Okay, so the BIG SPOILER THING is that the body in Andy Bellefleur's car is not, in fact, Lafayette: it's Miss Jeanette. This causes a little bit of a wobbler for Tara, who ends up in Andy's crazy boozy police station clutches before getting stuck in a tug-of-war between her horrible trainwreck of a mother and mysterious Maryann Forrester that results in one of the most deliciously brutal verbal takedowns captured on film since Julia Sugarbaker shuttered her interior design firm for good. On a completely unrelated note, the mystery creature that killed My Beautiful Jeanette scratched the shit out of her back, paralyzing her and removing her heart while she was still alive.
Sookie and Bill's relationship suffers two major mindblowing moments. First, Sookie finally meets Jessica after a hilarious series of scenes in which Bill is appalled by his new daughter in a variety of ways. Watch Bill teach Jessica to recycle! Watch Bill teach Jessica to choke down TruBlood instead of eating people! Watch his mind boggle! I must say I've never liked Bill as much as I do right now; even the overcooked dialogue between the two unceasingly verbal lovers has become delightfully campy. They break up at least three times, and then get back together with these amazing speeches about what you awaken in me and "you are my miracle" and things of this nature. It's amazing; it's enough to make you put on your whitest dress and go running around graveyards barefoot.
After the speeches, though, it's time for the makeup sex, which I suggest you not watch with, say, your in-laws, because it kind of goes into Tell Me You Love Me territory. Like at one point Sookie gets blood from her neck in her own mouth, I don't know what you would call that or if it's really even analogical to anything but it sure is uncomfortable.
Other hand, seeing Sookie turn Jessica's frown upside down, and the lost duckling stepdaughter love she immediately inspires, is pretty beautiful. I'm sure Sookie will manage to make it all about her in the long run, which usually calms her down immensely, but it's so sweet to see her identify and care for Jessica, and even better to watch Jessica roll over for it. That's going to suck when it falls apart, I guess.
The other thing -- which actually is all about her -- is a bit more of a bloodbath. Sookie also learns that Bill awesomely took care of Uncle Bartlett and threw him in the creek. So basically, Sookie finds out in one day two secrets that are directly related to her, that Bill's been keeping for a few weeks at least. Turns out dating the one living person on Earth whose mind you can't read has a downside, of course, but I think Sookie's more freaked out by the fact that her boyfriend is a gun she can aim at people, because what happens when she has a bad day? Because, I don't know if you've noticed this, but Sookie Stackhouse has the occasional bad day.
Shapeshiftin' Sam Merlotte remembers when he first met Maryann: he was running around as a shoplifting teenager and occasional puppy, and accidentally stole some important Jamiroquai statue that comes to us out of antiquity. Maryann responded by going cougar on his ass, and then doing that fucked-up vibrating thing mid-coitus, which caused him to feel spooked. He stole a bunch of astonishingly easy-to-locate cash and got the heck out of there, and has been afraid of her ever since. That vibing thing really is troubling, it's true.
In the present day Sammy tells off Sookie for jerking him around, and hires new waitress Daphne, while Terry Bellefleur and Rene/Drew's ex Arlene continue to be into each other in their separate post-traumatic ways. Maryann explains to Sam that she doesn't want his money, and isn't even really in town to dick with him: she's after Tara for her own reasons, which would seem to do with Tara kissing Eggs. This conversation is remarkable because for some reason Maryann decides to have it while replicating Pat Benatar's sideways '80s hooker look from the "Love Is A Battlefield" video. Maybe she is planning on shaking her shoulders at him if he does not relent. Or like vibrating them.
Good old Jason Stackhouse has managed to find his way right into the fang-bashing Fellowship Of The Sun, where his confused values continue to get twisted around and around while he cozies up to the leaders of the movement, last season's occasional talking head Steve Newlin and his terrifying wife. The blood money Bartlett left Sookie pays for him to go off to Texas with them, for freaky Jesus boot camp and reconciliation with Vamp Eddie, Strangler Rene and Witchy Amy's deaths, but honestly I don't know how you could leave Hoyt behind.
Which leaves, if you've been paying attention, two folks we love: not-so-dead Lafayette and the inscrutable Vampire Sheriff Eric. The former's alive, for now, and the latter is terrifying. Remember when the rednecks burned down that nest of poseurs and there was just the cute one Royce that was left, and then Eric said he was going to get it one of these days? Today is that day. For dealing V and for losing track of Eddie, Lafayette's been locked up in the Fangtasia! cellar for at least two weeks. He talks with his former AIDS-burger enemy in the last moments before Eric comes down the stairs and ... Um, eats Royce's kidneys out of his body and then tears off his arm and throws his body parts around and groans and grunts and drools blood. It's rather upsetting, on a level with the fucking we addressed earlier, but with guts and screaming instead. It's like what if that movie Saw were awesome and addressed the social ill of homophobia before they started pulling the people's nuts out their eyesockets. I swear, Eric is such a vampire sometimes! Even Lafayette's like, "This is everybody's favorite character? Meh, I still don't see it." Oh but you will, Lady. And then you'll write him the same pass we all do. But for real: thrilled to see you, and happy I didn't get spoiled about it.
Sam's got the trashbag full of money in his hands and I think he's going to just take off, speeding out the back of the bar after running into Maryann, but then he hears Tara and Sookie screaming about the body in Andy's car, so he tosses the money in his truck and comes running around to the front.
Andy's still drunk and moving kind of slow, and Tara starts screaming at him for cutting people up and putting them in his car, and Sam's like, "Seriously, WTF happened here" and Andy tells everybody to chill so he can check on the body, and Sam -- who's been too busy freaking out to know that Andy is the entire Martha Stewart Collection's worth of sheets to the wind, thanks to sympathetic Tara buying him drinks -- tells the screaming ladies to let Andy handle it, and there's a sort of collective patting between the two women and Sam that goes on for awhile. "Sam, call the cops!" shouts Tara, and Andy yells that he is the cops, and Tara begs God to make sure it's not Lafayette in the car, but it totally is.
Except it's not. Sookie grabs Sam's hand and Andy says that there's no pulse, because there's no heart, because it was ripped out of the victim, who screamed in terror as it was pulled out, and the fear is still painted across her face: Miss Jeanette. Tara starts screaming again.
Panic is a word with a lovely definition: "a sudden fear in lonely places." Shepherds caught under a full moon would hear a sound, or get a feeling, under that vast expansive sky, and their loneliness would become so exquisite, their smallness so apparent, that they would feel a sudden fear, and know the God was passing close to them. The other side of ecstasy (ex + stasis, "to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere"), then, is panic. Not that far off from each other; both direct connection to the divine. Both responses to repression; both forms of abandon.
