, and tries to help her up. "Now, let's just go and take a shower..." Momma spazzes out for awhile, and eventually her hands fall on an empty liquor bottle, heavy and glass, and bashes Tara across the head and into the wall. "Who's ugly now?" Jesus: "You. Times two. Keep it up, bitch."
Tara pulls it together, straightens her back, breathes deep. Says the things you just don't say. Steps outside the lines. "All right. You may have carried me and nursed me, but obviously you are now set on killing me." Given the choice between Momma and dying, Tara explains, Momma will always lose. She grits it out through tears, grabbing her keys. "You get back here! You help me up!" Nobody can. "You on your own, old woman." She leaves; it's the hardest thing she's ever done. Alone, Momma spazzes out some more. That was awful, and good. Both.
Sookie's forcing that lawnmower across the yard like she's fording a river, like she's pushing it through concrete walls. Adele calls to her from the porch -- "barely nine o'clock and already eighty degrees!" -- and gives her some fresh-squeezed lemonade. (Man, I wish my Grandmother had been like Sookie's. This whole scene would have played out like so: "I'm about to do crossword puzzles with my 9AM gimlet and I don't want any funny business, so shut that damned machine off. I have a hair appointment in an hour, you can sublimate your sexual frustration all over the lawn at that time. Now, about this vampire: is he educated? Breeding tells, Sookie.") Sookie admits that she's been landscaping since the sun came up, but she was awake well before then, masturbating herself into a coma.
Gran catches her eye, and while sipping her lemonade Sookie makes this great, "Aw, hell" face. "Are you concerned about the vampire? Has he done something ... untoward?" Heh. Sookie says he hasn't but that the problem is not the vampire exactly, then gives another speech that's a tad less forthright. "What I'm thinking is, stay away, but what I'm feeling, what I'm feeling with my whole body is ... Something else entirely, and I don't know whether to trust my head, or..." Adele points at Jesus and reminds her that we are classy in the South: "Heart." They both smile with that Steel Magnolia smile that only comes out when there's naughtiness in the air, and Sookie agrees. "Well, that is a dilemma," Adele says, and tells her to come inside for breakfast. When Sookie says she's not hungry, Adele gives her The Look. "I didn't ask if you were hungry." Sookie's like, Um, okay then, and follows. That dang dog, who's been watching for who knows how long, stares for a second more before running off.
Lafayette answers the panicked beating on his door with the usual serene profanity; he is wearing amazing pajama pants covered in flames. "She hit me with a fucking liquor bottle," Tara says immediately. "My head is bleeding." He tells her to calm down and stop shouting, because he has a guest. Tara hesitates ("Oh shit") but he waves it off -- he's in the shower. Tara asks if it'll need stitches, and Lafayette takes a look: "You're gonna put some peroxide on that... Then take two Vicodin, with a big glass of red wine. Then smoke some badass ganja, baby. By the time you wake up... mm! All healed." (Well, if you wake up, with that awesomely ill-advised cocktail, but if you do, that would probably work all right.)
Tara continues to whine about her shitty, awful mother, as he fills her full of pills and alcohol and pot. I think we're so used to hearing the chords of doom whenever anybody drinks or takes any drugs that we're conditioned to think that they are literally the worst things in the world, and it's a nice piece of cognitive dissonance -- here and on the prior show -- when people use drugs and aren't immediately destroyed by the narrative gods. Hell, the first half of American Beauty was about the idea that Reefer Madness is usually preferable to Regular Flavor.
Tara asks if she can stay, and confirms that she doesn't really care to hear the answer. A man, white and stately and old, enters and is taken aback by the new person. "Hi!" says Lafayette, totally unselfconscious. "This is my cousin Tara!" He's about to introduce him to her, but the guy jumps in and supplies a fake name: "Duke. Duke Smith," which causes Lafayette to bust out. "Boyfriend, you are so not a duke." This does not put "Duke" at ease, and he stutters in Mad Libs: "I left the _______ in the ______?" Lafayette thanks him kindly for the money he left in the bedroom and offers "Duke" a toke off Tara's joint. "Thank you. Call me when the ______ comes in?" Of course. Lafayette, grandly says ta-ta, with one last hilarious "Take care, Duke."
And what the hell was that? "That was a state senator." Tara asks if he's tricking now, and Lafayette is like, hey reality: "I'm supposed to be satisfied being a fucking short-order cook and working on the road crew? Which is basically one step from the chain gang?" He smacks his body, making her laugh, and says it's his "ticket" -- "How else am I gonna get ahead in this podunk town? Already got a website," he says, sitting again. Tara muses. "What's wrong with us, Lafayette? You're a state-senator-fucking prostitute and I'm a bartender in a redneck bar, who fucks her boss who's in love with her best friend..." Lafayette offers her another hit, and then stops short. "...Wait a minute, you slept with Sam?" Tara nods. "Know what? He barks in his sleep." They agree that white folks are just all fucked up, and it's so self-evident that they barely even laugh.
