Jason and Amy clean up the pieces of Eddie, and while at first he's strong enough to throw out all the V, eventually she sneaks a little bit back into their bed. While they're tripping balls, Rene sneaks into Jason's house and finally strangles Amy. This is kind of the final proof necessary for Jason to admit he's possibly the killer, and he willingly goes into lockup. Also in jail: Tara Mae Thornton, on a DUI that can't be explained by mythical naked ladies and giant pigs. There's a fairly brutal scene in which Lettie Mae basically disowns Tara because she feels like her salvation is endangered, and then Naked Lady shows up in the form of a freelance social worker, pays Tara's bail, and takes her home with her in a shiny magical car. And finally, Lafayette threatens the state senator's run for the US Congress when he sees his former lover talking shit about vampires and homos on the campaign trail, which should work out splendidly.
Sookie and Sam make temporary house together after she decides if being chased down by the Killer in her place of employment didn't activate her blood bond with Bill, he can just go to hell. They investigate the girl she saw being killed in the Killer's head, and meet a funny old man who tells them the waitress's brother/killer was Drew Marshall -- now living under a fake name with a ridiculous Cajun accent in Renard Parish and newly engaged. That's right: Rene is the strangler. But Sookie and Sam don't know that, thanks to the usual farcical miscommunications, and end up mugging down right as Bill's coming home. He jumps Sam, and Sookie gets pissed enough to rescind his invitation into her home, which bums him out because of how he just killed a girl for her, and also didn't even get to tell her about his new daughter.
Bill's vampire daughter Jessica is truly outrageous, what with her insane hunger for human blood, absurdly delightful existential crisis, generally teenaged acting out, and all of it. Her main goals seem to be: saying curse words, killing a bunch of people, and becoming a stripper. Mostly, it's awesome because of the intensely hilarious situations it puts Bill into, which are nonstop, blackly comedic, and include a vampire parenting sequence with Eric that's gayer than the time Angel and Spike did it.
week: the first season finale, Lafayette gets into some scrapes, we learn more about Naked Pig Lady Maryann, Jason is approached by the Newlin vamp-hating church, and Rene comes for Sookie yet again -- but meets a pissed-off border collie in the process.
Pam watches Bill digging Jessica's grave for awhile, but eventually gets bored and starts checking out the body's tits and ass, puling up her dress to look at her panties. Bill if totally offended, but Pam just sighs. "It's your own fault. You and your insane affection for stupid cattle." She's still wearing her sunglasses on her head; every day is Halloween. He tells her to go away and she says she's there on Magister's orders. "I fulfilled the conditions of my sentence! I murdered this innocent girl!" Pam totally scoffs at him, because once somebody's decided to hate themselves you can't really argue with it. "There was no murder. You drained her blood and gave her yours." He says however you say it, that's proof of his loyalty, but she's still not leaving: he's romantic and sentimental and kind of a dumbass, and who knows what he'll do rather than letting Jessica be born. "You just might do something to keep the little blood bag from joining our ranks. I'll follow my orders; I won't let you stake her before she goes to ground." He drops the shovel and stares at her, promising he's not going to stake her: "I'm gonna set her free," he says, and his face goes unsure. Is that something Pam needs to know? Is that something she can even understand? She loves being a vampire. Her story started there.
Lorena turned Bill as a reward for his gentility. If anyone's spirit deserves to stay in the world eternally, it's a gentleman. The fact that he was seriously traumatized by it isn't his fault, but the fact that centuries later he's still whining about it is most certainly his fault. So this is his worst nightmare coming true: taking possession of somebody else's choices. Killing a girl to save her from torture. She went looking for danger, and she found it. Jessica's parents were trying to keep her safe, her body and her soul safe, but she knew she knew better than them. She knew she was risking her safety, and she was right. We don't always choose the things that happen to us, but we always choose how we respond.
So now Jessica is dead, because Bill killed her. And whatever happens is up to her. And if he doesn't agree with it, that's on him, because the time for him taking her choices away is over. And if he could see that for one second -- that Jessica's story belongs to Jessica now, that she's the main character in it, that it's not about self-loathing or self-hatred or self-denial unless she chooses that -- then Lorena could never hurt him again.
"You've already set her free. The same as Eric freed me." Bill tells Jessica's story, but it is not Jessica's story, and Bill will never understand that other people have their own stories, because his pain is too large to look over: "Everyone she's ever known will recoil from her. Everything she's ever loved has been stolen from her." Pam refuses to call her by name, because she's dead, "a pathetic lump of temporary flesh," and Bill hates it, but Pam's right. Because in Pam's story, before Jessica was dead, she was even less alive than she is now. I'm on Pam's side, because the thing has happened. Jessica died. And we choose how we respond to that.
"You've already set her free. The same as Eric freed me." Bill tells Jessica's story, but it is not Jessica's story, and Bill will never understand that other people have their own stories, because his pain is too large to look over: "Everyone she's ever known will recoil from her. Everything she's ever loved has been stolen from her." Pam refuses to call her by name, because she's dead, "a pathetic lump of temporary flesh," and Bill hates it, but Pam's right. Because in Pam's story, before Jessica was dead, she was even less alive than she is now. I'm on Pam's side, because the thing has happened. Jessica died. And we choose how we respond to that.
"[You've given her] the ultimate gift! You're a Maker! You're a hero." It rakes across Bill's skin, the joy she takes in this. In a new life, being born to power and untold beauty and strength; he's brought another of God's creatures into the world. He says it to wound: "I find myself doubting whether you were ever truly human." And Pam delights in it, thanking him, kicking the corpse into its hole. He hops in with it, whining, and Pam shovels dirt over them; he curls around the body like a mother, like the tender seed inside the loam, waiting for some earthly magic to kick in and bring it to life. "I'll tuck you in. Tomorrow night, your little girl will rise. Vampire."
Sam puts a shotgun shell on Sookie's mantle downstairs, leaving yet another message for Tara (Her awesome outgoing: "This is Tara. Leave a message. Easy stuff.") and wondering if she's in a ditch somewhere, then apologizing for the thought. Sookie brings down linens, so that he can sleep in the house and protect her, like Bill asked. And, as it turns out, was necessary. "I just had to put those clothes in the wash. Felt like the killer was... all over me. Watching me, hating me, itching for a... knife, or a rope or... my neck." She shudders and Sam asks if she picked up anything else; his thoughts were "all red and black and... snarly," she says, the questioning lilt in her voice as she tries not for the first time to put her gift into words. The thing before words, that's what she hears, and putting it into words is as hard for her as it is for us.
There was something familiar about the Killer, that's for sure, but still not recognizable. Sam suggests again that they go to the police, and Sookie laughs. "Sheriff Dearborn, Andy Bellefleur, I saw a woman die. I just happened to be in somebody else's brain at the time." She was young, and pretty; she wore an apron -- "Like a mom?" he asks, still lonely and still young -- like a waitress. "Was there a name tag?" she asks herself, and shakes her head sadly: "I don't know. I was looking at her eyes. She was so surprised..." The people that trust you, the people you invite in, those are the people that can hurt you the most. That's what trust means: It's natural to hate the people you love most because you're giving them the most of yourself, and the fact that we don't, or that it's rare as it is, is one of the things that should make you proud to be human.
"Well," he says regretfully, "Do you want to call Bill? I mean, it might make you feel better..." Sookie shakes her head, because she's come to rely on the blood bond and she knows what it means: "He would found how scared I was, he would've known I was in danger. If he didn't show up tonight, he's not coming back." Sam strokes her hair a little bit and they sort of vacantly stare into each other's eyes because they have had a very long day, and she pulls it together enough to ask about Tara. He, of course, has not -- although it would be a tremendous show of trust if she'd call him from the scene, wouldn't it? -- and Sookie takes a while to stare into space about that too, and then she randomly splits upstairs, leaving him alone to cock his gun wistfully.
Very, very drunk Tara stands against a cop car talking to her old friend Deputy Kenya, who's not buying her story about Naked Pig Lady. "Standing there naked, fucking with my head! [With] like a crazy-ass motherfucking Paul Bunyan pig!" Awesome, but not as awesome as this line, in both concept and execution: "Kenya, I am an excellent driver. But you cannot prepare for a naked lady, and a hog, in the middle of the road. Now you know that." Kenya also puts Tara's drunk ass in the column of knowns, which incites Tara to much disbelieving insult, so Kenya finally gives her a sobriety test, or more like the overture of a sobriety test which includes in itself enough evidence the other way to contain its own destruction, and finally throttled by Tara's total drunkness, insane outfit and hair and makeup, on top of the generally offputting Tara behavior, Kenya yells, "What is the matter with you? You're turning into Lettie Mae!" Which, of course, earns her a big old FU from Tara, and a short time later Tara's knocking her head against the door frame of the cop car while yelling, "But the lady! And the pig!"