Later Sookie's in the usual murder-victim hoodie they put on you when you're at a murder site, and Kenya's there worrying about everybody, and Sookie can't fight off the echoes of Tara worrying about how she knew Miss Jeanette, that she went to see Miss Jeanette in the woods, that Miss Jeanette saved her. And later, when Miss Jeanette was revealed to be Nancy Levoir, disappointment and drugstore employee, and Tara shoved her and screamed at her. Kenya asks if she's ever seen the woman before, good instincts, and Tara swears she hasn't while Sookie stares.
"Careful here, son. Her leg will break off like a chicken wing if you hold her like that," says Mike the Coroner, with his usual charming creepiness. I like having him in the background of every death, putting it into perspective. How we all become meat when the lights go out of us. Andy whines that he just got his car detailed; Sookie's lips quiver with everybody else's thoughts. Bud arrives, and Andy drunkenly gives him just the facts: "Body's in full rigor mortis, Bud, which is consistent with the vic being killed elsewhere then brought here into the scene sometime in the past four hours, since that's when I... Drove over here." Andy's sister Portia honks from the parking lot, and Bud tells him to call it a night. When Andy whines, Bud reminds him that he's "overworked," not to mention drunk, and stomping Andy can only disagree with half of that statement.
Sam tries to get Sookie talking with some "dead bodies are a drag" routine, and she won't even look up from the scene, with her eye still black from the big fight three weeks ago. She's troubled by the control, and the cruelty, of the injury. Rene killed a lot of people, but he did it in a rage: blood everywhere, terrifying and brutal. This was the act of someone who wanted Miss Jeanette to suffer, who cut out her heart and placed her tenderly in the backseat of a policeman's car.
"Every time I think I know what's what," Sookie says, "It turns out I don't know anything." Which has always been, to me, the mission statement of the show, after all: once you find the answer it stops being the answer. In this case: murder isn't always a case of repression, of the nighttime darkness coming out of people. Sometimes it's about abandon.
Tara approaches, and before she and Sam can work out the night's duties, Sookie blurts, "Sweetie, how did you know the woman that got killed?" Tara's offended because Sookie's lost control again, and read her mind. Tara's relieved because every secret is a burden. She chokes out a half-hearted angry retort that goes quiet at the end, as she relaxes into tears. When she tells Sookie what Miss Jeanette was, what she meant to her and to her mother, Sookie immediately throws her arms around Tara, gulping that way she does. "You're going to have to tell the police about it," she reminds her, and Tara stares at the sky. She worries briefly about getting questioned, but she's innocent. The tears only come back when she realizes Lettie Mae will have to find out that Miss Jeanette is a fraud now.
I like this show because it's a collection of the walking wounded, but it also makes it challenging for a lot of us, I think, because Sookie's hard to read. The entire point of Sookie, I would say, is that she's hard to read. There's a childlike part of us that would like to believe every story is really about us, and Sookie seems handpicked for that kind of Mary Sue-ing: she's beautiful, funny, kicks occasional ass, and everybody wants to fuck her. She gets the romance while everybody else gets fucked. But Sookie actively resists being a point-of-view character, in a way that takes a little bit of active understanding to comprehend because without visual clues you're supposed to remember that we're watching the story of a woman with a debilitating cognitive disorder, who cannot hear anybody talking to her because their thoughts are so loud, and can't communicate her essential normalcy to the world because of that same veil.
If you take the magic powers out of the equation, you're looking at a woman who hears voices pretty much constantly, and believes that everybody around her is out to get her, either sexually or physically or patronizingly. She's privy to the essential smallness of all of us, which we hide entirely through our clever choice of words: take out the magic powers and you're looking at a classic paranoid schizophrenic. Who happens to be right. None of this is visible, maybe that's the problem, that it all has to be portrayed through acting and the occasional verbal complaints about how hard it actually is to exist with this disorder. I mean, it's been a month since she met Bill and she's already seen like a billion people die, including her loved ones, but I don't really think she needs an alibi for her behavior: she's a weirdo. A lonely weirdo, in a story chock full of lonely weirdos, in fact a story peopled entirely by lonely weirdos.
The day they tell us why House is the way he is, that show's over, because that's not really how people work: there's not like one thing. But I think Sookie's a lot easier to understand than House, especially once you stop trying on her clothes and let her exist in the story, but I can't imagine saying that House annoys you because he walks all fucked up, which is basically what we're doing when we expect Sookie to act normal. She's not normal, and just because we know she is neither mentally ill nor mentally deficient doesn't mean that what she is doesn't occasionally take part in both. What a stupid show this would be if Sookie were as perfect as she looks. The fact is that she and Bill are drawn together in part because they had lowered their expectations so low before they met, and represent for each other the very valid possibility of love, for the first time, in their lives. That's somewhat romantic, but mostly it's desperate, and horribly lonely.
Bill stokes the fire and looks at his new charge: "Your bedtime will be at 4 AM and not a minute later." Jessica's still wearing her Hot Topic bepigtailed outfit and a sour expression, and doesn't care anymore. Frankly, I wouldn't either: I'd just be looking for the door. First they put her in a trunk, then they kill her, then they make her hang out in the back room of an awesome strip club, and then give her to the guy that killed her? Poor Jessica. "And whilst you are under my roof, hunting is completely forbidden." She lets "whilst" go, but points out that "in this bumfuck town" you could barely find people, much less eat them.
"We also recycle in this house. TruBlood and other glass items go in the blue container..." She stares at him, sort of tickled. "And paper products go in the white container." Jessica falls in love with his cell phone when it rings, and kicks into teenager mode, begging for one of her own. He blows her off hilariously, and answers. Sookie tells him "something real awful happened out here," and he's desperate to get away from Jessica, hoping that Sookie needs him. "I always need you," she says sweetly, with Sam over her shoulder, but tells Bill that knowing he's waiting will give her something to look forward to.
"Jessica, I'm gonna have a guest coming over shortly," he says, still smiling sweetly from the call, and Jessica asks if they can eat her. "You may not!" he yelps, terribly offended. The best thing about Bill has always been his total dorkiness, and I love how Jessica seems tailor-made to bring that out so intensely. Is she his girlfriend? Yes. "Is she a vampire?" Jessica asks, thrilled to meet more of her people. Her family. "No," he admits, and she grins: even better. "Well, do I have to be nice to her?" Jessica asks, in her best hi daddy voice, and he asks her to go cleaned up. "Remove your makeup and make yourself presentable. I will not have you looking like a slattern." She goes whut and he explains, and she laughs uproariously. "AWESOME!" Poor, poor adorable Bill.
Jason sits in the bed Amy died in, on the sheets she died in, reading from Newlin père's book, lips moving needless to say: "The Acts of the Apostles, 26:18. 'Jesus informed Paul of his purpose: to open people's eyes, to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. If God is light, then Satan is darkness. If we human beings are the children of God, then creatures of darkness are undoubtedly... The children of Satan." This last questioning, staring into space with a highlighter in his hand, before he is struck suddenly with memories of Amy and falls over, on the sheets, and starts to cry again.
