Immediately upon waking up with naked Sam in her bed and learning that he is a shapeshifter -- not a werewolf, he's intense about pointing out -- Sookie decides to spend the entire episode waiting to die, feeling abandoned by everyone, and being a giant bitch. As usual, she has more than enough excuses to do so. She feels betrayed by Sam, both romantically and now ontologically, and what with Bill having run off for the nineteenth episode running to go play reindeer games with his vamp friends, she's in no mood. Arlene's engagement party -- a classically understated affair to be sure -- also provides the Killer with a pretext to stalk Sookie around Merlotte's and drive her right back into Sam's arms.
Eddie the Fang and Amy the Loon play a quick game of Cat and Mouse for Jason's soul, which Amy awesomely turns into some kind of fucked up European backpacking adventure where Eddie's their pet vamp, until a masculinity pep talk from Rene Lanier -- and a roughing-up from a very worried Lafayette -- cause Jason to assert himself by letting Eddie go. Amy goes sort of insane and stakes Eddie, causing massive heartbreak on Jason's part and a certain gooiness for Eddie.
Bill watches some guy get his fangs pulled out by the Tribunal, but when it's his turn for judgment, he manages to mouth off just enough that the Magister changes his sentence. Instead of being locked in a coffin for five years -- which is apparently just long enough to wither away to "leather and sticks" and go completely insane -- he's forced to sire a young sheltered Christian girl. Just when you think it's going to be really bad, you remember that you forgot glamouring, and that it's going to be okay... But then the Magister tells him to cut it out, which means the eventual ritual -- which, with everybody around, manages to encapsulate the worst parts of birth, murder, and sexual assault -- is even worse than you originally thought.
Tara spends the dawn doing intense ritual and personal demonology with Miss Jeanette, the morning with Lettie Mae sucking the heads of celebratory post-exorcism crawfish, the afternoon freaking the fuck out after discovering her hedge witch doubles as a stocker at Walgreens and literally snatching her bald, the evening flouncing around dressed like a drunken streetwalker from the '80s, the night getting into yet another horrible and pointless fight with Sam, and ends things by drunk driving her car into a tree to avoid hitting a strange goat-legged woman standing in the middle of the road with a hog as large as a VW Bug. The fact that she's played by an absolutely filthy Helena Cain means that she actually exists, and is in fact dreadfully important, and the smirk on her face as she walks away from the wreck promises us that Tara's about five seconds from finding out how scary real magic can be.
Come back on Friday for the full detailed recap. Until then, see what our vlogger thinks about Bill's accent.
The Bad & The Beautiful was a 1952 Vincent Minelli MGM film starring Lana Turner and Kirk Douglas. It was like Citizen Kane, but with Hollywood types doing the remembering: the writer, the actress, the director. The main character, Jonathan Shields, is a Hollywood scion and movie producer whose downturn in luck has caused another exec to bring his three victims together to help him make a new movie. They flashback to the various ways in which he created their fortunes, and betrayed them. It won five Oscars, and is a record holder for most awards won without being nominated for Best Picture. I don't know anybody that's ever seen it, but it's good: they're totally successful because of the bullshit he put them through, but they can barely even see straight about him, even years later, because he broke their hearts. He created them while he was destroying them, and they couldn't even see it:
It's barely dawn and Sookie is, since it's the beginning of an episode of True Blood, screaming bloody murder. This time it's because of naked Sam at the foot of her bed like the loveliest Christmas gift of a lifetime. When she demands to know what the hell he's doing there, he's still a little sleepy: "Nothing! Sleeping!" Sookie's question is less humorous for being more understandable: "Did you touch me?" One day she'll wake up and that won't be the closest nightmare to hand. "Sookie, listen. Bill asked me to look after you while he was away..." Sookie, flattening herself against the headboard, every inch of her as far from him as possible, shivers and gasps: "Did he ask you to do it buck naked?" Man, even in PTSD she's awesome. "I want you out of here," she declares with her resolved face, and he shakes his head like a frustrated puppy:
"Now listen! Listen, Sookie, I need to tell you something about me. Something I've never told another person..." The last person who invaded her house, when she thought she was safe, killed her cat and left her body to be found, in the dark. "Oh my God, it's you! You're the murderer!" He reaches for her, and she slaps him, throwing herself off the bed: "Oh my God, you killed my grandmother!" Into the bathroom, where she quickly jumps behind the shower curtain and grabs a loofah. Not quite a murderous length of chain, but you can't always hit them out of the park. Eventually Sookie peeks around the curtain, horribly slowly, and there on the floor is Dean the border collie, looking up at her with sad eyes. Sam whines, and becomes a man. Standing in front of her, breathing hard, he swears he's not the killer. "I'm a shapeshifter," he says intensely, and Sookie smiles in wonder and bemusement, then becomes afraid as the world gets bigger again, and finally wrinkles her lip in derision. "Shut the fuck up."
We're defined in a very small way by the stories we love. Like, that line would be a lot funnier to me if she hadn't said "Shut up!" when she met Bill, or if Buffy hadn't said, "Get out!" in the same intonation on the night she met Dracula. Still, it's good. It's Sookie to a T, the Sookie she's becoming, and I like that. Or how, in the movie, Lafayette likes Georgia's story best: the starlet-turned-slut-turned-star. He's old-school and he loves his vicious bitches; he loves to see the goddess in women because while he loves the women in them, he doesn't have a use for them. His highest forms of compliment are in likening them to himself: Hooker, Skank, Tramp. He loves the old bitches because they give voice to something wonderful and angry and beautiful inside him; because they are beloved in a way he can only find in corners and nooks and secret places. For my part, I like the director's story. Making a movie about shapeshifters -- okay? -- they realize something very important, something that we've been talking about since the first episode. They do a spell:
And what scares the human race more than any other single thing?
The dark.
Of course. And why? Because the dark has a life of its own. In the dark, all sorts of things come alive.
Now, what'll we put on the screen that'll make the backs of their necks crawl?
Two eyes shining in the dark.
A dog frightened, growling, showing its fangs.
A bird, its neck broken, feathers torn from its throat.