The Sam dog runs up to ... Sam. Huh. He's reading the paper, and opening up in a way he said he never would: "What's up, my brother? ...Oh hell, Starbucks coming to Marthaville." He asks the dog how long until he breaks down and buys "a goddamn cappuccino machine," then admits that more than a Starbucks, what he wish would come to town is: Buffy. "Or Blade. Or any one of those badass vampire killers, to take care of Mr. Compton. That's what I wish." He laughs at the dog, who could give a fuck, and throws the ball for the dog; they chase it together.
"Marthaville's getting a Starbucks," Sookie notes, and Gran wonders why on earth anybody would pay three bucks for "a cup of coffee with too much milk." Sookie points out -- and this is so Alan Ball -- that, per Arlene, people are less calcium-deficient than they used to be, because of all the fancy coffee they drink nowadays. Gran laughs and feels a little more in love with the future. "I never thought of that, but it does make sense." She pours herself some coffee nonetheless.
"Hey, Gran. Do you think I should continue seeing Bill?" Adele tells her that of course she can't be the one to say. "I can tell you that I think he is a smart, handsome and very polite young man... But of course he's gonna show his best side to me, so that I won't stand in the way of his courting you." There's a wonderful note to Sookie's line here, which is equal parts admission and defiance: "He scares me." Out loud, to the only other person in all Bon Temps who's on Team Bill. "Well, it is scary opening your heart up to somebody," Gran says, and Sookie's like, "True. Plus HE IS A VAMPIRE."
"I suppose. Bill is the first vampire I ever met... that I know of." Sookie says she's not scared that he would ever hurt her; that Adele was right the first time: "Scared because... I don't know what he's thinking." Gran opines that this is a probable relief, given Sookie's circumstances, and stumbles over the elephant in the room, wondering if she's crossed the line. Sookie stands, and takes her stuff to the sink. Why talk about it? "You know," Adele says more loudly, to Sookie's embarrassed back: "Your grandfather used to know things." Sookie's back goes straight, but she doesn't turn: "What things?"
"If somebody was having money problems, running around behind their wife's back. Sick. That kind of thing. Personal things they never would have told anybody about." All shame forgotten, Sookie whips around all OMG, right? "See, that's exactly it. If I don't stop myself from it, I hear everybody's deepest, darkest secrets. I'm sorry! That's just too much information!"
But there's a daylight side to it, just like people. "But then Earl's brother, your great-uncle Francis, came back from Korea in real bad shape. All torn up, from the things he'd seen. Earl knew he was thinking about killing himself. He went over there in the middle of the night one night, Francis was just about to kick the chair out from underneath him. Already had the noose around his neck. But Earl talked him out of it." Sookie looks at her grandmother, who's reaching the point.
"I just think there is a purpose for everything that God creates. Whether it's a unique ability, or a cup of overpriced coffee with too much milk. Or a vampire." Sookie smiles. "God will reveal that purpose when the time is right."
Sookie nods and kisses her cheek; on the stairs, she turns back. "Wait. I thought great-uncle Francis did kill himself. With a shotgun." Gran nods: "Oh yes, he did. But that was years later."
Sookie rolls her eyes, Adele is hilarious and awesome, stares into space, finishes her coffee.
Somebody else is beating down Lafayette's door, later. His shouting curses stop short when he opens the door; he curls himself toward Jason, like a sex kitten in gold lamé. Jason's unfazed, because what: somebody wants to fuck Jason Stackhouse? What else is new. "Lafayette, I need your help!" Lafayette leans against the doorframe: "I am so glad you finally recognized that truth." He's a guide. And Jason? Giggles. "You're wearing gold pants!" Giggles again. I mean, you could die from such a man. They sit on the couch -- the pants are fairly awesome, now that you mention it -- and Jason whispers the word "Viagra" so softly only Sam could hear him. "What?" says Lafayette, loving it. "Viagra. Do you have any Viagra?" Lafayette laughs at him, because -- "Puppy dog" -- Viagra is legal. "You can buy it in the drugstore!" Right, but Jason needs it STAT. "Don't you have anything that would..." Lafayette supplies a troubling metaphor: "Give you wood so hard a saw couldn't cut through it?" Even Jason is kind of amazed by the imagery: "Yeah, that sounds good. I think..." Lafayette admits he's holding something, but it's pricey: "Six hundred a quarter of an ounce." Oh, hell.
"Get the fuck out of here. What in the hell's worth that kind of money?" Guess. Put one toe over the line, might as well just strip down and jump in. Jason's stepping out of the daylight, into the strange places. Where there aren't any rules, and the thing about having no rules or loyalty to social roles is that you're without a major tool most people have for constructing identity. (In Jason's case, literally; his identity comes down to just one tool.) But he's dealing with the Shadow. The only way out is through. Without Lafayette as his guide -- and I mean that in the capital-G, Joseph Campbell way, considering he's been marked as such from his first appearance more strongly than any other archetypal character on this show -- we know how this story ends: with Jason dead. Testing the limits again and again until he fucks up, out of stupidity or self-hatred. I'm not saying this won't go to hell faster than anything you ever saw, but: it's not a drug, it's an inoculation. A little bit of darkness at a time, until you're not allergic anymore. Until you can look at the darkness in yourself. The only way out is through.