Kenya stares at Tara in Bud's office. He's bewildered by the exorcism talk, but she's got some experience here: "Last time it was a pig in the middle of the road. Crazy-ass motherfucking Paul Bunyan pig, if memory serves. Plus, a naked woman." Andy screams in frustration, and Bud tells him to chill, but Tara stands by her story. All of them. "As far as we know," Bud explains, "Her name's Nancy Levoir, and she's been a cashier at DeSoto's pharmacy in Keachi for almost twenty years." Right, but also a voodoo bus out in the middle of the woods, Tara elaborates. Andy stomps around, getting scary now, and Bud tells him to chill out again, but Andy's not having it.
Andy brings up the fact that Tara poured him drink after drink, as though she didn't want him to discover what was going on. Which is a stretch, but also sad, because she was giving him drinks because she loved him, for a moment, and felt sorry to see somebody so obstructed on the path of who he wanted to be, like she used to be, before Maryann. Bud's finally had enough, and drags Andy from the room, still screeching. Kenya crosses her arms, staring down at Tara with a luxurious mmm-hmmm, while Bud tries to send Andy home. But because it can always get worse, Lettie Mae shows up already halfway up the tree, screaming and crying and shaking like a sick dog and being dramatic as usual.
Back in the room, Tara's sort of horrified that they brought Lettie Mae in, but Kenya reminds her gently, "It's a murder investigation?" Heh. Lettie Mae sits down, shaking, and proceeds to make it all about her ("She saved my life!"), but Tara snaps into action when he mother appears, just like always. "Mama. There was no Miss Jeanette. She was just some woman who worked in a pharmacy. All that stuff on the bus, it wasn't real." Lettie Mae calls her a liar, says it's because she's still angry, and Tara says that yes, she is still angry, but her own exorcism was admittedly carnival tricks: "She gave me ipecac and peyote and made me think I was killing my demon."
Kenya watches, sad, while Lettie Mae protests. "No! No! It is a sin to speak ill of the dead like that! She was a good woman," Lettie Mae protests. She's right. "No, Mama, it was a scam." Tara's right too. But Lettie Mae's more right, even though she's wrong about how and why, and how much, shouting up at poor Kenya: "She cured me! I'm all right now, ain't I? Ain't I still right?" Not really, not when you say it like that. Kenya's eyes bug out with how crazy Lettie Mae looks right now, but I don't know. I thought Tara was being stupid when she decided that the existence of Nancy ruled out the existence of Miss Jeanette, and even though Lettie Mae's not really selling it at the moment, being generally a nutcase, but: healed is healed. It's not work anybody else can ever do for you.
Peyote, ipecac, crone stone and possum: those demons are yours, they belong to you, you can do with them whatever you wish, as long as you're strong enough to look them in the eye. That's all Miss Jeanette ever tried to teach them, and it's not all that different from what Maryann's always saying. So what makes Miss Jeanette a fraud that doesn't also make Maryann Forrester a fraud? (Or Amy Burley, for that matter? Or Lafayette?) That's all Lettie Mae's really saying, and I agree. I don't think either of them are frauds, any more than Tara is fraudulently being Tara, or Lettie Mae is faking being a loon; I just don't see how it matters. If I show you a door and you walk through it, right, and you're standing in a green field. And then I laugh at you because it wasn't really a door at all, it was just a door I painted on the wall with Acme paints, that's my problem. You're standing in a field.
Or the way that Tara's demon is still -- and watch Maryann still riding it, like a hag through the night -- about being essentially unable to reconcile Lettie Mae's darkness with the love she has for her mother. About needing to come down on one side or the other, and which story to tell: either she was an abused child, and deserves to be coddled and written a pass for her own horrible behavior, or she's a grownup with a bad past like the rest of us, who's in charge of her own behavior. Either way, as long as she casts this in the context of her abusive mother, she's missing the point: Lettie Mae opened the door, but now Tara's in a field, all alone, just telling stories instead of writing her own.
But hang on, if that's not Lafayette in the car like we assumed, if once again the Gods have come down and traded Miss Jeanette for Lafayette, then: where is Lafayette? There's a dungeon underneath Fangtasia! that has a wheel in the ceiling, and filthy water drips down, and there are four people huddled, chained to the wheel in the ceiling, coughing and hellish, and when they need to piss or shit all four of them must labor together to turn the wheel, chained down under Fangtasia!, in order to get the one of them in need to where they need to be. To separate the shit and piss from the rest of the horror, and stay as human as they can.
(Took a saint down to hell and all the people were starving, with fingernails grown out a yard or longer. Surrounded by fruits and meats and savory pies, and nobody could eat anything because their dang fingernails kept getting in the way. But it was so beautiful, and the smells so delicious: what must heaven be like, then? And the guy tells the saint, Same basic deal, only they've learned to feed each other. It's like that, only instead of fingernails and a buffet, it's shitting in a bucket.)
The old man is desperate, begging for the bucket, and they pull together. There's a broken woman, there's Lafayette, and a man with the word SLUT written or scratched across his back, probably because he's a giant slut. The wheel groans and they are weak, but they get him there, just as he's cramping up. They all begin to weep, with pain and exhaustion and nausea, as he takes his dump. A vamp brings down a guy with a hood, kicking him roughly and chaining him to the wheel before grabbing the slut and taking him back upstairs.
The guy they've brought down and chained up is Royce, the sexy survivor of the trio of white trash idiots that burned down Malcolm's nest. Three of them, three of us. Royce is the last. So we know why he's here, even though he's screaming that he doesn't and he probably doesn't. And I guess we know why Lafayette is there, even though he's not even sure himself: Eddie, vanished Eddie, whom Lafayette loved and drained before Amy and Jason kidnapped and killed him. Royce continues to shout and shake his chains, and Lafayette's last nerve is screaming: "Will you shut your mouth, you fucking inbreed?" Royce asks where the slut is going, and Lafayette doesn't know that either. "Sometimes there are screams." He doesn't know how long he's been there; it's been three weeks since they got him, out back behind Merlotte's, but he lost count a while back.
Sookie's finally in Bill's arms, talking to his chest and nuzzling and kissing and being generally ridiculous like they always are. Maybe more, so we'll be refreshed on how gag-inducingly wonderful they are together. He takes her face and tries to tell her about Jessica, but she gives more romance -- "No. Please, just... Shut up. Kiss me, just make it go away for just a little while" and the like -- and he gives in, of course, so they're about equally surprised when Jessica comes out onto the nubile banister in a soft towel: "You must be Sookie. Oh, Bill, I love your shower!" Sookie stares up at her, and Bill realizes he may well be sucking sunshine in a few.