A little girl screaming, claw marks down her cheeks:
Miss Jeanette lays out a bunch of stuff, tools of the trade: sweetgrass and sage, knives; she shakes out a little cloth baggie and Tara asks what it's for. "Give me your hand," Jeanette says. The sun is coming up. Tara asks her why, and Miss Jeanette gets harsh: "'Why, why, why. Why's it have to be in the woods? Why's it have to be before dawn? Why 799.95?"" Tara rolls her eyes. "Why, why, why. You think knowing the answers will save you?" Yes. That's the problem here. "Shut up and give me your hand." She spits in Tara's palm and she recoils. "Oh, you nasty bitch!" Miss Jeanette doesn't even crack a smile: "That's cleaner than anything you've ever touched." Tara grunts, but settles. "Hold it over the fire. Keep it there." She throws herbs into the fire; sparks fly up:
"Angelica root and spit. A lot stronger than holy water. You got poison oozing out your pores." Tara's grossed out. "You live near the highway?" She doesn't. "Cook with a microwave? Or talk on a cell phone?" And that's when I stopped trusting Miss Jeanette, because that's some Amy Burley talk right there. You either love the world or you don't. You start drawing lines and you see how regularly they line up around whatever suits you best. "Who doesn't?" Miss Jeanette doesn't. "All that pollution and technology, that's how demons travel." Oh, I don't trust you anymore, Miss Jeanette. That's some backwards fucking talk. That's not the speech of a woman who lives in a crooked little bus in the crooked moonlit woods, letting the ivy come in. That's the speech of a woman who knows better than nature:
"That's why I stay away out here in the woods, away from civilization." She flaps at the flames with one crooked hand, wafting the fumes from the fire toward Tara. "Rub it on your face. You make sure to get around your eyes, that's the demon's doorways." Two eyes, shining in the dark. Tara pats it on, gingerly and sweet, like a facial mask, as Miss Jeanette opens up a tiny apothecary bottle, and hands it over. Tara does; she chokes on it. "Jesus, what the hell is it?" Snake juice. "It's made from snakes?" Miss Jeanette shakes her head. "No. It snakes down in you. Coils around that evil and rips it out." Tara gags, but she urges her on. She puts it to her mouth and drinks it down. Whatever you are, that's what it shows you:
V, dripping out of the IV into a silver thimble; Eddie stirs, in pain and out of it, and says Jason's name softly. Amy's hate is careless as she drains him. "If I were you, I'd get my filthy mind off of him." Eddie moans, waking from nightmares to something worse. Her again. "What was it that you vampires say? Jason is mine." Eddie's grossed out, and swears it's not like that, not this boy, not this time, not for this reason: "He's a good person." Amy laughs as she tends to him. "Are you implying that I'm not?" Eddie suggests that, in a certain context where Amy is planning on using him up and murdering him, while Jason is not, there's a possibility. But we're in Amy's world now:
"Sophomore year of college, I walked away from a full academic scholarship so I could go to this Guatemalan village." She ties him off. "Helped them build their very first irrigation system so they could have fresh water. Crops that didn't give them dysentery. So don't you dare..." -- She grabs at his face; he groans, afraid -- "...Get morally superior on me. I am an organic vegan, and my carbon footprint is miniscule." And in Amy world, that's the difference, and for all her bullshit I have to say the logic is solid: "Because I know that ultimately, we're all just a single living being... But you are not." That's true, I can see that. Vampires aren't about life, they're about death. Whether or not he's a person, he's been evicted from Gaia, like Pluto from the solar system. If all we have is nature, than the supernatural is unimportant and can be discarded. We have all the magic we need. She pounds on his bicep, shocking and scaring him. "You got a clot forming," she says, and tends to him. He moans in pain. "There. Okay, I need tape. Keep it at that angle." He groans, with his arm out, and she goes to a desk drawer, to find a way to keep him viable:
An empty four-pack of TruBloods, rattling around in a drawer. She's stricken still for a moment. "Jason, Jason, Jason." Eddie pleads: he was half-dead, Jason was only helping, trying to help. He's like a little boy. "He should've told me about this. Why wouldn't he tell me about this?" she asks, turning honestly wounded eyes on her prey. "I won't tell him if you won't," Eddie says, panicking. Amy confides: "Withholding is tantamount to lying, and I can't have that in our relationship." She shakes her head sadly: "This is so beneath us." You have to be pretty fucking amazing, which Lizzy Caplan is, to juggle these balls: Henry Winter, Annie Wilkes, Living Liberal Zombie Nightmare, Jealous Girlfriend, Good Friend, Unpracticed Compartmentalizing Milgram Authority. There's an easy joke in every scene, an obvious way to play it too hard; it's easy to just pick what kind of freak to be in every scene and go for it, and Lord knows it's easy enough to do that to her, as a viewer. But you have to be pretty much freakishly perfect -- and this is why I've been following my girl Janis devotedly for almost ... shit, ten years now, from 1999: from Freaks & Geeks and Once & Again and Smallville (which I actually stopped watching when she died) even unto Tru Calling and Related, and my personal favorite, The Pitts -- to stay human in the middle of it all:
"Jason loves you. He never cared about anyone before. He even thinks that you might be the one." Amy is suspicious a moment -- "You talk about me with him?" -- before giving in, turning inside. "And he said that, he said that he thinks that I might be the one?" Eddie's getting stronger: "Amy. If I die here, Jason will never forgive you. Even if he wanted to. He's not as evolved as you are." And again, the secret to Amy is that this makes her just as sad as anything else, because it violates the rules of the universe she's constructed for herself as bad as vampires did Bon Temps; she's nearly weeping as Eddie's eyes bug out at how fucked up she is: "I know."
Sam sits in the rocker on the porch, waiting for the dawn; Sookie stares down at him, nervously fidgeting. "A shapeshifter?" Sam nods, and says mostly they just say "shifter"; there's no way of knowing how many there are, but maybe tens of thousands; it's hereditary... He looks around guiltily, as if about to tell a lie; as if it's too hard to talk about. "Um, I was adopted. And the family that took me in... We just never talked about it." His shame and sadness are no match for Sookie's curiosity. "Can you turn into anything? Like cats? Birds?" A cat would have helped, last night. "Cats, sure... Yeah, I can do bird, but flying's hard. Dog's the easiest for me." Why? "People like dogs. Most other animals leave you alone..." Sookie's suddenly weirded out: "I used to scratch your belly in the parking lot at the bar!" Sam laughs, and explains that was the brother dog, so happy to be telling her, telling somebody, finally less alone: "I need a live animal in order to shift. You know, as a model. Kind of like an imprint?" But Sookie knows about shapeshifters. Not the Sam kind, but she knows:
"Can you turn into another person?" He already has. Twice in one night. Sam shakes his head. "Humans are too complex. Despite what you might see at the bar." He smiles, but she's not picking up what he's putting down. She stays focused -- "So what's it like to sleep in the ground?" -- as much in love with the secrets and mysteries as she's terrified by them. Her life has been characterized by systematically learning and dealing with the most horrible thoughts and qualities of everyone she comes into contact with. It's rare she gets to learn something new, and when presented with it, no matter how scary it gets, no matter how big the world will get when her body starts to panic, for a moment she's lost in the learning. "Can you do it any time, or... What?" Sam explains that he can, although obviously it wears off when he sleeps, and he can't control it during the full moon. "Like a werewolf?" she asks, and he barks. "We're not werewolves. Okay, werewolves are dangerous, nasty creatures. Do not call me a werewolf." He shakes, with the need to protect her and the need to impress this upon her and most of all the terrible need for her to never look at him that way again: as a beast, as a thing that crept into her bed. Werewolves are bad, dangerous, hungry, like vampires. Sam is loyal, protective, attentive, like a dog. Sookie just stares at him: "Werewolves exist too?" Shit is getting White Wolf up in here. He nods. "Wh-what else is there?" she asks, quieter, starting to get scared. The novelty is wearing off in the time it takes to go from dogs to wolves. Sam shakes his head, thinking about the things he's seen. "More than you can imagine." More than you would want to:
He swallows, trying not to think about it, and she stomps away. After a few seconds he joins her on Bill's front steps. "I can't... Life is just getting too weird too fast..." Valid. Every time she learns something, somebody dies. But if the world is sufficiently big, then there's a hope in this, somehow: "Could a werewolf have killed Gran?" Could something have just come out of the darkness, randomly, and made of her an orphan, something mindless and magical, that can be put back into the darkness with a silver bullet and a prayer? He tries to be nice and allows for the possibility, but it's a weak response. Sookie commences flipping out, putting her head in her lap, hiding from enormity:
"Oh my God. Bill's been dragged off by vampires, and now I find out you're something I never even knew existed..." She starts to sob, drily, and jerks away from his touch, yelping in fear. "I thought you of all people would understand," Sam says softly, and she turns on him. "Why? Because I'm dating a vampire?" Um, no, because you're totally psychic and everybody thinks you're a freak? "I don't hide who I am!" she shouts, heading for the door. Which is true: she doesn't have the option. Only the shame of bearing it, alternately scaring people and making them point and laugh, depending on their faith. "I've wanted to tell you for years," Sam says, about one more thing, and she whirls back, shouting. "I kissed you! And I know you wanted to do more than that. Were you gonna tell me before? Or after?" She slams the door and he sits on the porch, alone again somehow; feeling burnt and sick. I'm just looking for something real, they said, and: If we do this, we did this:
Miss Jeanette smudges the circle while Tara shakes on the ground, wriggling, sickened and groaning: "Spit, smoke, root." Water, air and earth. "Cleanse the body, cleanse the soul. Snake, seek, search, find, bring it to the light. Ohhh, the light..." It starts to come; Tara groaning and cramping on the ground: "Fuck, my stomach!" She's got the bends, digging herself up from the deepest places, the darkest place, where she put the demon. "It's angry," Miss Jeanette says. "It's digging its claws in, so it can hold on. Don't you fight back! Let your body be the battleground." It always was. When people talk about their alcoholic parents, they're never talking about the alcohol:
"You let that demon destroy itself," Miss Jeanette commands, and Tara suddenly sits up. "I feel sick..." Miss Jeanette watches her heave, pushing and straining to bring it up. Her body was the battleground. That smart little girl, breaking her mother's bottles, fighting the demon before it had a name. Lettie Mae was her maker, so entranced by the eyes looking back at her in the dark that she couldn't even see her daughter except as another problem. She changed her daughter, broke her apart, and in doing so she broke herself. She was a pale caretaker and a monstrous maker. She was a vampire:
At Georgia's house, Jonathan took out one of her famous actor father's dramatic recordings, and played it, to make a point: Macbeth, Act V, Scene v. It's about a woman who died too late. She helped destroy her husband while she was creating him:
"She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word... And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death... Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing..."