Jason's not dealing incredibly well with being covered in Eddie blood and that weird fettuccini grue that comes from staking a vampire, plus the fact that he just saw his girlfriend kill a dude after spending most of the day ethically signing off Jason's responsibility for that selfsame dude's kidnap and torture, so now she's gotta explain the entire world to him again for like the fifth day in a row, and until she does he won't have peace, because he loved a man and that man is dead. They exposit the highlights: Jason, high on Eddie's special brand of careful affection and Hoyt and Rene's prodding of his own masculinity and self-determination, decided to test the limits of his relationship with/control by Amy Burley by letting Eddie go; Amy, afraid of letting Jason learn the truth -- that her words aren't spells that spell the world, but justifications for things she feels like doing -- and afraid she was right -- that Eddie really would have killed them both -- and most of all afraid that the entire world she's spent days and weeks building around herself would come crashing down again by a sudden jump by the fulcrum point, the pivot, the anchor in the middle of the map, Jason, sending them both into the abyss, killed Eddie. A sacrifice of blood to tie them together forever.
Jason and Amy clean up the pieces of Eddie, and while at first he's strong enough to throw out all the V, eventually she sneaks a little bit back into their bed. While they're tripping balls, Rene sneaks into Jason's house and finally strangles Amy. This is kind of the final proof necessary for Jason to admit he's possibly the killer, and he willingly goes into lockup. Also in jail: Tara Mae Thornton, on a DUI that can't be explained by mythical naked ladies and giant pigs. There's a fairly brutal scene in which Lettie Mae basically disowns Tara because she feels like her salvation is endangered, and then Naked Lady shows up in the form of a freelance social worker, pays Tara's bail, and takes her home with her in a shiny magical car. And finally, Lafayette threatens the state senator's run for the US Congress when he sees his former lover talking shit about vampires and homos on the campaign trail, which should work out splendidly.
Sookie and Sam make temporary house together after she decides if being chased down by the Killer in her place of employment didn't activate her blood bond with Bill, he can just go to hell. They investigate the girl she saw being killed in the Killer's head, and meet a funny old man who tells them the waitress's brother/killer was Drew Marshall -- now living under a fake name with a ridiculous Cajun accent in Renard Parish and newly engaged. That's right: Rene is the strangler. But Sookie and Sam don't know that, thanks to the usual farcical miscommunications, and end up mugging down right as Bill's coming home. He jumps Sam, and Sookie gets pissed enough to rescind his invitation into her home, which bums him out because of how he just killed a girl for her, and also didn't even get to tell her about his new daughter.
Bill's vampire daughter Jessica is truly outrageous, what with her insane hunger for human blood, absurdly delightful existential crisis, generally teenaged acting out, and all of it. Her main goals seem to be: saying curse words, killing a bunch of people, and becoming a stripper. Mostly, it's awesome because of the intensely hilarious situations it puts Bill into, which are nonstop, blackly comedic, and include a vampire parenting sequence with Eric that's gayer than the time Angel and Spike did it.
week: the first season finale, Lafayette gets into some scrapes, we learn more about Naked Pig Lady Maryann, Jason is approached by the Newlin vamp-hating church, and Rene comes for Sookie yet again -- but meets a pissed-off border collie in the process.
"I told you not to talk to him. He was controlling your mind..." Jason's pissed, because he knows Eddie doesn't know how to do that yet; that Eddie's so young he's got no guile in him at all, that Eddie's so soft he could barely bite, that he had tamed the beast in Eddie and that they trusted one another; that they had no guile in them and didn't know yet how to lie. That there was something old, and good, and wise, something extraordinary, in Eddie, and that he could see it, and that they could see each other, and that he knew it would be all right. "God, it was never gonna be all right. From the minute we took him, you knew it was gonna end like this, you just couldn't face it." Jason assures her he had no idea it would end with him covered in the blood and skin of a person he loved, and she rewrites the world again, in cinder and soot and blood and skin: "You wanted his blood. Bad. You were with me the whole way, so do not act like this is my fault. Now, I said to clean up, so clean up!" She shoves a towel at him and they scream: "Yankee bitch!" "Dumb fucking hillbilly!" They try to clean their mess up; it's a good five seconds before he starts to vomit.
"It's okay. It's gonna be all right. We just gotta keep our shit together." Just like they killed a man; it looks and feels and sounds like they just killed a man. "For the last time: he was already dead, he was not a man. He was a predator, only we got him first." She walks him out of it; lets him lean against her with arm thrown across her shoulder as she walks him out of it, humbled and hopping: "Don't do this, okay? Don't let a vampire come between us. Because what we have..." She says his name, sharply, to draw him back in, to pull his eyes to her beautiful face. Eddie couldn't do this yet; he was too young. They are covered in blood, and hunger, and hate, and fear and lust and selfishness, they are covered in murder and gore and the horror of a life they ended together: "It's beautiful."
It's morning time, by which I mean the sun is coming up. Sookie's sitting at the kitchen table, by which I mean it's breakfast time. There are eggs and sausage in the oven, staying warm for Sam: in the daytime, when the sun comes up, and families eat breakfast together, Sookie's sitting at the kitchen table with the home smells of egg and sausage heading up the stairs and out into the sunlight. It's going to be clear all day, and you can walk out into the sunshine of a morning, after breakfast with the family, and know that everything is going to be all right: that a new day is beginning. If you're alive, you can do those things.
I think there are two main reasons our entire pop culture at the moment is consumed by vampire boyfriend/werewolf boyfriend. The first is that we're only afraid of three things -- sex, death and life -- and we'll do anything with our imaginations to cross from here to there to feel safer around them. Vampires = sex + death (an end to a start, the joy in being consumed utterly, burned alive; to be awake when the world is sleeping and thus asleep when the world is awake; to be dead to the world) and werewolf guys = sex + life (overly lush, too accepting, too much like life on V, fucking in the garbage and the sunlight).
The second one, though, and it's kind of central to this episode, has to do with feminism, particularly our generation's bizarre experience of feminism as culture speeds up. Vampires, in this particular brand of literature, are paternalistic/"protective," seductive/"mind-controlling," bad boys-except-with-you types; like keeping a tiger in the kitchen, or Tank Girl, they're the giant scary thing that loves only you and can kill everyone else. And then there's the werewolf guy, who just wants to romp around all romantical and dedicate himself to you utterly and says "More life! More sex! More fun! Love who you are! Get lost in it!"
And for those of us who make a habit of sleeping with men, these are the ways we're trained to respond to men: as cold and controlling authorities by virtue of their physical power, or as exuberantly terrifying, conspiratorial beasts lacking any sort of self-control. Vampires are nice because they are courtly, and old in the ways that count while being forever young and hot in the ways that really count, and rich, and do things like come zoom-running from miles away and holler about how you must be protected and stand outside your house all night, staring. Vampire guy can make you be turned on, so he removes any kind of sexual risk or shame; you never have to ask for it and if you do it's because he made you want it; all you have to do is lie there and be penetrated. The downside is, they never ever go away.
Werewolf guy is nice because he says, "If it feels good, do it!" Be super psychic, yell at Andy Bellefleur, make out when you wanna make out. Werewolf can guy can smell that you're turned on, so you don't ever have to admit it: he carries the sex monster for both of you. Werewolf guy knows better than you about the beast, because you've never been allowed to let your beast free. So he urges you to do so, and shows you how to do so, and it's very fun and not very memorable because we don't live in memory, we live now. He changes shape to be something closer to what you wanted, what you thought was perfect -- the same way you change shape for vampire guy, because there are rules that must be followed. Vampire rules are the rules of the world and of the night, Saturnian and Jovian, hard and fast; werewolf guy rules are the rules of the heart. Downside is, they go away. Werewolf guy is just as fickle as you are, or would be if "fickle" were a word that applied to men, because werewolf guy is a horndog, who loves you eternally until he turns his head or else can eternally love any number of people in this world -- which contrasts absolutely with the singlemindedness of vampire guy, who's crossed oceans of time, who's been waiting... Oh, just hundreds of years for somebody just like you. Vampire guy conspires with time itself.
So you're a girl, or a boy, and the world keeps throwing guys at you, and some of them are like this and some of them are like that, and every time you're thinking: Is he the one? The one I would actually change things around for? Or is the one to romp around with? The entire universe works on the twinned principles of compression and inflation, repression and abandon, structure and chaos, endings and beginnings. It's not about making the choice between vampire guy and werewolf guy, it's about the fact that these are the only two ways we know how to deal with men, because we were born at a particularly effed-up time where our mothers' feminist ideals are flexing and bending to the breaking point and we're not seeing our mothers walk the walk. Because their dogma was invented by them, as received wisdom, in the decades surrounding our birth, we watched it fall apart around them. Our hearts broke together, ours and our mothers, when we found out how the world really worked.