Tara apologizes to Lettie Mae outside the station, for pulling the curtain on Miss Jeanette. "In spite of everything you've done, there's some sick, sick part of me that can't bear to see you suffer," she says. As though compassion is a sickness, she says this. "And I thought if you found out Miss Jeannette was a fraud..." Lettie Mae has it together now, in a big way, and tries to explain again: "There wasn't no fraud. I am living, breathing, thriving proof there wasn't no fraud. I'm still healed. Healed stronger than ever." Tara believes, with tears in her eyes; she's impressed. "The good Lord tested our faith by taking Miss Jeanette away from us." And the inevitable bullshit kicks in: "I stayed true. I wish I could say the same about you, baby." She offers to pray for Tara as her daughter rolls her eyes; we've talked about how offensive that is before so I won't bring it up again, except to say that Lettie Mae is about halfway there, and thank God it's the right half, but damn, avoid her regardless.
"I'm actually doing better than I have in a long time," Tara starts to explain, but Lettie Mae is still in a praying mood. For Miss Jeanette, then, given that there's clearly "something evil" out there that did, in fact, cut her heart out of her body, and Lettie Mae's convinced, quite rightly, that Tara's probably on the list. Tara doesn't hear her mother: she's wrapped in Maryann's arms now, like a soft warm towel. "That's my mother," she says distractedly, and heads to the car. And Maryann gets awesome, sticking her hand out, making Lettie Mae's hand go to her hair, grateful for the attention.
"What a rare opportunity this is! I've always wondered what it would be like to gaze into the eyes of someone so devoid of human compassion that you would abandon your own child when she needed you most." Lettie Mae shakes her head, shocked and honestly confused. "Just as I thought," Maryann nods. "Emptiness. Nothing inside. It's always something Out There that gets all the blame, or all the credit. Whether it's Jesus or gin."
Lettie Mae pulls her hand back, jerks away like she's been burned. Like her heart is being carved out. It's validating, I guess, in a way. Except it's only validating if you, in turn, are interested in letting Lettie Mae take all the blame, or all the credit. Tara doesn't seem interested, because she's learned the first lesson Maryann teaches you: it's all on you, good and evil, both at once. And if you can't love and deal with your darkness, if you can't bear to look it, if the thought makes you so angry you can't think straight, then it's not love, and you are under the control of something dark. And you are lost.
"What I can't believe is that your daughter still manages to feel any love for you at all. Since you've abused, neglected, betrayed and forsaken her love since the moment she could feel. That's extraordinary." She grabs Tara and bounces, leaving behind what's left of Lettie Mae: "She's a hell of a girl. Come on, let's get you home."
So Bill killed this girl? Sookie's standing akimbo staring down at them both, in the drawing room, aghast. He is contrite; Jessica is livid, and avid, as usual. "Not entirely, no." Sookie says obviously he did something, and asks Jessica how old she is. Seventeen. "Oh my God, where are your parents?" Sookie shrieks adorably, and Jessica snorts. "Is she always like this?" Oh, yes. Even Bill almost nods. "So what then, you... Bit her?" Yes. "You drained her?" Even more contritely, yes. "Did you have sex with her?" He screams in the negative, and Jessica shouts, "Ew, old!?"
Bill looks at her briefly, continually horrified by her, and tries to explain: Jessica was brought a condition of his punishment, to replace Longshadow. Jessica hasn't heard this part, yet, and her eyes scan Sookie's face wonderingly: "So this is all your fault." Sookie and Bill feel weird both separately and together, and Bill finally sends Jessica off to bed, kindly as he can. "My sleeping quarters are beneath the stairs. And you may stay there until we make other arrangements." She protests, and he orders her; she must obey, and slumps away. "Compared to Fangtasia!, this blows!" Truer words, darlin'.
Sookie's not sure what to think. Bill explains they have to take care of Jessica for now: "At her age, with her impulses, she could be quite dangerous." Which of course causes Sookie to wonder exactly where she's been tonight: Eric and Pam dropped her off a few hours ago. "So there's no way she could have anything to do with the woman at Merlotte's with her heart missing?" At first he shouts in the negative, feelings hurt, but then shrugs a reluctant "...Probably not." Sookie shivers and then... makes it all about her, as usual. "Two weeks and you never said anything. I've laid in bed for hours, talking about my life, your life, the weather, rules of football, and not once did you mention that you slept with and killed..." -- Bill jumps up and shouts at this -- "...A seventeen-year-old girl."
Except he did kill her, and technically he did sleep with her, wrapped around her in the grave, like a mother and a father at once. He sits down again, calming down, explaining that his great tragedy is being a vampire and he would never willingly turn anybody else, in case they were unlucky enough to be the type to constantly cry and whine about it like he does. It's not easy, he explains, to share the pain of that; Sookie is so far out in front of the pack on this that it takes him a second to realize what she's saying, or how awesome it is: "If I'm with you, and she's with you, then she is with me. And I'm sure as heck sharing in that." She is with me, simple as that. I love Sookie. Even if she tells him to fuck off in a second, it doesn't change the fact that Jessica's hers now, in the family, just like Amy was, through Jason, before she died, or Rene through Arlene, before he stopped existing.
Bill swears he was just protecting Sookie, but she points out that if Jessica hadn't pissed off Eric and Pam, Sookie still wouldn't know about her existence: "That's not protecting me, that's lying to me." And if Bill lies about this crap, what else is he lying about? He says nothing, after a long silence, and I honestly think he believes that's it. Because it's the only problem that hasn't been solved; the other things he never told her were solutions, not problems. Nevertheless, she's not staying. She crosses her arms in her hotpants and reminds him how she's shared "every dark, horrible corner" of her life with him, and didn't get the same from Vampire Guy. "I'm a lot stronger than you think," she says, but then proves it by crossing to the door, walking through it, and heading home.
Cute little fetishized Steve Newlin (in Shreveport) from the Fellowship of the Sun argues with good old Nan Flanagan (in Tokyo) on a TV talk show. His first point: they've cheated death, therefore life has no meaning, which makes it easy for them to kill. (True.) Nan's first point, also true, is that they were all alive at some point, and remember the "joy of human life," and anyway, if life's so goddamn sacred why did several of Steve's "kind" find it necessary to burn a whole nest down three weeks ago? He is angry, shaking his head in mock bewilderment, as she explains that his assertion about the cheapness of life is really just an incitement to his nutsack supporters to come kill the rest of her people.
Steve reacts, as conservatives have seen fit to do more and more recently for some weird reason, by changing the subject to how he's a victim of all kinds of persecution. Well, and also that Nan's people killed his father, which is most likely true, but the whole victim stance freaks me out. The awesomest thing about being a conservative is not playing that card the way liberals constantly do, and now it's all, "Stop being so intolerant of my hate and intolerance!" Presumably because some smart conservative figured out that Democrats will do anything to avoid looking like the bad guy, including turning into Republicans, once you start accusing them of bias or hatred, no matter how stupid the accusation is.
Steve's wife, the amazing Sarah, sits to the side, saying the words along with him, wearing the headphones and watching on a monitor: "My father's death was an assassination, pure and simple. A killing meticulously planned, ruthlessly executed. From there, all we have to ask is who stands the most to gain." Nan's final word regards the Reverend's impressive ability to turn his grief over losing his father into yet more political grandstanding. Instead of addressing this salient point, he changes topic again: "It's a beautiful sunny morning in America, Miss Flanagan. I wish you were here." He gives a scary smile, but one neither as scary nor charming as hers: "Give me twelve hours, Reverend. I'll be right there." Nan Flanagan still gives me the pee shivers. "May His holy light shine upon you," Steve brightly says goodbye to the host, and they sign off.