"Let it go, let it go. Let it go. Let go of all that sickness, all that rage, all that anger, all that hate, all that self-pity. It's just fuel for the demon inside of you." Tara finally barfs for like a million years, when Miss Jeanette standing above her. "Come forth, demon! Leave this child in peace! Come into the light! Show yourself!" A child walks out of the forest, jumping in space and time, black-eyed and small, afraid, weak. Tara shakes her head and Miss Jeanette asks her what she sees. "Momma," says the demon quietly. "It's me, standing right over there," she says, nearly weeping. "It's me." Miss Jeanette shakes her head. "The demon will take on any form to stay alive. It knows your weaknesses. It preys on your fears." They're both right:
Miss Jeanette puts a ritual knife into her hand, clasping fingers around it. "Only you can destroy it." Let your body be the battleground. The little girl is so sad, and beautiful, and scared. Tara walks toward her where she shivers, but turns back to look at Miss Jeanette, unsure. "Don't let it fool you, Tara Mae! You stand up to that demon." Tara comes closer to the baby, takes her knife in hand. "No, Momma! Please, don't hurt me!" Miss Jeanette screams from the fire: "One of you must die!" Tara shrieks, stabbing the little girl before she falls upon the ground. She stares at the knife, at the spirit blood dripping from it, and reaches out blindly into the space where she once was, screaming her demons. Singing the night that made her. Miss Jeanette caresses her hair, pulls her to her thigh like a daughter, like a little girl. Grand and reverent music glides into the sky, looking down on them with hateful amusement. "Good girl. Good girl, good girl. Good girl. It's all over now. That demon is gone forever."
Your brain is like an iceberg: little tiny-tippy top that you live on, balancing precariously, cold as ice, bobbing along ignoring the fathoms and fathoms below you, that are also you. You could spend your whole life sitting up there, and a lot of us do, in denial of all the things down in the water we don't want to know about. Your soul, your real mind, is down there: richly associative, thinking in images and metaphors and beautiful music. You spend a third of every day letting it play, and bringing up little stories that don't make sense in the sunlight. But if you're strong and smart you dive down and bring things up on purpose, and you make your life better, and you make your life make sense. The trick is to forget it afterward; make it look like you didn't do anything, and go on with your life. It's harder than it might seem. But in the end magic's just another way of talking to that vaster and more beautiful part of your soul, and bringing something back:
When you walk through the woods in a fairy tale, when you meet Miss Jeanette just past the crossroads, when you take Communion, you're telling that part of yourself a story, and you're getting untold riches back. It can feel like barfing up a snake as long as your life, black as sin and strong as shame; it can feel like laughing about how stupid you were to be afraid; it can feel like remembering something you've always known; it can feel like talking to the demon in the basement until you've grown enough to love it; it can feel like watching your bedroom enveloped in primordial forests, wrapping around you in love, love, love, and all the sparks that jump between us. What it doesn't feel like is a trip to McDonald's, which is what Tara thinks this is. And Amy and Jason, sucking down their liquid divinity like meth addicts at the one-stop shop down in the basement where dreams live. Treat it like an ending, bought and paid for, and not another step in a journey that never ends -- treat it like a garbage dump where you leave things, and not a meal to take in and keep moving -- and you'll float away on that ice floe, forgotten and cold and alone forever:
"You spend more time on your hair than any man I've ever met," Amy says indulgently, watching Jason preen in the mirror. "The trick is to make it look like you didn't do nothing. It's harder than it might seem." She grins; he doesn't need any help looking good. She notices the toilet seat, standing at attention, and her smile falls into disgust. He's not as evolved as she'd like him to be. She's just as angry and sad as she would be at something real, because in Amy world we put the seat down. "I think I might have had one too many beers last night. I feel like I been shot at and missed, shit at and hit!" Colorful, Jay. Amy sits down and looks at him; wonders how to bring him back in. How she can redefine the world for them both before the demon in the basement breaks it all apart:
"We need to talk about Eddie." Jason agrees; he turns on the tap. "Well, I've been thinking. The way we've been treating him, it's just really uncivilized, you know?" Jason nods petulantly: he does know that. "We can't let him go, of course, but we can try to make things just a little bit more comfortable for him. Do you know what Stockholm Syndrome is?" Jason turns around and takes a swing: "It's a disease?" Amy nods and course-corrects: "Well, not exactly..." He makes that face he makes, a swing and a miss. "It's something that happens to people who are kidnapped. It's like over time, they start to get closer to their kidnappers. It's kind of like ... being part of a family." Jason lights up. It's like Pluto, coming home. It's like having a family, like being a man, like Rene. People that count on you, and tell you what being a man is:
"All we need to do is make Eddie love us. And he already loves you," she says, pushing the button. Jason quirks a suspicious eyebrow and turns back around. "And then eventually, we wouldn't have to keep him locked up," she says, spinning tales for Jason, readjusting their course. "He could just be in the house with us, like he's..." Jason nearly jumps for joy: "Like a pet!" Yeah. "And we could travel with him..." Jason's loving it, nearly punching the air. "We could sell his blood, you know, when we need money, and just live out of backpacks and see the whole world! We just need boots, and a map." The best liars believe what they're selling. She's such a total Cylon, like, This was the plan all along! We just didn't know that until just now: we'll keep him as a pet! But if nothing is true and everything's permitted, then there's no shame in changing Amy world to suit whatever needs to happen . If she doesn't get Jason on board with keeping Eddie, at least in the short term, then something bad will happen to the world. This story may not stay true, but it's true for now:
"I ain't never seen snow," Jason says, getting into it, and Amy gets expansive: "Tibet. We can climb the Himalayas, we can visit the Dalai Lama... Jason's totally on the same page: "And snowboard naked!" Amy, convinced he's convinced, stands. "Right, I gotta go to the store, I want to get Eddie some TruBloods." Jason's so ecstatic that she kisses him. "I love you," she says, and for the moment everything makes sense, and she's pulled it off: all he sees are her two eyes, shining in the dark. She's more real than anybody else. He tells her he loves her, still surprised by how easy it is to say, and at the last second she twists it: "I love you more." He makes a "You got me again Cecil," Liz Lemon kind of face, but he'll figure that one out eventually. The important thing is that everything is safe, and there aren't any secrets, and he wasn't wrong about Amy. Eddie was. "Oh my God," he says delightedly into the mirror, "You are even better looking than you were yesterday." He's been reborn; he's pushed all the bad down deep:
Tara wakes Lettie Mae calmly, with the sun behind her head, coming up, and the tears on her face drying. The tears in her throat are still there, singing love, love, love. "Mama. Mama, wake up." Lettie Mae opens her eyes slowly, wondering where her baby's been. "I had the exorcism," Tara says, and the ridiculous Jesus music swells with a sneer. "Tara, are you...?" She nods: "It worked, Mama. It worked." Lettie Mae decides that Jesus has answered her prayers, because the dawn has come and gone. "We're saved," she cries, hugging her daughter. "Both of us are saved! You did a brave thing, Tara Mae. I am so proud of you, my baby..." Tara shakes her head, shamed. "My whole life, I thought you didn't... I thought..." Lettie Mae puts her hand over her daughter's mouth, shaking her head in just about the nastiest, grossest way and smiles. "I forgive you." Fuck that. I forgive you for assuming that your behavior was having a negative effect on my life and development? Demon or not, another word for parenting is self-control, and if having a kid doesn't give you that, you were not made for children and you don't deserve to have them. "Get dressed. I'm taking you out to celebrate, anywhere you wanna go." They bounce around the house for a sec before Lettie Mae suggests Mamaw's Mudbugs. It's in Keatchie; she wonders if that's too far to drive. "Are you kidding? I'd drive anywhere for you!" They embrace again, and she watches her mom run around excitedly, and wonders why she still feels so tired and sad, now that she's been saved. We're all, right now, every age we've ever been, somewhere inside. Somewhere inside a thing rises up, afraid and wounded, still bleeding, and she tells her to go back, far below the depths, because she has been saved, go to sleep.