The original vanguard said, "Stop locking us up at night. Let us go out into the world and see what we must see, and do what we must do. We can and will protect ourselves, but we'll never know for sure until you stop treating us like girls and start understanding that we are women, which is the same thing as being a person." They were werewolf days and howling nights, women shapeshifting before each other's eyes, exploring what they could be with and for men and what they could be with and for each other. For the first time since like agrarian times, women assumed shared control of the cultural narrative: Carole King writes "He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)" in the Brill Building in 1962, and nobody actually gets it. The days and nights of the counterculture are chronicled by men who write like women and women who write like men. Bodies are redefined and rewritten, what they mean and to whom they belong, new ways and laws are created, men and women bleed into each other, exchanging secrets and telling stories and realizing that 90% of boy-girl bullshit is just an illusion handed down from the people before.
Fast-forward to the '90s, and you've got "may I touch your left breast" at Dartmouth; "sexual harassment" being applied to literally every circumstance possible; diluting and obscuring its own once-valid complaint; girls of my generation saying, "Fucking lock me up. This world is scary, sex is scary and my safety is an illusion, pornography is violence, sex is evil, I get it now, I repent, I'm sorry for questioning the patriarchy, please give me my bra back." Our culture was invaded by forces from beyond the pale, by diseases so powerful they seemed magical, and we worshipped at their shrine in a way: by becoming ever more obsessed with blood, with sex, with death, with taint, equating blood and sex and death into a single objective correlative for the fact that sex is scary, always, and somehow we forgot that for just long enough to fall in love with the idea of being scared of sex itself. Gay sex, which is like scary with a little scary on top anyway, intersected with this stuff in a remarkably unlucky way; our vampires went bisexual as a result. Vampire nights and the rotting carpet of a culture in decline, obsessed with its own decay and dancing to goth music in the last big vampire fad, calling every day Halloween and calling for the death of sex itself in reaction to the sterility and the fear and the desperate need for somebody, anybody, to explain what the fuck was going on.
The literature here deals with this dichotomy -- how you deal with the darker sides of masculinity in the post-Bly post-'90s sexual anarchy we've wandered into -- in different ways. Those Anita Blake books deal with it by turning the woman into a third, inherently feminine creature of darkness, a succubus, equal in power to the two operating male archetypes. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books get really weird with it pretty early on, but basically frame the werewolf/vampire triangle as a basic coming-of-age story in which both versions of masculinity are necessary in order to fully awaken the woman's sexual maturity, flowing into and out of each other and breaking down the walls between them even as she's taking on the roles and habits of everybody else, like every teenager. Harris, in the source material, works the triangle as a negotiation with darkness, making both suitors passports into the areas of darkness necessary to reclaim all territory, dark and light, for herself. To me, this seems healthiest, but they're all the same kind of myth.
Why's it happening again? Why on earth is our culture playing out entirely vampire boyfriend/werewolf boyfriend right now? And I'm not just saying this because Twlight came out yesterday -- these three series of books I'm talking about started in 1993 (Anita), 2001 (Sookie), and 2005 (Twilight) and pretty much have ruled the bestseller lists since then, even with the variances in quality, readability and WTF between them; seven of the eight Sookie novels are bestsellers pretty much nonstop, which is not something that ever happened before. I think it's pretty easy if you follow the line of blood: The war and the Greatest Generation's reassignment and recapitulation of gender roles becomes the uphill battle of the '50s and the glorious global shout of the '60s becomes the delirious sexual abandon of the '70s becomes the cruelty and sexual artifice of the '80s becomes the total AIDS-related sexual freakout of the '90s ... and we grew up in that, doing the incredibly dangerous undercover work of becoming healthy sexual beings that people have been doing since there were people, with all that crazy on top, mediated for the first time by television telling us back to ourselves in realtime and the endless fucking Baby Boomer retellings and nostalgia and music videos disguised as feature films. We became men and women in the middle of that shitstorm. Vampire Guy/Werewolf Guy is just us telling that story back to the world and trying to decide what to do .
Do you want to be married, do you want to enter into a static world where the choices have been made and the growing has been done and the living can start? Does a part of you get off on the idea of being a good wife, of being in control of yourself and your home to such a degree that the balance of power in the house can shift around whenever you feel like it? Do you want to be tied up in the darkness, arms around you as tight as death's, and know that you are finally safe? To love is to bury, do you want to be buried? Half the time. Exactly half the time.
Do you want to be just like a man? Roaming the night, fucking at will, being open and honest, without any ties at all? Do you want to escape the tyranny of relationships and demands and live on your own, like a beast, plant a garden and watch it grow, feed the cat, sleep with just everybody in the whole world? Do you want to try fucked up sex things that maybe you can't look the person in the eye for awhile, but you can laugh about it eventually? Would you like to live in a world where nobody judges you or says that words reserved for women who make their own choices? Wouldn't you love, for once, to make the call and honestly know there are no social repercussions, no psychological tell, no evidence of past trauma, or tiny little shame in the back corner? To love is to be taken apart and put back together better, do you want to be ripped apart? Half the time.
Because, you know, those are the only things you're allowed to want. Men that act like fathers, men that act like brothers. There are no other men in this world, we've been told our entire lives; men are objects to be feared, and they are objects you put into your life for certain reasons and to have certain effects. Vampires don't have souls. Werewolf guy has a soul but it doesn't even make sense and it has ADD anyway. And there you are, this rational boy or girl, confronted with their beautiful faces and fucked-up rationales, having to make a choice about what you're going to put in your life, and why. And that's not optimal -- because people all have the gift of subjectivity no matter how you treat them -- but it's a hell of a lot better to know you have options (including getting over this dichotomy altogether) and it's comforting to know that the entire publishing economy, in a very real way, right now rests on the idea of our culture collaboratively trying to process this vampire guy/werewolf guy phenomenon so we can move on to whatever the (even more WTF) thing will be.
(I'm going to say that whatever it is, the male Quest of Harry Potter is going to swing into alignment with the female concerns of VG/WWG, and what you'll be seeing in the decade is going to be hero stories about girls, specifically instead of having these arbitrary Team Edward/Team Jacob blockheaded icons thrown in her path, more like Sookie than anything else, where the obstacles are mostly the girl's own bullshit rather than the freeform hysterical derangement about relationships that has come to characterize popular literature from chick lit to S&TC to He's Just Not That Into You, which gigantic chunk of our cultural landscape right now, when considered from the outside, looks screaming-meemie amounts of crazy. The regrettable thing about the post-ironic cycle we're about to hit is that self-obsession is the price you pay for earnestness, so, paradoxically you get more done for other people by focusing your hard work on yourself, unless you're doing it as a way around actually focusing on yourself. Which is inevitably what will happen, and then we'll all have to look around for a new way to fix ourselves/go crazy.) I guess it just comes down to the fact you're either loved or your forgotten, and this mad dash to be on the list of people who are loved is responsible for really bad judgment calls. To love is to raise, up into heaven; but to love is also to bury.
Which is a digression on a scale I don't even think I have ever attempted, but Sookie really seems to be confusing for a lot of viewers and I wanted to get that whole dichotomy out there. Breakfast, here and now, is from Adele's recipe. She cooked it for the man who stayed, and he just happens to be the man who can eat it, here in the morning, without bursting into flame. A whole life spent waiting for the story to start, for a man to love her without all the creepy stuff that goes along with it; a whole life waiting for sex without pain, for danger without terror, for beauty. Oh, to be normal, to be loved and normal and known as one of the ones who won, who wasn't alone. And the world keeps putting it in her grasp and pulling it away again. But when Sam walks out into the kitchen, putting on his T-shirt and looking at her with that smile, eating the breakfast she made for him, here in the sunlight, and teases her into eating it with him, that's a new offer from the universe: "You can have love without complications."
"I'll tell you what, I am sick and tired of waiting around to get strangled," Sookie says, and he says he'll protect her but she knows he can't stay with her 24 hours a day for the rest of her life but they both know better: he surely can. He would love that more than anything, and so would she, and they'll have breakfast every morning in the sunlight and go around town a couple, the well-to-do bar owner and his once-troubled, now-adored wife: love without complication, love as the antidote to complication. It seems so simple here in the kitchen: Bill is complications on a vast and shallow level. The sex, the blood, the feeling of safety and always being protected were a compensation for the million miles of bullshit fangbangers slog through every day, not that she is one but still: worth it. And if Vampire Guy doesn't protect you -- if he runs away like some kind of Werewolf Guy and won't even tell you why, or let you rise to the occasion and help, because it's a Vampire Thing and you just don't get it, it's not your business, you can't crawl into each other's lives and social circles any more than you'll ever sleep in each other's arms, anymore than you'll ever have breakfast together, or children, or get married if the VRA doesn't pass, any more than you have a future with a dead thing...