Sarah takes off the cans and she's all over him: "You're so handsome. You're getting good at this!" It's only been what, a month since his parents and brother or sister died in Dallas? He nods, tiredly. "I have a long way to go. Any notes?" She tells him he sounds too much like a preacher, and he laughs, but she says she's thinking ahead: "You could be governor of Texas if you play your cards right." They laugh about how he had Nan "cornered" and how cool it would have been if her fangs had come out. Later on, at a book signing, Orry Dawson approaches with Jason in tow. They're attracted to him instantly, his poster boy looks and sick body and the light that, despite his best efforts and serious liabilities, shines out brighter than anything; they lean forward. But never so excited as when they hear his name, and place of origin. Sarah shows her teeth.
"Wait, Bon Temps? Weren't you the poor soul they were accusing of these terrible murders?" He was, but he was saved, and finally feels like God has a purpose for him, thanks to Orry's witness. Sarah says Steve is hers, and Steve says we all have one, and Jason attempts to speak, to make friends, to get closer to them. "I've been reading your father's book, and it's really making me, umm..." Find the word, Jason. "Think? About things?" Heh. That's my boy. Steve busts out how the "true message" is "love," despite those "liberal wingnuts" who point out that Newlin Sr.'s message of love sure is confusing amid all the spewing vitriol and hate.
Jason misses the finer points of this, but love sounds good. He indicates one of the many, many highlightered pages: "Well it's just like he says in the book, I'm coming from the darkness into the light." Orry shoots eyebrows at Steve about how enthusiastic Jason is, and his potential, and Steve takes his message. Orry was one of the Reverend's closest advisors, so it means a lot when he suggests Jason for the Light of Day Institute, a leadership conference in Texas that's mostly like a summer camp for lunatics. "Think of it as a springboard for fulfilling your destiny," Steve says, and it doesn't take too long to get to the point. This is a business. It's not about getting money from Jason, it's about using Jason to make money. And to kill, to create hatred, to put him forward as a true leader, as a man who's suffered from fangs and their hangers-on more than anything. Somewhere in there, it's about God. Basically.
When Jason asks how much it'll cost, Steve honestly doesn't know, but Sarah sure does. "Twelve hundred dollars. We cover room, board and transportation and you just pay for your class fees." They agree that it's a hardship, but tell him to pray on it: "There's no price for salvation," they say, and "God'll give you a sign." Jason gazes at them, crushing already, in puppy love. "Okay. I'll pray on it. God'll give me a sign." Steve caresses his face. Jason's parents died when he was nine years old. Jason's parents were never this rich, or this focused and direct; they were never this beautiful.
Speaking of charisma, Sam's finally brought the bag of money to Maryann's crazy house. Karl the Pig Manservant, with an awesome weird accent, notes that she was expecting him last night. "Uh, yeah, there was a bit of a... A murder in my parking lot?" Karl motions him in and says he'll look for Maryann. Her house is self-consciously eclectic, a bricolage of cultures, the sensuous and the playful. Beautiful and irritating in a very specific Rachel Getting Married, upper-class, Maggie Gyllenhaal way. There's an underlying theme but we can't see it yet; by the time you do, it's too late. His eyes fall on a classic Mycenaean phi statue on one table that he remembers, a goddess with arms curved up over her head, calling the dead to life and the living to abandon. Her body is a knife.
It was windy. The puppy came out of the forest and ran toward a house, in through the doggy door. It was as though the house simply sprang up in his path; called into existence, perhaps, by his need and the curious divides and gaps within his soul. The puppy stood on two legs, and was Sam. He'd been traveling for a while, all alone, hunting for scraps, stealing in the dead of night to stay alive; he was an abomination, on the run. On the table was a sumptuous spread, and it smelled so good and it was so beautiful he chomped down a turkey leg without thinking twice. Later, as he crept naked through the house, quietly filling a bag with the most expensive looking of her forest of too many things, the statues and the dollies and the masks and objets, his eyes fell on a classic Mycenaean phi statue on one table: a goddess, with arms curved up over her head. Her body was a knife.
Sam was taken by the statue, he picked it up, mesmerized, and Maryann appeared in her nightie and robe, grinning. "How did you get in here?" He swallowed, terrified, with the goddess in his hands. "If you'd broken it, I'd be really angry." He offered to leave, and she laughed: In this weather? He wasn't even wearing clothes. "You are very interesting," she said. "How old are you?" Seventeen. Practically hers anyway, and adorable. Her hands play across her lips, and she smiled. He stared back.
Karl reappears: "It's a beauty, isn't it? Mycenaean, I'm told." You'd know. He says Maryann's still asleep, and Sam goes away again: "Just tell her I have something for her."
What's funny about myths is that they start someplace, and end up bringing the whole thing back with them: You don't want your kids to go out in the woods at night, for example, because they'll come home dead or eaten or injured. So you tell them a story about the woods at night, that basically is meant to make them afraid of the woods at night. But on the inside of your head, where you actually live, the woods at night already mean something else scary: your woods, your night. Gods thrive on belief, but that's not where they come from. So the story takes on a power of its own -- something Out There gets all the blame, all the credit -- and before you know it you're avoiding the woods at night not because of injury or attack, but so you don't piss off the woods.
Anyway, the Stove pointed out that basically Sookie's entire life, when she's not getting off and getting high on her boyfriend's bodily fluids, or finding dead bodies or naked dog-people or the rest of things she's always finding at bad times, is this here now: sitting at the kitchen table in a morose sideways evening light, listening to oldies and feeling sad. Finally she pulls it together and goes into Gran's room for the first time in almost a month. Suddenly it is quiet. She walks carefully. There's a glass of water on the nightstand, the bed is unmade; she can hear Adele's spirituals, beautiful songs about salvation. She picks up her Gran's knitting from the comfy chair, and she smells it.
And within the hour, she's gathering the jewelry and pieces of her grandmother's life together, deciding what to KEEP and what goes to GOODWILL, and she's randomly cut her finger and is sucking on the blood when the doorbell rings. Long story short, it's Sid Matt Lancaster, the lawyer, who has arrived to inform her that Great-Uncle Bartlett has passed on. Bartlett, who found a girl already unable to speak, and took away her voice. Bartlett, who chased Hadley into the arms of death, and madness, and royalty. Sookie's unable to deal with any of this, and as usual can't produce anything like an appropriate affect, so he just assumes she's grieving: Bartlett was, to Sid Matt Lancaster, a kind, giving man. Sid Matt Lancaster was proud to call him friend. But is this because Sid Matt Lancaster is an idiot, or a conspirator? Or is it possibly because people are larger than even their greatest sins?