They call these parties "fais-do-do"; they started before the second World War. In France they still tell their babies do-do, as in "dormir," as in: "go to sleep, go to sleep." You fry up a bunch of Cajun crap and drink a lot of beer and dance, and when the children complain you tell your babies to go to sleep, go to sleep, before your husband finds somebody else to dance with. Sam's hanging lanterns for the fais-do-do while Bill's away and the sun's still up, but Sookie won't help. "Kind of busy right now setting up your bar." Sam rolls his eyes, stuck up a ladder, and Terry helps Sookie out. "Thank you, Terry. You are so sweet. And reliable!" Terry's confused; normally she's a little wary of him. You don't want to hear what's in his head. Things hurt enough. "I always know what to expect from you. No nasty surprises!" She launches it up at Sam, like daggers. "That's just because you don't know me very well," he says. Sookie's like, weird. He hates being this way.
Arlene arrives, full of compliments hiding pin-turn adjustments and suggestions and wouldn't-it-bes and how-bout-wes, until Sam finally just laughs and asks her what the hell she wants from him. "A debutante ball," Terry says, and Arlene smiles her special Terry smile: "Hug your neck, you know exactly what I'm talking about!" He always does. Sam looks at Terry, still grinning, and wonders how he knew. "My cousin Portia was a deb in Shreveport when she turned eighteen. Every Bellefleur woman's been doing it since they started having them before the Revolutionary War." Sam offers that it's nice to come from such an old family as the Bellefleurs, as the flashback camera closes in on him. Especially one God's kept such a good eye on. "All families are old, Sam. Some just keep better records..." It's nice to come from someplace at all:
Sam flopped on the couch, shaking, seizing; a tiny cute puppy growled and barked at him, shaking, stuck to the spot. His mother yelled from the other room for him to shut the dog up, but he couldn't. He couldn't move. When she came in to check on them, Sam flopped to the floor, and she screamed. His chattering turned to yips and the yips turned to growls, and he rose on all fours, and booked it for the back yard; he tore off his shirt as he was running, and his mother followed after. And under the moon, he shed his clothes and his skin, and went running into the night, and she cried out to God with her hand over her mouth... And Arlene snaps him out of it, screaming to get Sam's barking dog away from her, keep the red and green lanterns apart, the colors separated, the scallops smaller and more gingerbread-like. She brings him back, from memories and pain, back to the obligations and the friendships and the relationships he's trying to build, she brings him into the world:
"Don't shut me out, please," says Georgia on the TV. Lafayette grins, as Lila appears at the top of the stairs: " Uh-oh, Georgia, your replacement just showed up!" He knows the line, the best line: "Thought you said you were gonna get rid of her quick." Lafayette cracks up, waxing his chest: "Bitch! I love you, you scandalous whore! Take your man! Take his ass..." Out the window, a car drives up: it's the senator. Lafayette nods to himself and rips off the last waxing strip. "The picture's finished, Georgia You're business. I'm company," Lila sneers, and Jonathan tells her to get upstairs: to take her cheapness and her dinginess and all the things he tries to hide from the world, and secret them back, up and away. And honey you know Lafayette isn't having that. He tries to show Lila a better way, sauntering to the door by way of example: "You better walk down them stairs, like..." She doesn't. As she's raining down nastiness on her rival, Lafayette opens the door to his own little Jonathan Shields. "I can't stay long..." the senator says, and Lafayette rubs up against him, a thousand feet of muscle. "Boyfriend, I can make you stay longer than you ever thought you could." Why hide, when you can have anything you want? Here's why Lafayette loves Lila best:
Gaucho: Don't talk like that about Georgia! Or Jonathan, he's a great man.
Lila, laughing: There are no great men, buster. There's only men.
"Actually, I had something else in mind," says the senator, and takes out a wad of cash. "A little, uh, v-juice?" Lafayette shrugs and wrinkles his lip: "Sold out." He turns off the TV and stretches out on the couch. He is very tall, very long; the senator's only a man. "My supplier only comes out after dark, if you know what I mean." The senator's got a speech tonight; he's disappointed and Lafayette grins at him indulgently: "You got stage fright? I could help you with that." He puts the money in his pocket and drops to his knees. "You know I can." He takes off the senator's belt, slowly, and drags him off and away, and the senator giggles that he can't mess up his suit. And Lila heads back up the stairs.
"I love how Mamaw's Mudbugs is exactly the same as when we used to go there when I was little," Tara says. Her salvation, like her mother's, is a time machine. Go back to before the first pain, the first remembered fracture. Just go back. "Yeah," Lettie Mae says, sucking the head of a ... okay, I lived in Houston for seven years and this still gives me the wiggins. Stop eating insects. It's no different from the monkey brains of Indiana Jones. Crustaceans are fucking grosser than catfish. I was going to try to think of an animal that evolved to eat shit and other animals' garbage on the riverbed and lakefloor, until I realized God already thought of that, and they're called crustaceans, and I'm sorry if I'm drawing lines in the Gaia like Amy Burley, but they are shit-eating insects, and then you suck their little heads out of their nasty little necks? I can't say I'm down with the whole of Leviticus, but I have to think it's at least 90% aesthetics. My God. "Yeah, I until I lost my license. First thing in the morning, I'm going down to DMV..." The entire bucket of crawdads she was just eating repeat on her, and she groans, burping. Nice. "...Maybe one bucket was enough..." Tara, at least, reminds her she shouldn't suck the heads, but Lettie Mae's in serious pain, so Tara pulls over to get her some Pepto. The DeSoto pharmacy, somewhere between Keatchie and Bon Temps, past the row houses; somewhere past the crossroads:
Georgia's first screen test was a disaster, so Shields gives her a little tip: be more coy, not to even look up from the pulp novel she was reading, as the well-dressed man entered the scene. The trick is to make it look like you didn't do anything; it's harder than it might seem. She nailed it the second time. Without even looking up, she said her line: "Read any good books lately?" And lightning struck. This happened in a drug store:
"Excuse me, what aisle's the Pepto-Bismol on?" A woman in a pharmacy smock stands on a stepping ladder at the back of the store, so she doesn't turn around right away; her name is Nancy, and she's wearing lipstick and red plastic-framed glasses. She looks like somebody's mother, someone's aunt. "Aisle 7," she says, and points with a smile. "I know you," Tara says, and Nancy steps away and down quickly, heading away from her: "No, I'm sure you've mistaken me for someone else." They're both right:
"Miss Jeanette," Tara says, more shocked than horrified, and Nancy tells her she's wrong. She tries to get up an aisle, but Tara chases her; she cuts her off midway through the store and fully snatches her bald! In the daytime she's not a witch at all; she walks tall and straight and lovely. "Hey! You took advantage of my momma!" Nancy jumps back, terrified, and tells Tara not to touch her. Tara pushes her back into an endcap, scattering stuff all over the floor. "Don't touch you? I ought to kill you, you fake, lying bitch." Nancy threatens to call the police, and Tara offers to call them herself: "Tell 'em how you charged me $800 to spit in my face and poison me!" When you put it like that, it doesn't look like magic at all, not if you never knew what magic was:
"What was in that shit you gave me, that snake juice?" Nancy swears it was just ipecac, and a small amount of peyote: perfectly safe, but Tara's not feeling her. "I puked my guts out! I hallucinated stabbing a little girl!" Nancy blushes, embarrassed. "What the fuck kind of person are you?!" asks Tara. As though Nancy was the one that invented Miss Jeanette:
"Look. I got a son in prison, another one in Iraq, I got a daughter with diabetes, and three grandbabies I gotta take care of. I do what I have to for my family, same as you." And for yours, but you forgot that part. (Also, way to be every stereotype at once!) Tara stalks away, whining and crying, explaining how badly she's misunderstood it all: "I actually believed you had fixed me. Oh my God, I am such a fucking dumbass!" As though it was Miss Jeanette that fixed her, that fixes her, that goes on fixing her. Tara whirls back around at Nancy's voice. Look, Miss Jeanette says. Listen, Miss Jeanette says:
"Listen. Just because Miss Jeanette ain't real doesn't mean she can't help people. You saw how it worked for your momma. She still sober?" Yes. Cased closed. Sing the night that made you. "Once she finds out about you, she'll be drinking again!" I'll bring it all down, if it's not real. I've always thought the perfect balance between Sookie and Tara was the way Sookie can't stop listening and Tara can't stop talking; Tara says the things Sookie can't say, and Sookie feels the things Tara can't feel. But this is true too: If it's not real, if it's destructible, Tara Mae will bring it down. And once you destroy the whole world -- when you discover that holy madness she's racing toward at a thousand miles an hour -- you can find truth. If you survive the journey. "Well, maybe she don't have to find out? Faith's a powerful thing." Can you lie to save a life? Nancy can. Tara can't, because what makes you awesome is always also what makes you suck. She shoves the wig into Nancy's stomach like a blade and stomps off, singing her favorite song as Nancy stares after, tired and sympathetic and sad and lonely: "Fuck fuck fuck fuck."