Then the universe is saying, "Love or no love, this is a losing game. You wouldn't let your friend date an addict, and this is even more annoyingly complex," and the universe is saying, "Look, Bill agreed with me, and traded himself out for Sam. Literally. Literally said Sam is going to be me until I get back." And you know what? Sam is -- now that he's a shapeshifter, now that he's special like Sookie, now that she's not alone and he thinks her gift is wonderful -- pretty much like a better sort of Bill, right now. Once Bill comes back, if he comes back, she knows she'll be swept up again and all the darkness and the blood comes rushing, and the questions without answers one way or the other, and the biting and the fucking and the way everybody looks at you, all the things you give up to be with him... But until then, how nice is it to sit at the breakfast table in Gran's house and eat breakfast with an uncomplicated man, to tell jokes and solve mysteries and crimes and go out among the humans in the sunlight, ask questions that do have answers, and get those answers, and save your own life while Bill is traipsing around playing Tribunal and refusing to help you, when that was the one greatest thing about loving him.
"So you're looking up killers in the Yellow Pages?" Sookie laughs and explains that she remembered part of the Killer's memory about the girl, her name Cindy and her name tag, which Sam recognizes as being a pie house a couple hours away. "You don't have to come with me," Sookie says after a grin, and Sam shakes his head: of course he does. "Come on. Eat up, you need fuel. Don't sass me." Sookie yells that he's not the boss of her, then they laugh: he is the boss of her. Would be creepy if it weren't cute, and if he had any authority whatsoever.
Amy's shoving bits of Eddie down the disposal, wearing rubber gloves, when Jason comes out dressed for road crew. In the scene we'll see Rene and Hoyt: T-shirts regulation, safety vests; Jason's sleeves are cut off and there's a deep notch in the neck. Jason is sooo awesome. Amy chats at him nervously, but jumps when he sweeps all the vials of Eddie's blood out of the fridge and into a garbage bag, slamming it against the floor. V gives you a heart, opens doors you never knew existed; the price of having a heart and doors is that pain comes in and breaks you, and Jason can dimly remember a time when the world wasn't so good at hurting him, breaking his heart, and he's not wrong that it's the V doing that. It's the V doing that. It's the only good thing that comes of V-juice, that momentary and ephemeral feeling of connection, that reminder that God is implicit in every word and action. No thank you. She tries to apologize about Eddie, but he's going into the trash bag too, along with the memory of hope, along with Adele and Sookie: "We are done with this shit, do you hear me? Done. I want every fucking drop out of my house and if you don't like it, you can pack your goddamn bags and go." He storms out and Amy nearly weeps, alone: "...Love you."
Lafayette's happy at first to see his state Senator boyfriend David "Duke" Finch on the TV at Merlotte's, but once he hears Finch's plans (US House) and platform ("Equal rights for vampires? I don't think so. Many of them are foreign immigrants... Taking our jobs and our women. And their very blood turns our children into addicts, drug dealers and homosexuals. No vampire, and none of these vampire-loving deviants, deserve any rights at all") sends him into a tizz, throwing food at the TV and screaming at him for his lies. He asks if Terry heard any of that, and he shakes his head matter-of-factly: "I can't listen to politicians no more, I get a seizure." Terry begs him to change the channel to "[his] home decor program," and Lafayette obliges, just as Amy's coming in looking fucked up, like she just killed a guy. "Oh darling, you looking a little used up." She grins a hello, as taken with Lafayette as everyone else on earth. "Jason dragging you into his bullshit?" She pulls off a glass full of Coke from the bar taps -- would that be ORGANIC COCA-COLA, ASSHOLE? -- and tells him she has no idea what he means. What he means, of course, is V addiction, not kidnapping or murder. "Why is everybody tellin' me lies today?" he asks Terry, who's moderately sympathetic: "Got no idea. Look at that, Lafayette! Theme shelves." Lafayette nods, because Finch will be shaking hands in Monroe tonight, and that's the last thing the TV said. "Oh that's pretty, baby. ...Would you work for me tonight?" Of course he would.
Get a load of Harley, pretty blond waitress at Miss Patty's Pie House or whatever it's called, who has never heard of Poor Dead Cindy but can name many, many pies. I guess Bon Temps is much classier than Bunkie because this girl is obviously the town retard, but it's outwith the realm of possibility that it's because she's psychic, which means our town retard totally trumps theirs. Harley's hilarious in a way I kind of understand -- back to the whole Coen Bros. disconnect again -- but I also like her because she reminds me of Best In Show: "No ma'am, no sir, I don't know any Cindy but I can recommend the fried apple pie, the frozen Hawaiian pie, the chocolate pecan praline pie, the chess pie, the seven-layer Jell-O pie..."
("I used to be able to name every nut that there was. And it used to drive my mother crazy, because she used to say, 'Harlan Pepper, if you don't stop naming nuts,' and the joke was that we lived in Pine Nut, and I think that's what put it in my mind, at that point. So she would hear me in the other room, and she'd just start yelling. I'd say, "Peanut, hazelnut, cashew nut, macadamia nut..." That was the one that would send her into going crazy. She'd say, 'Would you ... stop naming nuts!' And Hubert used to be able to make the sound, he couldn't talk, but he'd go rrrawr rrawr and that sounded like macadamia nut. Pine nut, which is a nut but it's also the name of a town, pistachio nut, red pistachio nut, natural, all natural white pistachio nut...")
Bagger Vance orders them some pies and Harley goes, "Gotcha, Buster!" and jumps to, and he tells Sam and Sookie that Harley is so stupid they named her after a motorcycle, and also he can tell them all about Poor Dead Cindy Marshall, but first he's going to eat some pie, whatever, the facts are that she was a waitress here, and moved into Bunkie two years ago with her brother, and then a couple months after their arrival she was strangled to death, and nobody knows whodunit and nobody knows what happened to the brother: also dead? Possibly the Killer? His name was Drew Marshall. Sookie asks what Cindy was like, and Bagger Vance tells her that Cindy was "Cute as a button, a little wild, fun-loving, always nice to me. But people talked, you know... Vampers. They say she was carrying on with the vampers, I didn't believe it. What kind of woman would do such a thing?" Sookie does the third-coolest thing in the episode at this point, making a the fuck you say face so extreme that Sam can actually see it shining from behind her head at the counter, and puts his hand on her shoulder. And having given them the information they needed, Bagger Vance stands up babbling about pie and wanders into the movie requiring a random old gossipy black guy, which should be coming along in five, four, three... There ya go.
Meanwhile Tara's at the police station in that fucked up dress and her hair still all a mess, having this convo with Lettie Mae: "Mama, please don't cry. It was only a little accident and I didn't get hurt much. Well, no, I... I wasn't drunk, but they think I was. Mama, quit yelling, all I need is bail money and a ride home, there's no reason to cry..."
Jason begs and begs for Hoyt and Rene to spend time with him tonight so that he doesn't have to deal with the situation at home. Get rid of Amy, that's provisional and something he would never actually do, but it stays on the to-do list because it's technically possible. Go home and pretend everything's okay -- that he doesn't hate her for killing Eddie, just like Eddie said -- that's going to itch in a whole different way. Go home and stay off the V, that's going to itch worst of all, especially if she's there, looking down on his dumb ass, both cut off from the only way they can connect. Go home and she's gone, and everything falls apart. Therefore, Jason has decided without admitting it, the best option is to not go home at all, so that something else can make up his mind for him. Stay out of his house until he just has to go back, maybe with a girl in tow, and see what the world's been doing while he was out. But Rene and Hoyt won't play.
Hoyt, because he's adorably and unself-consciously excited about taking his horrible night-blind mother Maxine to a baby shower in Shreveport ("I wanna go... The food's good, the games are fun. You know, like Pass the Orange? And, if the ladies start screaming like they always do, I'll just go for a little walk.") Notably, Hoyt very clearly calls him Jay, which was previously off-limits when Jason's doors were too far open. Rene won't play along because he's taking Arlene dancing, and even though Jason begs to come along -- to be the Eddie in the basement -- Rene's not having it. Hoyt asks why he's so intent on luring them out when he's got Amy, and Jason gets sad.
"Alright, I'm gonna tell you something, but you can't say nothing to nobody. You got that? Amy likes V." They're unbelieving; Hoyt immediately tells Jason he has to help her quit; that's what love does. Rene asks if she fucks vampires too -- remember, Rene doesn't hate vampires any more than Sam does, but he sure gets weird when pretty white girls fuck them -- and Jason says, "She says she never did, but these days, it's hard to find a woman who ain't been bit." And that's how Amy Burley died.