Sid Matt Lancaster explains that Bartlett's body was found a few miles south of his town, having fallen into Walnut Creek by accident. The rest is just a monologue: Bill's Theme starts to play across the scene as Sookie realizes what he's done. "There's no sign of burglary or forced entry at the house, and he was such a sweet old man that there'd be no reason to hurt him, anyway," Sid Matt Lancaster says. There were not any marks or anything, once the gators were done with him, and he'd been in there for a few weeks.
She doesn't feel sorry for him. There's no sorrow to be had for him. But this is another choice, taken away, and a choice having to do specifically with choices, taken away. This is validation and it is hateful and it's scary. Her boyfriend is a loaded gun, a killer by nature; he looked her right in the eye and said that he had no more secrets from her. And that was a lie, and that was one more choice taken away. It makes things easier, but she didn't necessarily need things to be easier. She needed things to be real.
There's no sorrow to be had, not for Bartlett, but he can still reach out and hurt her, even in death. "Your Great-Uncle Bartlett cared for you deeply," Sid Matt Lancaster says. "He stated in his will that he wished for you to inherit all his financial assets... It's a token of how special you were to him," Sid Matt Lancaster says, and her stomach flips over. Eleven thousand dollars, as a token of how special she once was. The blood from her cut finger mars the envelope, but she keeps her food down.
Some kind of "Girl From Ipanema" crap plays across Maryann's pool; she joins Tara and Eggs briefly on the edge, handing them a joint and staring across at a huge painting, like a temple fresco: Pan, and his human lover. Tara asks if she has a name, but Maryann just smiles, and this is key: "She could be any of us, couldn't she? The Greeks knew there is the flimsiest veil between us and the divine. They didn't see the Gods as being inaccessible, the way everyone does today." His human lovers had magical powers: they reveled in their panic, in their sudden passions; they could draw down the moon. Tara laughs: her mother is a stranger to the distance between us and God: "She thinks she's got a direct line to Jesus."
Eggs laughs, but Maryann only smiles. "You have an uncanny talent for connecting everything back to your mother." Tara knows Lettie Mae deserved it, deserved to have her heart ripped out and more, but... Maryann's not interested in talking about it, and hands Tara more of that sage advice she never quite understands: "If you took care of yourself for once instead of protecting her? She'd still be your mother, you'd just be happier." She's right. Tara looks down, and Maryann runs off for more papaya.
Eggs smiles at Tara again, almost bashful, playful, and they pass the joint. "Doesn't it seem like she's got an endless supply of tropical fruit?" Tara giggles. "And pot." He hadn't noticed, he's been smoking pot since he was ten. "My first kumquat? Three months ago." He pops it in his mouth with delight. She sticks her feet in the pool, laughing at her twelve-year-old self for feeling brave with cigarettes. He did worse; he saw worse. She asks suddenly if he's been with Maryann, and he stares at her. "You must be high!" She smiles, but he's serious also: "She's so far beyond me, it's like she's on another plane. I'm starting to get her more and more every day, but I think the main idea is, we're all luckier than we can imagine." The painting stands between them, as they sit, framed by decadence; his hand is on her knee.
Tara's thoughts turn to the body -- her first -- last night, and he illustrates his point: "You're lucky you made it this far before seeing one." And of all the ones he's seen, he's lucky in turn not to be one of them... And that she hasn't moved his hand yet. She giggles, stoned in the sun, and he leans in to kiss her.
"Fresh towels!" Karl says, having appeared out of nowhere, even though they aren't wet. She jumps. "They're Egyptian..." Eggs thanks him and he vanishes again; she stands to change for work, and inside Maryann smiles at her, in the kitchen. And when she's gone, Maryann summons Karl to her, slamming him into the floor with one great fist. "Nobody needed towels!" she thunders, and steps over him and away as he moans.
On the road crew, Jason wrestles once again with his particular angel: in this case, the shadow and the light of Rene, Drew Marshall. The man who killed his grandmother and the only woman he really ever loved; who tried to kill his sister, and killed his own sister. The man only Jason knows how close he came to becoming. I've said and maintain that Jason had all the ingredients to be a Drew Marshall -- that strange sexual attraction to vampires and their familiars, that troubled projecting protectiveness toward his sister -- but was only saved by this: his ability to love past any amount of hate. The man who killed his grandmother, his only parent since Jason was nine years old? "I guess I do miss that son of a bitch. He was my best friend."
Hoyt misses him too, but acknowledges that they never really knew Rene, not really. Jason can't believe that God would let Rene fall, and die, for no reason at all. "When I was in jail, the Fellowship of the Sun? They came to visit me." Hoyt wrinkles his nose, but Jason tries to explain to him about how they're not just about hate, how the true message is love. He's not got it figured quite yet, and explaining it to Hoyt isn't helping, but he knows that if he's going to find answers, it will be with them. Hoyt points out that they've got churches in Bon Temps, the kind that teach you Christian love, and no hate. Jason shakes his head condescendingly; Hoyt's caught up on the hate. "The Fellowship, it's bigger than that. When I'm there, I feel like I'm meant to be a part of it, like I got a calling from Jesus. Or from Steve Newlin himself."
Hoyt's not impressed. Sookie arrives and Jason approaches her gingerly. Hoyt apologizes for last night's panic, and she thanks him, and then gives Jason the check from Bartlett. "He left us an inheritance. Well, he left me the inheritance, but I don't want it." He doesn't take it right away; it feels like a hundred pounds in her hands, but he can't process it yet. Why would he leave her the money, when Jason loved him more? She can't talk, won't explain, just shoves it at him, finally yelling. "Jason! I do not want it." She shakes it in his face, and he finally takes it, and she's so much lighter. And when she's gone, he looks at the amount, and up to the sun: His holy light, shining down. "Thank you," Jason says to the sun, through the trees, and smiles. His answer.
The woman rode him, in her bed, still in that black nightie. He was seventeen, the same age Jessica is now. Practically hers already. "Is this what you imagined it would feel like?" Sam was naked; it was not. "All right, you stay with me," she said, "And we will do things... That you cannot possibly imagine." She arched her back over him; her arms curved up, over her head, like a goddess. The lines began to blur; he couldn't see her face anymore. "Don't stop," she hummed over him. "Don't stop." He got scared and flipped her off of him, begging to understand: what is she? She could be any of us. "Baby boy," she grinned lasciviously, full of power, "You're not the only one who's special in this world."
Sam's reverie in his office is interrupted; Arlene drags him back to the present with a frenzied knocking. "I don't know when you're planning on hiring another waitress, but me and Sookie are fixing to drop dead from exhaustion." She shows him her fingernails: "Nine out of ten, broken!" He apologizes, but she's ahead of him again, dragging in a lovely young lady named Daphne who has arrived looking for work. "I used to work at the Cracker Barrel in Alexandria," Daphne lies, and Arlene asks, on her way out, if she can start parking by his trailer, instead of near the latest murder scene. "I love you!" she says in her beautiful, bright way, and scoots. "Nine out of ten," she whispers, and he shakes his head, greeting Daphne like a gentleman. "Daphne, right? I like the name." She says it's French -- her mom's half-Cajun -- but it's a lot older than that.