Georgia shouted at Jonathan, to turn off the record player, the stop that song about Lady MacBeth, who destroyed as she was creating; to stop the voice of her broken father in its tracks. She wanted to take on all the horror of her father's dissolution -- the drinking, the whoring -- but none of the glory; it made Shields scream. "Make up your mind! You hate him, and you build this shrine to him. He died over ten years ago and you've been holding your own private wake ever since. You can't be a star in a cemetery! Because he was a drunk, you're a drunk. Because he loved women, you're a tramp. But you forget one thing. He did it with style."
"You're a Lorrison," he said: "Haunted, born to live by make-believe."
"Look at you," he said. "You're acting now, playing the doomed daughter of the great man. Well, let me tell you something: The acting isn't good enough. It's the cheap performance of a bit player, not a star. And that's all it'll ever be, until you can pull yourself out of this tomb."
He said: "Until you can see people as they really are, yourself as you really are, until you can do this to your father's picture..." -- and he drew a mustache on her father's portrait -- "...And laugh the way he would have laughed. That's not a God talking, Georgia, that's only a man." He smashed the phonograph record, her master's voice; she threw a liquor bottle at him, and attacked.
Shields: Georgia, no more doom daughter, no more whimpering, no more drinking...
Georgia: And no more men?
Tara slams the door and drives away: "They're out." They don't have what can fix you. We thought there was medicine, we thought there was salvation, that thing in your gut, that nasty old snake would stop turning and twisting in you, but it was a mistake. They're all out of salvation today.
Rene and Arlene are adorable, dancing, and Andy Bellefleur's drinking a Diet Coke; Sookie's on the sidelines as always, drinking Orange Crush in a bottle. Terry wanders up and doesn't say anything for awhile; they look at each other like the two village idiots that they are, and finally he explains that he would be asking her to dance, except he doesn't dance. She thanks him anyhow, and attempts to have a conversation with him. "Sometimes, crowds makes me feel guilty for not having fun like everyone else? And then I feel guilty for feeling guilty." Terry responds to this open-handed sort of friendliness with another non sequitur: "Guilt is a useless emotion." She considers him; he looks particularly fucked up right now. "Or so I've heard." Sookie wishes Bill were there, desperately pleased to have someone to talk to. "There's some dead people I wish was still around too," he says, staring at a desert a million miles away, and wanders off.
Flesh Fair! Vampires are so ridiculous and they all drive vintage autos, including a disproportionate number of convertibles. There's a scary old hobo clown-looking one, a few hundred white trash strippers, some grunge refugees, a bunch of beer-belly truckers, some people from Juniper Creek, a girl with Fat British Face disease, an old man in a tuxedo, Betty Suarez, and the main event, the Magister, played by wild roaming hottie Ċ½eljko Ivanek, sitting in a chair in the back of an awesome El Camino. Behind him a few heroin-chic hotties pose and crouch on an eighteen-wheeler like that giant bottle of cKone in Times Square that time, and everything is misty and dramatic and stupid. The Magister has a bailiff, Luisa, who is awesome, and there's a hot dude with a thick neck also helping, and what all the vampires are up to is watching Luisa pull out this guy's fangs. He's young, shirtless, on a silver leash, with a sort of gothy fagcore thing happening, and what he did, stupidly, was feed on a human that belonged to another, and that means three months of starvation, until his fangs grow back. Which is so horrible except for how this show is called True Blood and there's this stuff called TruBlood.
"Brothers and sisters of the Tribunal, is this fair? Is this just?" The crowd howls and I mean, as silly as it is, with the big concrete hipster structures and stadium lights, it's also very pretty. This is what I imagine Prague is like. Everybody's all horny in that creepy vampire way where who knows if it's the blood or the pain or what. Luisa pulls out the guy's other fang, and Bill's way into it, and she throws it like dice. "Sentence passed and executed. The trial is concluded, best of luck. Moving on..." Luisa pulls the boy away on his silver leash and the Magister calls on Eric: "Bring me your murderer." Eric's fangs are out too; Luisa brings out a coffin bound in silver chains, and the thick bouncer guy brings Bill out to stand in front of the Magister, and takes away his leather jacket. He is scared, but it's Bill so he's like pouty-scared.
Jason feeds Eddie, down in the basement, wiping TruBlood off his cheek with an adoring smile. "It's nice not to have to sneak it to you no more, ain't it? I told you Amy wasn't a psycho. The more time you spend with us, you'll see she's an amazing woman." Eddie gives a fake smile, still unsteady, and asks what changed things. "Well, she wants you to live with us, like part of the family. I do too!" I think I have Stockholm Syndrome for Jason's suckiness, because the more retarded and evil he gets the more I love him. Eddie asks if she mentioned finding the TruBloods, and Jason's smile immediately falls, because that's got to be a lie. Eddie shakes his head and Jason asks him what she said exactly. Eddie, in his best Bill Dauterive voice, quotes her: "She said that, uh, withholding was tantamount to lying and that your relationship was better than that." Jason jumps up, pacing like a panther: "Fuck. God, that even sounds like her." Eddie swears she's playing him, but Jason says that can't be the case because nobody plays Jason Stackhouse, which is adorable because his entire life is getting played, obviously, but is also setting up everything else that happens in this room.
"If you don't let me go, she's going to kill me." Jason swears she wouldn't, but Eddie repeats his opinion that she is a psychopath. "Jason, we're late!" Amy calls, down the stairs, and bounds down to say goodbye to Eddie over the banister: "We'll see you in a few hours... I was thinking, we could bring one of the TVs down here. Does that sound good?" Eddie just lays there, completely wigged by her change of heart, thinking it's not real. He doesn't understand that when all the lines are erased every lie is as good as every other lie, which means she's not lying at all. Everything is permitted. Jason looks down at Eddie as Amy scampers away, toward the fais-do-do, and promises him he's wrong about her. Eddie lies, alone, a demon in a basement, and listens to his phone, ringing out of reach.
"Eddie, where you at? I'm at your crib, the door was wide open. This is fucked up as fuck. Call me when you get this message, bitch." Lafayette paces around Eddie's house, nervous and worried for a variety of reasons. The rug is all curled up where they kidnapped him, the remote is broken on the floor. "Jason fucking Stackhouse, you bigmouth motherfucker..."
Arlene begs Rene to let her rest, stop dancing for awhile, but he pushes: "What, you won't dance with me? That's a fine thing at your own fais do-do!" She rubs his weird little goat beard, like for luck, and sends him to dance with Sookie, awesome: "Poor thing's got nobody here. Everyone's afraid of her!" She pushes him but he goes, smiling, and tells Sookie she looks lonely as a cloud. He leads her to the floor and Sookie tells him that Arlene's one lucky lady; when he bashfully says not everyone likes a coonass like him, she immediately says she does. "So does Bill! Rene thinks about how to approach it, now that she's opened the door, and mumbles a bit at first. "I don't have nothing against vampires, you know that. But you're a good girl, Sookie. I think you deserve better." She's about to tell him what for when Sam appears and cuts in; Rene twirls her into Sam's arms and her face becomes a mask. It's adorable; it's as cold as a new razor blade. He begs her to stop stonewalling him -- "It's not fair, you being mad about something I can't help" -- and she finally looks at him: "I'm mad that you didn't trust me enough to tell me. You hid the most important thing about yourself!"