Hoyt asks if he loves her, and he tells the story from a third perspective, back to Jason watching Jason be Jason, doing what Jason would do if he were in the driver's seat, saying what Jason would say if he were in charge of Jason, or watching from the outside; if he were a grownup, a man, if he had the upper hand, he would do things and would have done things in precisely this way. Would never have been weak, would never have opened that first door. "I don't like this V shit. We had a terrible fight. She might be gone already and if she's not... Maybe I ought to dump her." Hoyt tells him she's a keeper, but Rene assures Jason that "These things [have] a way of working out." Jason's touched by his kindness and the careful way he says it; he has no idea it's a warning from the Bon Temps immune system saying, "You can be Jason again in just a few hours, when this problem's off your plate." Hoyt hops around giddily as they get back into their truck, and Rene wiggles eyebrows at Jason: they are men. Hoyt's just a boy.
The officer on duty at the Bunkie police station has a huge GOD HATES FANGS poster in his office, which I love but also makes it confusing for some people w/r/t the essential flexibility of the metaphors in play. The show actively resists one-to-one substitution of minority groups, precisely so that the metaphor can float, and if in one scene fangs are fags and the second they're getting Jim Crowed, the logical jump for a newer viewer is to assign the correspondence and then get completely confused by a later shift to some other set of signifiers, which in turn makes a lot of the plot incomprehensible, like: if vampires are gays and vampires are also an evil dark cabal, then gays are an evil dark cabal, and isn't that terrible. Another sign on the wall says, "Attitudes expressed here are not necessarily those of the management."
Sookie listens to his slow, molasses thoughts about how you can't call it adultery if a wife won't have sex, but at least his mistress Debbie's a Christian. Once he gets a load of Sookie's total hotness, he's all helpful, but she flirts and plays with her hair, accidentally flashing the bite on her underarm where Bill bit her in the graveyard, and flips around immediately, good-old-boying her and stonewalling the investigation. He tells them they don't even know for sure that Drew Marshall killed his sister, and anyway it was probably a vamp, and Sookie points out that vampires don't strangle. "Well, I guess you'd know. Good riddance to white trash, that's all I got to say," he says, leering at her with the look that says a girl who lets vamps bite her is a girl who'll do things willingly that you normally have to work hard for. Sam's offended, but they are a great crimefighting duo: Sookie snaps him out of it by threatening to tell his wife about Debbie, and Sam's as amazed as ever at Sookie's full-frontal willingness to use her gift in whatever way gets the best results. They solve mysteries in the daylight, two strange creatures with powers they can use. The cop quickly switches sides again, whining that he can't just hand over a picture of Drew Marshall for them to investigate back home; he pulls the old man trick of addressing Sam entirely and forgetting Sookie altogether, offering to fax it to the police station in Bon Temps. "Fast," says Sam, and Sookie sweetly giggles: "That's all we ask. Thank you so much for your cooperation!"
Lurlene Butterman shakes Senator Finch's hand in Monroe, chit-chatting a moment more before Lafayette literally hip-checks her out of the way and grabs Finch's hand, pumping it slowly. "I am so happy and proud to shake the hand of someone with your values." Finch's face goes humble and cold, and Lafayette cocks his head. "Too often we're governed by criminals and hypocrites, don't you agree? But I can tell you're a man of virtues. And I applaud the effort you're making against the poor and disenfranchised, especially the vampires. And the gays." Finch tries to move him along but Lafayette pulls him closer, wearing a suit, beautifully male, jumping back and forth across the line as he does, and looks him in the eye. Eddie never learned to do this: "So many things can happen to bring down a fine personage such as yourself. You might want to be careful, you hear?" A cute camera intern tells them to look into the camera and smile -- Finch: "No. -- but it's done, the shot is taken, Lafayette slaps his ass subtly and leaves, having done a good thing and asked for his death in one breathe, and Finch, hilariously, breathes to himself, "Thanks for coming by..." So many scenes in this episode are about the conversations we keep having after the person is gone, aren't they? So much of this story is about the stuff we keep saying to people long after they've left us.
Amy's made a wonderful dinner for Jason; when he finally comes home and sees her in her lovely white dress, it all fades away. "Did you have to work late? It doesn't matter, I... I just..." He says no, straight up, that's not why he's late, and her loving smile sadly fades. "Didn't want to come home," he gruffs, and her heart breaks. "Okay," she says. Okay, this was unforgivable. She rearranged herself and her needs, threw out all the V, cooked a lovely dinner, made his house a home, and still no. Okay. "I was afraid you might've left," he says, which is one version of the truth, and Amy runs forward, stopping herself from jumping into his arms. "No, I want to be here. I want to be with you." He reiterates about the V, and she nods desperately. "I did what you said. It was all my fault, Jason. I'm so, so sorry." They make up, across a span of yards -- they touch without touching, even now. He pats his sweet belly and asks if she really made him dinner. "I'd do anything for you!" He knows it's true, his hands were covered in the proof, dripping off him like sweat. He's touched, nearly weeping, and takes her in his arms. She says they can make it right, and he hums his assent. They will put the world back together.
Bill sits on the stump with a four-pack of TruBlood, watches as the dirt of their shared grave begins to move. She claws her way into the moonlight, grunting as she comes; her hair is matted with dirt and her face is covered in it: his daughter being born. He stands, and she begins to scream. Unearthly, terrifying, afraid and hungry and wild. Nothing like him; there is nothing of him in her. She is beastly, feral, everything he swears he's not, mainstreaming as he tries desperately to claw his way toward redemption. His face is full of shock and barely disguised disgust as she screams; it's adorable in its shock and WTF. I love Bill Compton in this episode, for the first time, and it's because of this: he's completely out of his depth and has been from the beginning, has been in the weeds for centuries, but this is the first time his face acknowledges it, beyond a few times Sookie acted too weird to ignore. Jessica screams and screams and he stares and shivers, and she finally forms her first words: "Help me."
"Why's the way home always longer than the way there?" asks Sookie, as Sam drives them back toward Bon Temps. He says that's philosophical, which she didn't intend it as, but I would call the central statement of this entire episode, if not this entire season. We spend our days and hours walking further and further into the woods, into the magical and terrifying forest, and then the forest becomes the thing we must walk through to get out again, to get home again. He complains that he's a simple guy and she laughs at him, but he means it: "I may be a shapeshifter, but I want what every man wants: A good life, a good woman." She watches his face and asks if he loves Tara, and he thinks for awhile, shifting in his seat, and decides to tell the truth. "You know, I like her a lot. I care about her for sure. I've been trying to love her, but, you know, she don't make it easy..." Sookie shakes her head. "Well, she can't help it. When you've never had much love..." She's talking about Tara, but she's talking about herself too. And about Sam, who agrees.
"Believe me, I know, but... It's... It's not working. You know, we're friends, is all. And I'm not so easy to love, either," he says, trying to get her to walk here with him. Sookie tells him he's wrong, he's imminently lovable, and they are both pleased with themselves a moment; he takes the obvious step in this conversation: "Do you love Bill?" He watches her face, now, and she thinks hard too, not about what to hide for once but about the actual truth, saying it aloud, discovering it as it is written. "I think I do, but... Where is he? If vampire politics are more important to him than me... I don't know. I'm so mad at him I could spit." He begged to be her possum, to drown in her rage and soak it up, to take on her hate and sadness and fear and self-loathing and carry it himself, and she told him no: that she'd hate him forever. Like Jason hates and loves Amy, like he hated and loved Eddie for being the possum of their ugliness and the truth behind their beautiful relationship. Sam nods and agrees she has any number of reasons for feeling angry and abandoned; she changes the subject: "I'm sorry you're having to drive so far." Sam plays it off, saying he loves driving and riding in a car, and she laughs affectionately, sharing the new territory with him, rewarding him for trusting her finally with his secrets: "Of course you do!" Flirty: "Go on, hang your head right out the window if you feel like it." He laughs, no shame at all for the first time in his life: two beautiful, strange creatures, called by the night, celebrating their power instead of fearing it. "Yeah, I appreciate that, but it's a private pleasure." Sookie laughs. Private pleasures.
"One day when all this is over, I'm gonna save up and rent a convertible, take it to the Gulf. Lie on the beach, bake in the sun..." In the sunlight, with breakfast, nobody around to bring her down or make her feel anything other than completely normal and completely relaxed. "It's a date," he says bashfully. He loves riding in cars; she gets shy too, and after long silence another real Sookie rears her head, the innocent shoeless Sookie who would shrug off all this romance and complication if she could, and just have fun: "Do you know any car songs?" It is strong to admit you want to do real bad things, when we live in a daylight world where real bad things are really bad, dangerous if not deadly; it's something stronger to ask for real good things, when the night is taking over.
Jason unbuckles his belt, after dinner, and practically belches his approval; Amy says she learned to cook from her childhood maid, who was French. She stands up, now that he's happy again. "Hey, if I show you something, you have to promise that you're not gonna get mad." Jason, dodging the anvils as always, laughs that he'll never be mad at her again, and she retrieves the final vial out of the refrigerator: "I saved one drop." He stands up, betrayed, and heads out of there, away from her, to change out of his work clothes and shut out the whole world. "Babe, please don't flip," she murmurs, following him into the bedroom, and weaves another spell. "We both know that we're for real. That we're gonna have a life together." He asks what she's doing with the blood then, beyond killing him slowly and driving his mind completely bonkers in the process. "I can't trust you for a second," he says, and she reverses his syntax: "You can trust me totally, for always." She says she wants symmetry, and of course he doesn't know what that means, and then she gives the most awesomely nonsensical, totally typical and frightening pre-rehab speech of all time.