The wheel beneath Fangtasia! keeps turning. Royce has not shut up since he arrived last night. "Some people think I'm an asshole," he blurts, and Lafayette's surprise is underrehearsed and overcooked. "It's true! I pick fights with strangers, I've cussed out old ladies. I even pissed in my boss's coffee once." Lafayette tells him it's not necessary or called for to tell him this shit, but he keeps going. Royce asks what they do instead of talking, then, and Lafayette admits that mostly he thinks about how he got there. "All the shit I've done in my life -- the drugs, the sex, the website -- I did it so my life wouldn't be a dead end. And this is where I end up?" He rattles his chain, frustrated by the punchline.
"Well see, that's why we've got to talk. We have to tell each other all the shit we've done. That way, if one of us gets out, he can tell the world about both of us." Royce starts to cry, this time in real panic. "I just hope it's me." Heh. Lafayette says that if it'll make him feel better, by all means keep babbling. "When I was twenty, my cousin Rufus, he was going out with this girl who claimed she could crush a beer can. With her tits. And one night, when we were alone, I asked her to show me. One beer can lead to another, and before you knew it, she was crushing my head. With her tits. Rufus came home, and he was so mad he threw me out of the window. My hip shattered into a million pieces, and they replaced it with metal. My ass is magnetic now..."
The tawdry, boring nature of Royce's indiscretions have pushed Lafayette too far. "I pray to God you ain't the last motherfucker I meet before I die," he sighs, but Royce isn't done. What about Lafayette? No regrets? "Well, I got in trouble with my boss once for punching out three stupid rednecks at the bar." Oh, the AIDSburger. Finest moment ever filmed in Merlotte's. Royce laughs, and asks if he really regrets it; of course he doesn't. "Yeah. Hey, I'm sorry I hassled you for being gay. I was an asshole about it." Lafayette, I can't even tell if he's being sarcastic, maybe he can't either anymore: "Well, at least I got through to you." Either way, it's funny. "If it makes you feel any better, when I was fifteen, at Safety Patrol Camp, I let my bunkmate blow me." Royce weeps, and the sheer gorgeous eloquence with which Lafayette casts his eyes to heaven could make you cry just as hard.
The wheel turning becomes Terry's order caddy, spinning around at the bar, as Andy harasses strangers about Nancy Levoir, Miss Jeannette. Nothing. Tara's surprised Jason and Hoyt have ordered Abida Light, since they usually have pitchers of Dixie draft, but Sookie shakes her head. Jason's not drinking, and Hoyt says his mama wants him to watch his weight. Arlene chimes in from the side -- "She's one to talk, that woman's got more chins than a Chinese phonebook" -- which makes Tara laugh in spite of herself.
One of those particularly Bon Temps hos -- this one looking like Busy Phillips let her monkey loose again -- approaches, trying to get Jason to drink with her, and if no, then to fuck her, and if no, then he and Hoyt must be "gay together." They don't really respond to this, because God. She turns to Hoyt, who stutters and stammers enough in the first two seconds that she's turned him down before he can form a word. "I don't teach," she turns to Jason, "I absorb." That's inscrutable. I hate it when ho talk doesn't make sense. I see what she's saying, in a purely pedagogical sense, but there is the stink of pun on it that I can't figure out. "Bubba. I'd rather stay pure for that leadership conference, but if you wanna hit that, man, I'm cool." Jason is a good friend, but Hoyt likes them nicer than that, and besides, he says, he's not much of a... "Hitter." See, if that were a pun I would be all over it.
Andy's still yelling at the customers, this time about the trashbags they found in his car, and when he leaves the lady turns back to her over-the-booth neighbor and continues gossiping. It would seem that the conventional wisdom, or at the least this meanspirited lady, are saying that Rene Lenier or Marshall or whatever, the American Vampire League wanted to teach him a lesson so they dug him up and turned him into one of their own. So maybe he was the one that killed Miss Jeanette. Apparently you can still smell the blood back there. Gosh. Bon Temps is a hard motherfucker. I can't even talk about blood at the blood bank. I make them call it transmission fluid.
"Better be careful, Rene Marshall might still get you!" They laugh, high-pitched squeals that belie their earlier, and later, panic. But sadly, of course, Arlene's standing right there. She slams down their orders. "Don't you people have any shame? His name was Drew Marshall. And he's dead, and he's buried, and he ain't never coming back." Arlene bursts into tears. He's dead, and she loved him, or she loved a man who looked like him, and spoke with a Cajun accent. But is she crying because she's an idiot, or so desperate that she could have in retrospect dealt with the serial killer thing, or married him in jail? Or because any of us are larger than our greatest sin? Terry appears, and throws down money from his wallet on both tables, kicking the bitches out, hiding behind his nutty reputation the same way Sookie always does -- "Keep walking! Don't eyeball me!" -- and when Arlene throws her arms around him gratefully, he very deliberately and carefully takes one lock of her hair, and smells it delightedly. Like a sunset, after a bomb went off.
Sookie asks what church this leadership conference is for, and Jason lies, saying the first word he sees over his sister's shoulder: "Marlboro. Baptist. In Baton Rouge. It's only for a week. Just give me a chance to get away from everything..." She can identify; she tells him about cleaning out Gran's room, how hard it was to pack up anything at all. He nods, a million miles away. "I know. I miss her too. And I'm hoping maybe God'll tell me why he had to take good people away, like Gran. And Amy..." She's shocked. "Jason, Amy was a V addict."
(The metaphor from the forums I liked best is that V is like kiddie porn: just by doing it, you take part directly in something awful. Tobacco, pot, even coke you have to follow the blood and death back a bit before you get implicated, but V is not like that. V comes directly from the bodies of a minority that couldn't legally marry until a couple of days ago, usually through torture, and usually ending in a sunshiny morning. V addict means the Rattrays; she's not calling Amy a pothead. She's calling Amy a murderer, which is what she is.)
But she's much larger than that, too: "Yeah, that don't mean she deserved to die." Sookie stares at him. What does that mean, "deserve to die"? Who among us, what sins are large enough, that anybody deserves to die? And more to the point, once something's happened, once it stops being a shadow inside and starts being a fact, once somebody kills someone for hurting you, and lies to your face about it, what then? If Amy, V addict Amy -- and a thousand things Sookie doesn't know about but Jason sure as fuck does, Jason who loved Eddie even as he tortured him -- if Amy didn't deserve to die, where does that put Bill? How does Jason reconcile these things? Where does he get this strength?