Sam protests that it hardly matters, since she's with Bill now, and she retorts that he didn't tell her about Tara, either. "Because there's nothing to tell!" he says, lying, and she asks if Tara's aware of the "nothing" she represents. "Or the fact that you can turn into a dog?" He says it's none of Tara's business, and finally gets tired of the bullshit. "And you know what, I didn't tell you because I knew this is how you'd react. But you're right. I didn't trust you, I trusted my instincts, and they were dead-on." Nicely done! He storms off and she feels like a dick.
Now, what'll we put on the screen that'll make the backs of their necks crawl?
A dog: frightened, growling, showing its fangs.
Jonathan Shields screamed, from the center of himself, from the center of all the armor: "Who gave you the right to dig into me and turn me inside out and decide what I'm like? How do you know how I feel about you, how deep it goes? Maybe I don't want anybody to own me. You or anybody. Get out! Get out! Get out!"
Amy heads out to get another beer, and touches Jason's neck; he shies away bashfully, ashamed to look kept in front of Rene and Hoyt. She stalks away, wondering if Eddie's to blame. Hoyt smiles sweetly, saying Amy's his favorite of all Jason's girlfriends; he asks how they met and Jason wavers. "Uh, it's kind of embarrassing. Fangtasia." Rene jumps, asking what the hell he was doing, going there. Jason lies, saying it was to see a band. Rene calls him a brave motherfucker, but Jason plays it off: "It's just a bunch of losers wearing black. Amy and I could tell just by looking at each other we didn't really belong there..." Rene stares at him, but Hoyt's pinned to the punchline: "...Never did see the band." Jason grins and Hoyt gushes: "Oh God, I wanna be you!" So does Jason. Rene asks if she's the one, and Jason flips some Cajun food at him, unsure. "Life is short! You find a good one, you keep her." Hoyt nods with Rene, wiping the grease off his hand on his backside to pick up his beer. Jason agrees, and quietly admits he may have lost "the upper hand," you know, in the relationship. He's unsure what it means but he's pretty sure it's happening; nobody plays Jason Stackhouse.
Rene counsels him to take it back: "You just say, 'Woman, this is what I want. This is the way it's gonna be.'" Jason loves the sound of it; he and Hoyt both perk up and listen harder. "And if she don't like it, deep down she'll respect you. She can't help it. It's in her DNA. Fact." Nobody plays Amy Burley, he doesn't know this about her: the way she creates the entire world and the rest of us must follow in her path, or she'll tear it all down and start again. Nobody knows about the beast in Amy Burley. "Well, now I wanna be you!" Hoyt chirps, and Jason's offended. "And if she don't respect you? She ain't someone that you wanna be with anyway," Rene says, and Hoyt nods sagely. And up behind him comes Maxine, his mom, telling him she knows damn well it's his third beer, which is two too many. "You set that down, right now," she commands, and Hoyt looks to Jason with a brave and wobbly smile. "You know, I plan on having about six more beers. And enough tequila to drown a Mexican sea captain, woman." He looks at Jason with first fear and then bravado, and drunkenly pushes past his mother with a little spring in his step.
There's vampires all over the place, every style, like the entire Petrelli family, standing like a portrait. Bill finishes up the story of Long Shadow, and the Magister's not having it. "So: you murdered a higher life form for the sake of your pet. You broke an ancient and fundamental law, you decreased our numbers at a critical time in our history. Very bad." The assembled members of the family watch carefully, wondering what will happen, as Bill points out that Long Shadow broke the law first, just like the preceding criminal: "She was mine, and he knew it. He would have killed her and fed from her..." The Magister cuts in sharply: "-- Hello, human? Irrelevant. Happens every day." But what about how he was stealing from Eric? The Magister looks to the Sheriff, and he nods. "Long Shadow was a thief and a liar. He was hurting my business." The Magister reconsiders; Bill pushes his advantage, ordering Eric to tell him why Sookie was there. "The only reason the girl was there was because I called her." Bill: "To protect your wealth," he prods. "To protect my wealth, yes."
Eric weighs the pros and cons of telling the Magister about Sookie's abilities, but can't find the right way to do both without risking the advantage of having her. "She is...Valuable." The Magister points out that humans exist only to serve their people, and Bill disagrees. The crowd gasps in a single shared oh no he didn't, and the Magister gets bitchy. "Do you question my authority? I am the Magister. I was trained in the Inquisition, and I am the adjudicator for every vampire territory in North America. As the humans say -- the humans you love more than your own kind -- Back your shit down." First of all, you sound ridiculous, and secondly: who even says that? Bill looks primed to go off, like, "Listen, motherfucker," but Eric shushes him and the Magister laughs.
"Well, you haven't bored me. That works in your favor. And you seem to be obedient to your Sheriff..." Eric agrees... "For the most part." Bill's wounded look at Eric is probably the second-funniest thing in the episode, to Tara's upcoming outfit, and Eric's like, okay, that was a bit much. "When it matters, yes, he is." The Magister reminds us all of the usual sentence, to a series of gasps and moans: "Five years in a coffin chained with silver, during which time your body will waste to leather and sticks. You'll probably go insane..." Bill kind of freaks out at this point. "However," the Magister continues, twirling his cane: "I'm feeling a bit... Creative." Bill stares at him, in a very close up shot that transitions beautifully back to the fais-do-do. Everytime we leave the party, things get worse for everybody, and every time we come back to the party, the music is a little harder, a little scarier and more sexual and driving.
All the boys are doing shots while Arlene sits with Sookie and Amy, a little wobbly and making that drunk girl face like she might burst into tears, such is the depth of her overwhelming emotion. If you learn to recognize that face, it will serve you well, because nothing good ever comes of that face. "You know what I love most about Rene? Ahem, aside from his fine little Cajun butt! He's good to the kids. You know, he's... he's good to me. All the rest were fixer-uppers. But Rene, he's... He's solid, all the way to the foundation. I can count on him. And I've never had that, in all my life." Oh Lord, here it comes. The overshare and complete meltdown. It's written all over her intense face. Luckily, she's sitting at a picnic table with the two most intense people that have ever lived, so they're going to head her off at the pass.
"Well I know what you mean," Amy says. "I never knew I could have something like what I have with Jason. I'm not about to let anything destroy that," she says, and you have to know Amy better than her friends Arlene and Sookie to understand the darkness that passes over her eyes when she says it. Sookie, trying to be human, attempts once again to have a conversation. As usual, it does not go well: "I don't know anyone can trust anybody these days. They're always keeping things from you, and you don't even know who people are, or what they are..." Amy stares at Sookie and Arlene shrugs, like, "This is why she is the town retard, shit like this." Amy gets them all back on track with the love talk, to Arlene's total gratitude: "Well, you know what I love about Jason? Everything is just right there on the surface. You never have to wonder what he's thinking." Sookie snorts: "Yeah, because he ain't thinking." Arlene laughs, impressed and shocked and a little bit in love with Sookie, because Damn. If life were The Golden Girls, Sookie Stackhouse would be her Sophia.
And that's when Tara wanders up looking like a total lunatic, and everybody forgets how Sookie's randomly going crazy today, because check it: bizarre bright-red cocktail dress, complicated hairdo with a side ponytail, and makeup that looks like a little girl playing dressup for the first time. This is because Tara is a little girl playing dressup for the first time. She's putting this on like armor, to be a big girl, drunk as shit, wearing makeup nobody taught her to apply, because she never had a mother.