"Balance. Harmony. Beauty. Babe, this vial is our past. We started with V, so we should end it with V. Like closing a circle. So we can start a new circle, our new life together. I'm through with the blood, it's only a symbol. But the circle... I mean, that's what's important to me." He stands up, out of her embrace, freaking out, and she makes a false frown: "Never mind. I'm gonna go by myself." She feints the bottle to her lips, as though any junkie is going to sit still for that. "Now I'm not gonna let you do that. But this is the last fucking time..." She toasts their future and pours the drop into her mouth, then holds it there -- blood, in her mouth, with her tongue hanging out -- and kneels on the bed, sharing the drop with him like a momma bird. It is disgusting and ridiculous and funny and sad. The ways we pour our hungers into new skins and say they are the truth is just a girl with a mouthful of blood doing drugs with a half-naked moron and calling it love. What they have is beautiful.
Bill follows Jessica through the forest as she scratches at roots and digs up mushrooms and flowers, sniffs at the bark of trees: hungry, senses alive, a whole world you can read like the longest novel in the world. Alive for the first time. He is so much less compelling than that, but he doggedly tries: "You drank from me. Your blood was replaced with mine and then I shared my essence with you when we slept together in the ground." ("Ew!" she shouts) "No, no, not intercourse." Filthy Jessica rolls her eyes like Selma Blair in every movie ever, grossed out: "You just said intercourse!" She hurls herself away from him again. "It's tradition, it's part of the process, it's magical. Even we don't fully understand how it works." Jessica says her Daddy is going to kick his ass unless he takes her home, and Bill sits her down firmly on a log. She gives him the toddler interrogation:
"Stop!" Why? "Because we need to talk." Why? "There are things you must learn." Why? "Because you are no longer human." Why? "Because, as I've been trying to explain to you, you have been made vampire." After a long thought: Why? "Because you were unlucky. Because life and death are unfair." He's so sad, so guilty, so clueless: "And because of me." He towers over her, looking down, fairly clicking his tongue with sorrow for her and for him and for all of us, so somber and silly: "You cannot go home. That part of your life is over." That's not her story, it's his, and it's only his because he's addicted to it, living in the pain of his life like Tara Mae Thornton, blaming Lorena like Lettie Mae instead of taking responsibility for the chapter, and only Jessica could ever help him understand this. We learn how truly to be sons and daughters only once we've had children of our own.
"No more Mama and Daddy. No more little sister?" He shakes his head, full of sadness for her. Full of the guilt that nourishes him every day. "No more belts. No more clarinets. No more homeschool..." She stands up, scaring him to death in a whole new way. "No more rules. Yeehaw! I'm a vampire! Woo!" She runs ot the road and he fusses behind her, grabbing the TruBloods and following her out. "No, no, no, no. There are rules. That's what I tried to teach you..." She tells him, sensibly, that he has really missed the point. "Crap on your rules. Crap, crap, crap. I can say anything I want now. Shit, shit, shit. Damn, hell, fuck! Fuck, that's a bad one. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What's another cussword so I can say it? I'm a damn vampire!" she laughs, twirling in the moonlight, and she becomes beautiful.
"If you calm down, I will teach you what being a vampire means..." Jessica explains to him that she knows what it means, obviously: "I'm not stupid. I can read." He sits on yet another log and invites her to explain it to him. "It means that I don't have to sit like a lady," she says, demonstrating, "And I can kill anybody I want. And there's an awful lot of people I'd like to kill," this last less frightening than simply earnest. She is a person to whom bad things have happened, and now God has handed her justice. What's a few hours in a car trunk and a night in the ground sharing "essences" with a dork compared to that? That was yesterday. It's so rare that we're handed a complete and total do-over, and he keeps telling her no, that's not what happens: Every wonderful thing you're feeling right now dirty and ugly, and you are a dirty and an ugly girl. You still have not earned happiness, or glory, or the right to love yourself; Pluto will never be a planet again. Nothing he wasn't taught, himself, by a mother crueler than Lettie Mae and wiser than Miss Jeanette.
"No, Jessica, you absolutely cannot kill anybody you want," he says intensely, and she sends up a gorgeous, improbable wail: "But why? Why? I want to kill them..." She moans as he quotes Stan Lee at her -- "With your new powers come new responsibilities" -- and demands that she mainstream, like him. She makes another run for it, putting space between them in the clearing. "You can live almost exactly the same life as you did before, except you'll be awake at night..." The life she lived before made her murderous and sad; she's saying she doesn't want to be locked up at night, that she chooses Werewolf Guy over Vampire Guy, that she'll make her own way in the world. "I want to kill people," she yells, stomping and rational and wise, "And I'm so hungry, and all you do is talk and I'm starving and you are so mean; you're supposed to take care of me, that's what you said [you were supposed to bail me out, wash my clothes, feed me, help me grow], and oh, you suck!" Her tears become crazy, amazing laughter. "That's funny, because you do suck!" Oh Jessica, you don't even know.
Bill nods and hands her a TruBlood, praying it will calm her the fuck down, but she spits it out immediately. "Augh! It tastes like shit! Why are you doing this to me?" He begs her to try more, promising it's not that bad, and she gives him an amazing look: "Fuck no, and you can't force me. I will report you." She clarifies, awesomely: "I'll find a real vampire, and he'll kick your ass." Bill shakes his little bangs all around like an adorable Appaloosa colt who has been asked to program a VCR, and she goes back to crying and screaming and wailing. "You won't let me do anything and I am so hungry/! You are the worst Maker ever!" She sobs like a five-year-old who hasn't slept in six weeks, and he stares at her, cutely, going, "This is fucking incomprehensible."
Kenya brings Lettie Mae into Tara's cell, and things go from bad to awfully worse. "What took you so damn long to show?" Lettie Mae sits and explains that she first called Mabel, of the Fucked Up Church Hat brigade, and prayed with her. "Pray? While I'm locked up waiting? Cut this bullshit. Y'all can pray after you post my bail!" Tara has sort of had it. Lettie Mae explains she's not there to pay Tara's bail, and Tara gets real: "Momma, I'm tired. I hurt all over. I want to go home. Don't play with me." She's not playing. For the first time she's not playing. Even seeing Tara all strung out in the jail cell is killing her, with memories of how many nights she spent here, crazy with liquor, lost to herself and the Lord: "Not many," Tara spits, "Because I bailed you out." And then Lettie Mae says a thing that surprisingly put me on her side for the duration: "Maybe you shouldn't have."
And I mean, there are things that are true and things that are not true. The thing that is true here is that Tara could take away her salvation with one word, "Nancy," and even as her heart is breaking in her fragile chest she refuses to do that, to strip her mother of her sanity again. But the other true thing is that Tara is twenty-five, and needs to get a damn life. Whether or not her mother is drunk on Jesus or the real stuff, whether Lettie Mae is possessed by a demon or her own self-obsession, Tara was right to leave the night she knocked her head in, or any of the nights we didn't see before that. It's obnoxious and annoying that Lettie Mae's doing this now, but it's not wrong. She explains that Tara no longer has a home, and that she's watching her change before her eyes, and it's terrifying. "I am committed to salvation and you're on the road to hell. I would save you if I could, baby, nobody loves you more. But you're a danger to my soul and I can't have you in my house."
Which is harsh, sure, but less harsh than the twenty-five years of physical and emotional abuse leading up to this moment. Does it really fucking matter what Lettie Mae thinks, or what she does, at this point? Who's writing this story? Who's Tara letting drive? That little black-eyed girl didn't die, she went inside. That's her talking now: "I'm the only reason you have a house. After all the times I cleaned you up, all the times you beat me and stole my money, then sent me to school..." She nearly chokes on saying it, this deepest hurt, "...Dirty. In dirty clothes. So people laughed at me, and called me names. My whole life is shit because of you!"
Which, I mean, is simply not true. A run of fifteen shitty years is impressive. But then the day comes, and the day after that, and there's no amount or kind of love that should keep you in a house where they brain you with liquor bottles. Demon or not. You can't wipe away the past or stab the demon to death, but it's still your responsibility to keep walking. You can dance with her; you can take her into your body; you can tell just yourself the secret if no one else will do; you can love her, because she is you, and you can remember that there isn't a room in your house that is closed to you, or too painful to eventually walk around inside. These are the options, and they have nothing to do with anybody but you, and the covenants you make with yourself. That whole speech was in the past tense, and that's not where we live now.