"When'd you start dealing v?" When there was a market for it, and don't tell anybody. Lafayette pulls his hair: "Do you understand me? The vamps don't take kindly to the juice dispenser." Jason agrees easily, and asks about the source. "Let's just say I have an arrangement with a certain life-challenged individual who appreciates my multi-faceted talents." Jason's nervous, for the first time in this house. "Goddamn. Is there anybody who isn't fucking vampires these days?" (Is there nobody who wants to fuck me that isn't fucking vampires these days?") "Tell me something, lover. Do you wanna get it up and keep it up and have the best sex you have ever had? For both you and your lady friend?" Jason is adorable: "Yes yes yes yes yesyesyes." He tells Jason one or two drops, no more. (And don't feed it after midnight.) "Any more and things might get a little intense. I don't mean in a good way." Their eyes lock and Jason smiles dumbly, punching him lightly on the shoulder. "Thanks, man. Appreciate it."
Lafayette jerks him back down onto the couch: "Ain't nothin' free in my world." Jason starts to filibuster, batting his eyes and asking if he can come back later. "Motherfucker, who you think I am?" He locks the door and looks down at Jason from a thousand feet up. "I don't run a layaway program. And I ain't interested in instituting one." As though Jason will ever understand paying his debts, until it's too late. "Isn't there some way you can let me pay you this afternoon?" Lafayette thinks. And man, if you were Sookie you'd be real uncomfortable for a second.
Jason stands in the bedroom in his undies, very wriggly. "Goddamnit, I hate video cameras." Especially when they catch you strangling the town whore while you come. "You know how much you could make if you had your own website? Queens all over this world would pay good money just to watch you jack off..." Jason balks, protesting that all he was supposed to do was dance. "Okay. Dance." Lafayette turns on some hilariously on point Jonny McGovern, and Jason snaps his fingers awkwardly. "Is anybody gonna see this who knows me?" Lafayette sways his hips to the music and levels: "Probably. There's a lot of pervs in this town." Heh. Hey, just say your name's Duke. It's the daylight way. "No way. That's not cool, man," he says, grabbing his jeans for the second time today. "Look. You want the V or not?"
"...Gimme the fucking mask," Jason says. And just like that, his face is erased again, replaced by ... Laura Bush. Wow. "That's my Jason," Lafayette says: just two men, one faceless, a camera and a mask. And then somebody else: Tara, staring through the beads with her eyes grown wide: "What... The... Fuck..." Jason starts dancing, awkward at first, but soon enough the mask takes hold, and he can be whoever he wants. "I like what you're working with," Lafayette says, and Jason goes for it. It's ... awesome, let's say. "Ooh, shake that ass! Lover, you gonna make me clutch my pearls!" Oh, Lafayette. Jason giggles inside the mask, and smacks his ass.
Everybody is, you know, somebody. We're all just trying to be seen. To matter. But when the truth is something you don't want anybody seeing, you're in a pickle. Because everybody is also trying not to be seen -- to matter, without risk. You've got the camera, but you also need the mask. Everybody's body is their ticket, when we're food; whether it's for vamps or for the hungry eyes on the other side of the camera, just remember that you're food now. And everybody's shopping. Beyond the beaded veil, Tara makes a face that cannot easily be put into words, but goes something like: "Well. Well well well."
Sookie loiters on Bill's porch, staring in the window and then panning around the room, all the way around to where the camera started; that cello starts as she remembers her dream. He's still sleeping; it's the daytime. She steps back and puts her purse down, sits on the porch, looks up at the sun. Things get all trippy and wild in the field, v-juice still coursing through her veins and then she's, um, going to masturbate suddenly. Sookie! That's just not polite! That's a private activity!
("Okay Anna, you've just reached your boyfriend's house and realized that he lives in a coffin and isn't available, so you sit down and jerk off until he wakes up. Take one.") The phone rings, and it's Sam. Perfect! But no, she puts herself away and tells him she's on her day off. "No, I'm not asking you to come in, I need you to run by Dawn's and wake her up. She probably just overslept." Sookie sighs and heads over there. "Dawn? It's me, Sookie. Honey, you overslept..." No answer, so she opens the screen and knocks on the door. Nothing. She opens it wide, and stands in the threshold. "Dawn?" The screen door slams behind her; she enters, as is her prerogative. "Are you here?"
Dawn's got one of those alarm clocks that you can only hear when you're in the room with it and nowhere else in the house, including just on the other side of the open door; I have noticed that the people who own those peculiar alarm clocks are often found lying around totally murdered. Like Dawn. Dammit! Dawn is awesome! "Dawn? Dawn?" Neat acting moment: Sookie looks blankly at the body for awhile before the horror travels all the way up her spine... and then jumps about ten feet into the air, screaming her ass off.
And that is why you shouldn't masturbate.