"HEY GIRLFRIENDS WHAT'S UP!" she screams, blowing everybody's minds. They're like, "You look ... amazing." She looks like a cocaine nightmare from the '80s crossed with a teenager's vision of streetwalker hos. She is fully incredible. Tara gestures to her ridiculous dress like Romy: "PROM NIGHT 2000. AIN'T WORE IT SINCE." She gulps her drink and rocks unsteadily on her heels. I love Tara Thornton so fucking much. Amy's not blinked once since she tottered up. "Well... It still fits you?" Tara nods blearily and Sookie stands, dragging her cartoonish circus slut friend off for a little talk about self-destructive crazy. "Tara, come here. I've never seen you like this. Is this because of Sam?" From deep inside Tara summons an eloquent The Fuck You Say face, and Sookie explains she saw Tara and Sam macking in the office. "IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS," Tara blurps, and Sookie -- for about sixteen reasons -- tells her dating Sam is maybe not the greatest idea, and Tara points out that Sam's not into, for example, sucking her blood. Sookie wanders away, of course, because you never call a fangbanger one to her face, and Tara forlornly calls after her. When the witch puts a knife in your hand it's classic misdirection: something shiny over here so you don't see the trick over there. When you look at your demon you've got two choices: kill it, or dance with it. If she'd danced with that little girl, she would have been impervious to the disappointment of Nancy -- it wouldn't matter that God isn't a drugstore, that wholeness can't be bought. But she killed her, and now she really is possessed. If the vamps told us one thing when they came out the coffin it's this: we don't bury our dead. We learn to love them.
Andy approaches Sam at the bar, reminding him of how he called the "naked community" in Beaumont and that Sam is a mystery he needs to crack. Sam shrugs, embarrassed, and finally admits a partial truth: "I was adopted. That's the truth. At fifteen, I was on my own." Andy makes that I've Got You Now bullshit face he makes, and presses on, into places nobody should ever go. "Fifteen, huh? Where'd you go? Who took you in? I need to know what your life was. Before you bought up property in Bon Temps, and women started getting killed."
Sam came home the day, as the moon was waning, and the door was hanging open. He dropped his bike against the siding and carefully went inside, worried and silent. The living room was empty, the dining room was gone, the hearth was cleared of warmth and memories, and all that was left was shelf paper, moving trash and packing stuff. But the most deranged thing of all, the thing that makes this story a fairytale, was his bedroom: untouched. An island in the empty life. The sudden move-out is a theme we see sometimes in these stories, a childhood nightmare come to life. It's the untouched little boy's bedroom that makes this story art.
"Sam. Sam!" He turns around, shocked back into the story. "Where the hell did you come from?" Sam's exasperated, his eyes getting darker. "I come from exactly the same place everybody else comes from, Andy." Andy says there's no addresses, no tax records, no social security or credit card bills, before Bon Temps. He created himself from thin air, like a shapeshifter in the night. Like some kind of gypsy boy. "Jesus fuck, Andy!" Tara says, galloping past him to Sam. "Shit. Don't you ever get tired of being in everybody's way?" Andy's taken aback, Diet Coke on his clothes, but Tara ignores him, throwing herself on Sam. "Hey, baby!" He takes her in, her craziness and the bizarre outfit, and doesn't know what to say. Everybody's confused reactions to Tara's total craziness being on the outside instead of the inside for once is the best part of the episode. "Listen," she says, grabbing at his cock. "I have a situation. A very serious situation. And I need your help with it right now." He's forgotten Andy's even there; Andy whines that he's investigating something, and she whips back around to him. "WELL, LET ME WRAP IT UP FOR YOU. HE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING, HE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING, AND HE DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT. COME ON, SAM." She drags him off, and I mean: Juilliard. We need more Rutina Wesleys in this world.
Sam laughs as she shoves him into the office and tries to climb him, and she tells him to shut up and fuck her. "Hey, did you have that exorcism?" She rips at his belt, clawing at his body, and tells him to be normal and get with it. "I'm not a normal guy!" he shouts, and she tells him that's not really material right now. HE shoves her off and whines that he's not a walking dildo that she can use when she's fucked up and sad, and she realizes that he's right. She goes soft. "Sam, please. I'm not right..." But no, he's had it. "You're not the only one with demons! What the fuck do you want from me?" Which is, of course, the magic spell that activates Tara's total craziness, and she stomping out, and he slams things around his office, and the music's getting harder, and faster, and meaner, and the night is getting darker. She held onto him like a crucifix as long as she could, but the second he got curious, she lost her gumption. Nobody ever claims to be brave, because the second you do is when they come to get you.
"Well, congratulations. You've got it all laid out for you so you can wallow in pity for yourself. The betrayed woman, the wounded doe, with all the drivel that goes with it going through your mind right now. Oh, he doesn't love me at all, he was lying. All those lovely moments, those tender words. He's lying. He's cheap and cruel... Maybe I like to be cheap once in a while. Maybe everybody does. Or don't you remember?"
Lafayette finally finds Jason near his truck, pissing with one hand and refilling with the other. He twists him around forcefully, and starts in yelling. Jason swears he kept his mouth shut about Lafayette's supplier, but Lafayette gets in his face. "My supplier, he gone. He's fucking missing." Jason can't look him in the eye. "Other vampires find out I been selling, the same shit is gonna -- You understand it? -- The same shit is gonna happen to me." Jason grins sweetly, promising Lafayette he's got nothing to worry about. But because he can't possibly explain the rest, he just sort of assumes Lafayette will chill. But that is not what's going on. He's so angry he's grinning, like a wolf. "Bitch, you think life is just this one fucking game that you always win no matter how many dead folk are piling up around you." Jason's confused: dead folk? Hasn't it always been this way, Amy and Jason and their pet Eddie? What dead? "Maudette, Dawn..." Jason's smile falls again; that was a nightmare Amy woke him from. It persists. "Your grandma?" Lafayette shoves him down in the piss. "And I'll tell you one fucking thing: I ain't gonna be , bitch. On my mama's grave, motherfucker. I ain't gonna be ." Jason is not irresponsible, or unkind, or childish. He's a man with a family now, and nobody even knows it. Nobody knows that he is old and wise inside, or that he's learned how to love first Amy and now Eddie, and nobody knows this because nobody can know it, because it's also kidnapping and torture, so nobody can give him credit for it, which means that the story he's telling himself, he necessarily must stand outside of it, because nobody's telling it back to him but Amy. And that gives her the upper hand. "Fuckin'..." Lafayette storms off, punching holes in car hoods and scattering beers everywhere; Jason lies in the mud and tries to locate that feeling again.
They back up another old car in the fog and the Magister reviews Bill's life. "You have no nest. You prefer to consort with humans. You seem to have lost all sense of our priorities." All around them stands their family assembled, looking at his betrayal and his unmutuality and the way it indicts them, and they shake their heads. "William Compton, you owe us. A life." At the Magister's tiny nod, Luisa opens the trunk of the car, and a young redheaded girl falls out onto the paving, scared, running to them for help and getting pushed back into the circle like a nightmare moshpit as they laugh at her screams and whimpers. Luisa throws her down, on her face, and Pam steps to the front of the crowd, fangs out. Jessica shivers on the ground, terrified and praying, and Bill protests. "Oh, precious Jesus, God, save me, save me. Make it all a dream..." She doesn't wake, they keep laughing. Bill pleads with the Magister to put him in the coffin instead, and the Magister smiles. Jessica crawls to him, on his tawdry throne, one fingertip at a time, pleading for his help. "Please, it's the first time I ever snuck out. I just wanted to go to Ashley's party." Bill is sickened, watching her beg. "I only ever get to go to youth choir and prayer group. If you take me home, I won't say a word to Mama and Daddy, or anybody... Please, please, sir, please help me." It's so embarrassing, but it makes sense: she was taught to follow the alpha's lead, and the Magister's the oldest and the strongest and the wisest and he sits on a throne. I don't think she's abnormally religious, I don't think her parents kept her locked up or anything like that: I think she's a normal, lovely, sheltered girl. The Magister loves that best. She falls on her face and he points her to Bill: "Meet your Maker." Jessica turns and climbs toward him, scuttling, staring up into his eyes. "Please don't let them kill me. Please." Bill swallows. It's the worst thing she can think of, but it's not the worst thing. "I don't wanna die."
The last victim of Jonathan Shields is a writer; his novel becomes a screenplay only after Jonathan steals his wife away so that he can work, undistracted. The novel is a testament to her, and we see the wheels within the wheels: he creates her as a novel, only to be destroyed by the reality. I mention this because creating women in our own image is something that all men are taught and few men refuse, and because this was the novel's jacket blurb: A sensitive, unforgettable portrait of a present-day Southern belle: gay and foolish, naive, shrewd and heart-breaking all at once. I miss Sookie too.