Lettie Mae weeps, horrified to hear it, knowing twenty years of guilt and shame, but stays strong in the onslaught. She knows she's doing the right thing, and she is doing the right thing. She begs Tara to stop, but Tara won't; Tara unleashes everything she has like Pandora's Box: "And the first time I'm in trouble, you turn your back on the one person who's always stood by you. And you call yourself a Christian? Fuck you. You're not my mother. Get out of my sight, you evil bitch. You don't love me, and you never did." That's all of it. Every thing she ever feared; every thing they ever feared separately and together, out on the table: that's the demon. This is the exorcism. Because I'll tell you this -- as Lettie Mae's stumbling away through her tears, promising that one day Tara will she's doing the proper, the loving, the motherly thing -- you look down in Pandora's Box and there's one thing left, and that's hope. Tara didn't say "Nancy," to her mother, and left her with hope. And that is good enough for me.
Amy and Jason kiss, on his black sheets; the sun and rain come together, pouring down on them in bed; he feels it on his lips; she jumps on the mattress, like an earthquake; they run out, through the walls that no longer exist, into a lovely green field, and in the dining room, the candles are still burning on the table -- because they are idiot druggies -- when the Killer enters -- he walks slowly through Jason's house as they dance, in the rain and the sun, him in his underwear and her in a simple white shift, playing love games, zooming through the lush grass and the warm rain and a thousand rainbows, and the Killer enters their bedroom, crushing the V vial and stopping short; he watches them on the bed, holding hands across the sheets as they sleep; they cheer, and play like children, rolling in the grass, laughing at the wide-open sunshine; he puts her on his shoulders and runs through rainbows, driven by love in this house and this bed and in the infinite unfurling of the beauty and the light within them both, and the Killer removes his belt as Jason kisses her in the rain, and their love is a song as loud as the world, and the Killer loops the belt around her neck, and she strangles as Jason kisses her, in the sun and rain, and he tosses her into the air, because they can fly, and she rises on the breeze in the sun and the rain and he falls to the ground, laughing, with the sun on his skin. And then she's gone.
It was the best one yet. He rolls over with a face lit up like Christmas, joyful and grinning and tired. She's slower coming out of it; he looks down at her full of love and shouts, "Earthquake!" bouncing on his knees. She doesn't wake, and he pulls her toward him on the bed, neck and arms limp and sprawling. He leans in to kiss her awake, like a prince in a story, but she's gone. The welts around her neck: Maudette, Dawn. Grief, and behind that fear, and then an old guilt coming back again. "No, hey." He listens for her breath, but she's cold. He chokes on it. "No. God. No, please. Please." He strokes her hair, and kisses her cold lips; he picks up the phone and dials, looking to her for bravery. It is the bravest thing he's ever done, and the dumbest. He's numb to Rosie's happy shout, on the other end of the 911 dispatch line, and asks for them to come.
Jessica stares out at Fangtasia! from Eric's office, hungrily. Eric is amused, asking WTF Bill wants from him. "I wanna go to the bar," she declares, in wonderment. "I wanna be one of those dancers. I'm hungry..." Bill whines to Eric that she won't listen; he's worried about Sookie even though he knows she's all right, and doesn't have time to -- yikes -- teach Jessica obedience. "I don't obey anybody," she says, firmly and with conviction, not a whine at all but a woman being born. "Those days are over." Eric needles him about his lack of control, tapping his shoulder: "Man up, my friend. She's not even one night old." He asks Jessica if she doesn't want to stay with her Maker, like Pam, and her answer is immediate and heartfelt: "No. He's a dick." She takes note of Eric's hotness and, because she was raised to go for Vampire Guy, to head straight for the most powerful man in the world, supplicant and coquettish, asks to sit in his lap. Maybe the most troubling line in the entire episode.
"Nobody lets me having any fun. Fuckers!" Eric gets intense and tells her to sit her ass down, activating all kind of plumbing and wiring, and she slams the door behind her. "See," he says quietly to Bill, "You have to be tough with them, or they'll walk all over you." Bill goes full-on Betty Draper, all, "You can see how she is!" and then obliquely goes, "And there are urgent matters to which I must attend." Eric knows who he means, and asks if Bill hasn't, in the past couple days, done more than enough on her behalf. "If any harm were to come to her because of my absence," Bill nearly shouts, "You would be..." Eric leans in real fucking close: "...What?" Bill crumbles weakly: "...Without her helpful skills." Jessica beats on the door, begging to go out, begging to do something bad, and Bill and Eric come to an agreement: help now, favor later. "How would you like to learn how a real vampire feeds?" Eric asks, as Bill rolls his eyes, and Jessica folds her hands together like a good daughter should: "Oh, yes sir. Please, sir." Eric's like, "See how hard this is? Douche."
A woman with severe black hair and bangs, a woman you might recognize, in a flowy social worker outfit, stands outside Tara's cell. She's paid Tara's bail, and Kenya tells her to pull it together before letting Maryann Forrester in to speak with her. "I'd like to help you, if you'll let me." Tara asks if she's "some kind of social worker," and she grins, thinks, and agrees. "Yeah, that's about right. Kenya knows me. I'm in and out of here all the time, working with people in your position." Tara's question is not so much a question: My position. "Mm," Maryann nods. "DUIs, minor assaults, public drunkenness. You know, those times when things go just a little too far?" That's where she lives, in the places where we go too far, in the times that we forget ourselves. If Jessica was born of Bill's need to atone, and comments on it, then Maryann was born of Tara's need to see real magic in action. To be transformed.
"It can happen to anyone. And I expect you have your reasons?" Tara admits she has reasons, not that she can name them beyond one word, "Nancy," and she immediately turns down Maryann's offer of a ride home. "Well," she sort of laughs, "They gave me your address. And you can't walk there, it's too far." Tara shakes her head, knowing she'll come up with something, and in any case she's not going home. She has no home. She's not going there, she got kicked out. "You don't have anywhere to go? No family, no friends?" Both question and manipulation, but also a confirmation: Nobody will miss you? "I don't want them to see me like this..." She puts on her best friendly, grateful, conversation-ending polite smile. "It's okay. I'll think of something." Maryann sits in the bunk just across: "Tara. I'm sure you've barely slept or eaten. What if you come to my home? Just till you get things figured out."
Tara's getting a weird vibe, but Maryann laughs again: "No no, there's plenty of room. I do this all the time. It's sort of an informal halfway house... You can shower, you can wash your clothes, you can let me feed you. Then you can go on your way and my conscience will be clear. Hm?" It's informal, and halfway. She doesn't lie, this one. And I'm not operating from a spoiler place, because there aren't any spoilers at this point, and this character is radically different in the books and I have no idea what Maryann Forrester's agenda is, but I do think that Tara is headed exactly one place, which is past the crossroads and past her historical pain and right on into the very fucking madness, and that the only way out is through, so these are educated guesses having less to do with the books and more to do with the fact that it's my job to think about this shit.
"You're not a Jesus person, are you?" Maryann laughs, and I am not being hyperactive when I say it is a Dark Knight-level laugh. My favorite part in that movie is when a certain person sits at the bedside of another person to whom he has just done some terrible, life-altering things, and when the person wakes up this person goes, "...Hi." It's maybe my favorite moment in the entire movie, followed closely by Maryann's laughter here: first a startled "No! Ha!" and then a slightly more introspective, darkly musing exhalation toward the floor: "Nnnnnooooooo." She assures Tara she has nothing against religion, which is like your acid dealer saying he's got nothing against Payless Shoes, or your plumber saying he's not a huge fan of the Red Sox, and then stands up and hands over her business card and fusses with her purse long enough for Tara to swallow her pride and agree to go.
Outside, Maryann's red sports car causes another tiny meltdown, but Maryann assures her it was a gift, a tribute, a way of repaying doing something or not doing something. Tara hesitates getting in because it's so shiny and she's so dirty, and Maryann fairly winks: "Oh, don't worry about that. I get dirty too!" Andy, having just arrived with Jason in tow, screams at her to move the car, and she's almost unbearably scary, smiling easily at him and summoning up his name: "Detective... Bellefleur, is it?" She points at him like he's going in Pam's vault, and as he mumbles and bitches to himself she hops in the car beside Tara and they take off, just a second too late to see Jason Stackhouse heading into a madness of his own.
A movie about breakfast, daylight on a farm, the cock crowing; Sookie's close to Sam on the couch. She realizes that, weird as it sounds, she had fun today. "Well, that says something for us," Sam laughs, agreeing: "We can enjoy ourselves even when we're trying to find a murderer." Sookie laughs, but she's always thought he was fun; it's one of the reasons she's stayed working with him so long. He gets shy and she laughs at him. "Well, it's not the tips or the high-class clientele!" she says, and Sam changes gears: "You know, it was probably the best day of my life when you walked in looking for a job." She absentmindedly tells him to quit, but her eyes are elsewhere.