Arlene asks after Sam, and Sookie offers to get some ice: "I could use a break from all this anyhow," she says and stomps away; Arlene is totally offended, hitching up her dress and wandering away: "Well, thanks for having such a great time at my party!" Sookie heads inside and fills the bucket, and just as she's reaching for the second one, the lights go out. Not the electricity -- there's still the quiet hum of the cooler, and all the neon signs are bright -- but the lights themselves. She stares around for a bit, feeling for him with her mind, and the first thought she sees is a woman: young, beautiful, choking to death on a bathroom floor with his hands around her throat. Sookie drops to the floor and there's a long chase around all of Merlotte's, jumping over things and turning over huge metal racks in his way, a chase around a stainless work table that reminded everybody of Jurassic Park, taking off her shoes in the dark, various horror movie tropes and shadows. She sees the memory again: a girl named Cindy, betrayed and dying, all alone, just a girl, sliding down the wall.
Now, what'll we put on the screen that'll make the backs of their necks crawl?
A bird, its neck broken, feathers torn from its throat.
She kicks him, hard, and jumps through the kitchen window, out into the bar -- and runs into Sam at the door. She doesn't even see him as she gasps and moans and struggles, eyes blind, mutely struggling like a deer caught in wire, or a frightened bird. He calls her back to herself, and she tells him the Killer is there, inside, stalking her again. He makes to investigate, but she's an octopus of terror, grabbing desperately at him, begging him not to leave her alone, not to go, not to risk her. He wraps her in his arms and lets her weep and shake, and the Killer escapes.
Georgia couldn't even see straight, she was crying so hard. She got in her car and sped away from that house, from the scandalous whore and all the pain she represented, all that history of cheapness and self-destruction she thought she'd exorcised. It was raining. The last time she tried to kill herself it was a different girl. That was before the parties and the glory; that was a girl who had not yet been saved.
Tara's crying so hard and so desperately it sounds like screaming, her childish clown makeup running down her face, hair disheveled; she raises a plastic bottle of vodka to her mouth and sucks it down. Snake juice, for a mad girl. If she'd danced with the demon she could be free, and now it rides upon her back. She could have made peace with the pieces of herself, but chose to bury them instead. You forget to pray for the angel and then get angry when the angels don't pray for us, as though that's fair. As though you're allowed to forget your soul and the wonders inside it, until you get selfish and curious on your own timetable. She could have laughed, and really laughed with joy when she was happy, and cried when she was sad, and laughed about it again after that. She could have lived out a life as it was intended: one step at a time. But Tara's too smart for that; Tara deserves magic. And when she found out that crooked witches in crooked houses in the forest don't exist, she was disgusted. Where was the real magic? It felt like magic. Smelled like it, tasted like it. But in the sunlight it was all a mistake, a fake, a terrible betrayal. She wanted real magic, because she has no idea what that is. The madness and the wildness of real magic, Herne and Dionysus, the night that made you: true magic is abandon.
Now, what'll we put on the screen that'll make the backs of their necks crawl?
A little girl screaming, claw marks down her cheeks.
Tara takes a pull off her bottle and when she looks up, there's a woman in the road. She is naked, long matted hair covering her breasts. Beside her stands a feral razorback boar, here at the crossroads, her legs thick as trees or a cloven-hooved devil's. "What the fuck?!" Tara screams, driving into the face of madness, and swerves, knocking herself out as she blasts up against a tree. The woman whirls to watch her as the smoke comes up from her hood, and turns away again smirking, naked, covered in dirt -- but with a nice smoky eye! -- and leads the boar toward Bon Temps, away from the crossroads, called down into the world by desperation and fear. You wanted real magic? Wild magic? Welcome to the world of trouble. You're soaking in it.
"Look," Amy pushes at Jason as they make their way down the stairs, "If you wanted to feed him, we should've talked about it first." Jason's who is bound and determined to get the upper hand no matter how mny people, starting with him, end up dead: "I don't need your fucking permission!" Amy asks him how they can expect Eddie to trust them, if they don't even trust each other. Eddie groans as they flip the lights on, still fighting. "This ain't a game, woman. I don't want him ending up dead!" Amy code-switches again, claiming that Eddie's going to kill them. Jason promises her he won't, and kisses her -- then shoves her across the room. And it's done. Amy Burley is a person that a lot of bad things have happened to, and Amy Burley is a person who destroys any world that doesn't agree with her. "I'm gonna let him go, and don't even try to fucking stop me." Eddie calls out weakly to Jason, his friend, the boy who loves him, and Jason shoves Amy away again, working at his bounds while Eddie begs. "Yeah, I'm coming. I'm coming. Don't tell me what I can and can't..." Without standing, Amy grabs the first thing close to hand -- a fence picket, not yet painted white, the first tools of a life they won't let her have no matter how hard she tries or how good she is -- and stakes him. Jason screams and tries to stop her, but too late. His face contorts in sadness and rage and fear and disgust as he rips at the pieces of Eddie all over him, desperate to get away, clawing at himself, trying to get out of his skin, sick and heartbroken and shocked.
"If you wanna torture anyone, torture me!" Bill cries, and the Magister's offended. This isn't torture, it's birth. Bill's about to become a father, with his family to watch. How dare you call this torture? "I could show you torture if you like," the Magister offers, as Jessica prays and slowly goes insane. "No, I was... I was wrong to speak." The Magister tells him to knock off the stalling, and reminds him, as Amy reminded Jason at that first picnic, when even the leaves were so in love they tickled and kissed each other in the sunlight, "What you see in this cow, Mr. Compton, is merely a response to stimuli. Humans are quite... Primitive. Incapable of feeling pain as we do." Which is so much more than a parallel to Amy, or any historical horrors: it recapitulates the very first lie we're ever told. A separation between us and the rest of the world means subjective importance and reality. Becoming adult, becoming human, is remembering your ability to feel the pain and experience, or at least take on faith, the subjective experience of everyone else.
Luisa drags Jessica to Bill as she's singing out the Lord's Prayer, forgetting vital parts, guilty with the possibility that forgetting a few words of a prayer might make the difference between life and death. The Magister checks his Blackberry, and I do have to mention: what, they just had this girl in a trunk just in case? Or was she going to be the after-Tribunal dinner mint, or what? "According to our records, you've never been a Maker, is that right?" Yes. "But you know the procedure?" Jessica weeps, abject. "Then proceed." And the family looks on, smiling with pride, and love. She whimpers on the ground, tracing little circles and praying to them. Everybody's fangs are out, tumescent. Vampires are sex plus death, and this is how they reproduce. No wonder they don't know the difference between sex and violence. There's a sentimentality in their eyes, warring with their lust; her cries are exquisite.
Minnelli, Hitchcock, Huston, Barrymore, they all had something in common with Jonathan Shields: they were producers, creators, so in love with the goddess in their woman that they could never find the woman in there. They dressed them up, or turned them into other women from before; they changed them, and in so doing changed themselves. Men have been doing this as long as there have been men. They were collectors and they wrote their women into stories they made up themselves, they were authors and they were Makers. They were vampires.
Bill takes her hand and she stirs, looking up into his eyes. Two eyes, shining in the darkness. "Are you a Christian?" she asks, because there are two kinds of people. "I was," he answers honestly and without thinking. "I'm a good girl," she assures him, still confused but past worrying at it. "Jesus will take me home to Heaven." Bill smiles sadly, because that's the one thing that's not true anymore; he asks her her name and begins the glamour. "You're safe now. Look in my eyes." He caresses her face and she gazes on the infinite love in him, the divine kindness looking back out at her. "Everything will be fine..." The Magister interrupts, to remind him glamour's not permitted here, and he breaks the contact. She falls out of Heaven once again, and into hell. "She's just a girl," Bill protests, and the Magister yells at him to back his shit up some more and stop being boring. And to the hungry grunts and orgasmic groans of his family, as the sway and clutch at each other, eyes locked on the proceedings, he takes her, begging for forgiveness, and screams. It is hungry and it is sad; it's sex and death. Pam and Eric are hypnotized: It's a family, being born. He sings the night that made him, and all the infinite nights that follow, and then he takes her life. Jessica dies. And Jessica is born: created and destroyed.