Lingering on sunrise, boys that don't leave, secrets that make men even more special, choices you can make, any bed in the house you can sleep in, boys that keep you safe and boys that promise to keep you safe and then can't stop leaving. This trip to Bunkie, the day before -- everything after Bill left, again -- she spent pretending, trying on this life for size. Could you do this? Eat breakfast in Adele's house, Adele's recipes, with a beautiful uncomplicated man helping you solve crimes and adoring you every day? A man who wouldn't take away the sun, who could ride all the way to the coast with his head in the wind, and then bake in the sun, who loves your scent more than any other, who doesn't lead you into the dark places, who doesn't have to sink his teeth into your throat in order to come?
Sam strokes her hair, swearing he means it; she already knows. The best of his whole life, and the days after, dedicated to her and her alone. No creepy shapeshifters' councils and threesomes and nests and werebangers; nobody calling her a whore, or trash; nobody hating her for whom and how she loves. Safe, protected, but free to come and go. Free to howl, and to lay out in the sun; to share the sunlight on her skin instead of being devoured for it. "Are you looking in my head?" he asks, and only because she's a lunatic is it okay that she responds, "I'm looking in your heart." He kisses like a beast.
Bill slams the door open and, fangs out, zoomjumps on Sam, who tosses him handily over the couch. She screams, but it's not really about her so they don't hear her. Bill leaps back over the couch and throws Sam around, hands around his throat; she keeps screaming but it's not about her. Bill bitchslaps Sam and he punches back, and finally Sookie smashes a vase over Bill's head: "Stop! Stop fighting, you stupid men!" Bill shouts that Sam's hands were on her, and Sam points out that she's nobody's property. Not Mine, not Yours, but Sookie's. (The downside being, puppy love or not, he's not Hers in the vampire sense anyway, which they already fought about last week.) She tells them both to shut the eff up, and yells at Bill all on her own. "You left me alone, with no promise to come back... And attack the man who's helping keep me safe? How dare you?"
But she has the sunlight on her skin now, too. It was a shock, to go from the easy and warm back to the cold and hard. When Bill's not fighting the Trio for ownership of her, he's fighting Eric for ownership of her, or collaborating in Eric's ownership of them both, and now he's fighting Sam -- poor Sam who owns nothing and nobody at all -- for ownership of her: when does that stop? It's comforting to be His when the option is death or feeding some other fanger, but she's not really His. He can't really believe that, can he? Not when she's giving up so much to be with him: breakfast, and sunlight, her last chance of social acceptance... If anything, he's Hers, isn't that right? He would kill for her, he would die for her, he is a tiger in the form of a man with mystic powers beyond the telling of it; she gave him her body and her virginity and her blood, and for what? So that he could cage her up, like a wild thing? Of the two, she's only ever woken up with one of them.
"Get out!" she screams finally, and he's shocked. "If you knew what I had done to return to you..." Who cares? You didn't come in time, and when you did come you did it the wrong way, confirming every fear and killing every fantasy. I've known Sam for years, I've known you for weeks, and you know what? I've never had a moment's happiness with you. You are the darkness, and I consort with you, but some happiness is easy. Warm, and easy, under the sun. "I rescind your invitation." His fangs pop back in immediately, all lust gone with the words. He begs her not to do it, as she walks him slowly backwards, eyes on his, toward the door. It hurts her, but there is this: back when she invited him in, death was something that happened to other people. And ever since she invited death into her home, it has taken everything from her. It has come for her a hundred times. This is her house now, her seat of power and the one place she should be able to feel safe. She slams the door in his face, and he weeps.
Inside, she shrugs off Sam's manipulative race-hate shit, all "Can't you see what he's really like? How can you think about be with him?" and finally screams the most awesome thing. "My living room's wrecked, I've got a killer, a vampire and a shapeshifter on my plate. Right about now, I'm not thinking about being with anybody." She pushes her way through the house.
Maryann pulls up outside a beautiful mansion, antebellum columns, a hundred bedrooms. It looks shiny, and new, like it might have sprung up in the night. Like the car, like Maryann's clothes, like everything in the fairytale where the better mother calls you in, to warm yourself by the hearth. It could be made of candy. "This is where you live? Fuck me..." Maryann laughs, and ushers her in: "Make yourself at home. I insist." She opens the door -- no lock, it's like a dream, it's made of gingerbread -- and the door swings heavily open, and Tara enters that house by the silvery moonlight, and her initiation begins again.
Jason sits limp and slack in the station, Bed Dearborn watching him in anguish and disappointment and love while Andy struts and does his creepy sexual masculinity-jealousy crap. "People said No, not Jason Stackhouse, he's too dumb! But I knew. I said, 'That shifty bastard's a goddamn psychopath.'" Jason is pretty sure it's true, at this point, but stupidly calls him Andy, which earns him a bark of "detective!" Jason has just enough juice left to roll his eyes at the martinet, and Bud asks him what happened. Before he can speak, Andy goes off again: "I'll tell you all about it, I'll tell you exactly what happened. This piece of shit lured those poor girls into his king-size bed and dirty sheets, to fuck them and kill them!" Bud reminds Andy that Jason totally called them and came in willingly, so would Andy mind actually letting him confess?
"Go ahead, Jason. How'd it happen?" Jason realizes he has very little material to work with, given that he knows basically as much or less than Bud and Andy about the various murders -- his quiet "I don't know" drives Andy Bellefleur bats. "Bud, give me five minutes alone with him, I'll get you every detail!" Bud asks WTF he means, and Jason's like, technically I don't remember what he did to any of them, but -- crying, exhausted, really in need of a firm hugging -- "They keep dying all around me, so I gotta be the guy, right?" Bud's like, "Um, how about another way? Let's take them one at a time." Andy suggests Amy, since she was the most recent victim and thus fresher in Jason's "so-called mind."
"I took V," Jason says, and Bud shakes his head sadly while Andy crows -- Because how else could Jason have thrown him so terrifically far? -- "Not with the others, just with her. We both did. And when I woke up, Amy was... Well, like she was." Jason watches Jason unable to say the word; unable to comprehend that even if he HAD done it, he's still allowed to be heartbroken. The girl who loved him, the only girl who ever looked him in the eye and saw how extraordinary and good and wise and human he really is, is gone. Wiped. "Dead's the word you're looking for. Stone-cold dead." Jason tells himself the story: they were alone in the house, and high on a drug that makes you act crazy sometimes, so he must have done it: "But I don't know why! And honest to God, I loved her!" Andy screams about how he hated her, hated Maudette and Dawn, and Jason shakes his head -- they're collaborating on this, in Jason's mind, trying to figure out why and how he is the Killer, and Andy keeps tossing out the wrong theories and clues and evidence, and it's frustrating because he just wants to solve the mystery, and Andy keeps interjecting his personal shit and weirdness and fucked up hateful theories, when the fact is, if he did it, the mystery is in this room and it needs to be solved. Jason is the mystery.
"Aw, I didn't hate them! I mean, we had some pretty good times. It was... It was fucking and fighting, like with any girl. I just... I don't understand what would have made me do it." Bud is sad for him. (I must admit I kind of hated Maudette, but I didn't kill her either, because I'm only slightly fictional and she is all-the-way fictional, and plus if I killed her you better believe Randi Sue's ass would be in a ditch by now.) Andy starts yelling about how Adele must have suspected Jason's nature and pushed him to stab her all up, and Jason's face twists in the same way as it did when Eddie died: disgust and sadness and pain and total insult: "No, I didn't kill Gran and you know it! You better damn well find who did!" Different mystery, not the one that has torn his life completely apart today, from the roof to the foundation. "This is the worst confession I ever heard in my life!" Andy yells, which is adorable, but Jason's just had it: "Fuck you, Andy! That's all I got! Look, I don't want to hurt nobody else. Lock me up. For Christ's sake, lock me up."
Jason retreats into himself, shadowed, and Andy's all over him about waterboarding this and Gitmo that, and Bud's like, "Enough, dude. Lock him up." So Andy marches him away toward a cell, and over on the fax machine Drew Marshall's face is printing up, and Rosie's calling her friend to tell her the news about the Killer: "Yes, I swear. He's looking all crazy in a hot way -- you know him -- but they're throwing him in a cell right now. We are so lucky he didn't kill us..." says Rosie, and plops a bunch of files on top of the picture of Drew Marshall, now known as Rene Lanier of Bon Temps in Renard Parish, with the cute little Cajun butt and the fake little Cajun accent, and the sister he loved more than anything, until she disappointed him for good.
week: Maryann shows a couple of her cards, Rene comes back for Sookie for like the eighth time I guess, Jason finds a new notoriety, Jessica makes herself comfortable in the better world she's found, Lafayette pays the price for speaking truth to dangerous drug addicts with power, and Sam loses ... one loyal customer, at least. I'm looking forward to seeing it, but not to saying goodbye to you, so I guess we'll take it as it comes.