"I can't help it, Sook, I loved her. And when you love someone you've got to love it all. Otherwise it ain't love." She realizes his point, and she doesn't like it. But if she loves Bill, if she's going to love him as a grown woman, if they're going to be an adult couple instead of the kind content only to go running through graveyards in flowy white dresses, she's got to reconcile the fact that he has killed. A lot. Bartlett and Jessica for starters, but also hundreds of years of humans, as a vampire, and who knows how many fellows, when he was a soldier? When you love someone, you've got to love it all.
And it's not to say you have to approve, or sit idly by. Whoever told you approval and love were the same thing fucked you up real good. We spend so much time creating fictions around ourselves where we're the hero, or the constant victim, in which we have no power at all. And anything that doesn't fit into that world, anything that seems dark because it's unfamiliar, or scary, or comes too close to things we can't accept about ourselves, gets shoved into the dark. Amy wasn't perfect. Nobody is perfect. Whoever told you perfection is what earns you love fucked you up too. Love is not something we do to absolve others of their faults. To love is to do ourselves the favor of growing larger and more compassionate. Choosing not to love Amy because of her faults and her behavior isn't a choice, it's just blindness. Jason is saying that you see the whole person, not an edited-down version. You take the darkness in one hand, and the light in the other, and you pray to God for the strength to reconcile them. That's all compassion is.
Andy approaches drunkenly hitching up his pants and ready to harass Jason, his favorite pastime; Sookie takes off with a kiss on the cheek and heads into the main room, where Bud and his wife are entering, having just won some kind of ugly-costumed dance competition like they used to have on TV all the time in the '90s. (The digital video has trouble with the tracking shot from the door back around to the bar, making it look like Maryann's vibes for a second, but I'd imagine on DVD it won't look that weird.) Tara rolls her eyes at their rich pageantry, and Sookie comes looking for Sam. She wants to go find Bill, the whole person, and hear the stories about Jessica and Bartlett from their lips; if she doesn't, then it's not love. Tara hugs her about Bartlett; Sookie changes the subject immediately.
Jessica nearly spits out the A- and Bill holds up one petulant finger so she won't. "Less like ass than the A+, but more like ass than the B-." He rolls his eyes, beyond frustrated trying to find the right TruBlood for her, so she can stay alive. Bill Compton is the funniest fucking person on the planet, probably. I never noticed because he's so obnoxious and sentimental and sexist, but this season, those things just add to the hilarity of him. What a marvelous character! I finally get it. "Two thirds of new vampires never survive the first year!" he worries, and she points out she can hardly help having not yet acquired the taste for a substance not a single vampire relishes. "You know, Eric let me feed on a guy with tattoos, and nipple piercings." Bill informs her that he is not Eric. WE KNOW! "You are so not Eric," she moans, shoving the A- across the table, into the incorrect recycling container.
Sookie goes to see Sam, who's sitting on his trailer steps looking lost and on a beer that is not his first. He doesn't want to talk about his day, how he revisited the site of his greatest terror, not to say religious trauma, but on top of Miss Jeanette's body in his parking lot it's a lot to deal with. She starts to ask about leaving early to visit Bill, and when he interrupts her, she tries to explain, and he cuts her off again. She stands, suddenly a bit smaller, and considers him. "I guess I've owed you an apology for a while now. I never meant to hurt you, Sam."
The timeline here is that she basically dated him for a couple of days last month, championed him over Bill, managed to get both him and Bill mauled by Rene and the sun respectively before saving her own ass, and then backed right off again -- just after it was too late, and he'd lost Tara. So after three weeks of that, he learned about Maryann, and now has easily 99 problems, of which Sookie is not currently one, as he hastens to make clear.
"Don't it seem like you're always either apologizing or yelling at me? Don't you get sick of it?" She shocked, but he goes on. "Because I sure do. I can't be whatever you want, whenever you want anymore. I'm tired of charring my ass on your back burner." Wow. A speech Lafayette would have been proud to hear! He hustles back into the bar angrily, telling her she'll need to make up the hours.
Andy's screaming at old people about Miss Jeanette, accusing an old man on an O2 tank of lying to him about where his prescriptions come from, and he stumbles into Bud, who takes him off the case after a little bit more of that Andy Bellefleur attitude. Andy is totally the Colonel Tigh of this show. He is so awful and impotent that he just becomes amazing. "Bud. I'm a good cop. I can close the case, let me show people that, please." Bud asks him to do something else, but here's the thing about Andy -- and the reason Tara couldn't help but indulge him, last night: "I don't do anything else. This is it." Bud's sorry, but damn. Andy pouts, and stomps away with yet more beer.
Sam has graduated to shots, and is now sweating profusely. He was in bed, still naked, still a child, when she got into the shower. He was terrified, and jumped up. In the armoire were polos, dungarees, clothes that fit him perfectly; called into existence, perhaps, by his need and the curious divides and gaps within his soul. In the drawer was a shitload of cash; he shoved it all into a pillowcase. She was nowhere to be seen.
Maryann appears in Sam's office doorway, grinning wildly. "You have something of mine!" He jumps to his feet, and she closes the door behind herself. Her presence is menacing, her smile is engaging. "Karl said you stopped by with a gift. I do love presents!" He presents her fearfully with the trashbag full of money, trying to be strong, to pay tribute to whatever force she embodies: "I don't know how you found me, but I assume this is what you came for." He's honest, as ever: "I'm sorry. I was young and scared at the time." She takes it, and he steps back as quickly as if she were coiled and ready to strike. "I remember," she smiles dreamily, crouching and opening the bag.
Maryann smiles, and rewrites the story with him inside: still a child, still naked puppy Sam, provincial and ignorant. And she is arrogant, and very old, and wise. And she is laughing: "Money? Oh, you sweet thing. It's not your money I want." He asks if this is about getting to him through Tara, luring her into Maryann's world, and she's nearly offended: "Get back at you? How in the world did you get the impression that this was about you?" Eggs sits at the bar, smiling at Tara.
Tara can't believe he still wants to see her, that Eggs hitched a ride all the way from her palace just to say hi. "You're either dumber than I thought, or you're way too good for me." Maryann, Eggs, we don't like that kind of talk: "I just wanted to see where you work." She reminds him how "lucky" he is: the bartender likes him, and the drinks are on the house. He asks her for something sweet and she lists them, distracted by his beauty, looking around her at the bar: "I can make you a rum and Coke? A margarita? Turns into his kiss: Or a White Russ..." Um, he totally meant a kiss? So he takes it; she leans in hungrily, and Sam and Maryann walk out from the back, watching it. And nobody offers them any fucking towels.
(Interestingly, Maryann has chosen for this visit a sideways-pony-thing that makes her look eerily like Pat Benatar from the "Love Is A Battlefield" video, which is about a runaway who finds the city is harder to survive than she thought. There's a bad man, for example, who takes advantage of the young and the lost; who might rip out the hearts of those who would protect his charges, and fail them. She writes letters home to her little brother, who looks like Puppy Sam, but the years take their toll. And then -- it's like something out of Euripedes, it's impressive -- he attacks a girl, and Benatar rallies the troops, and the man is menaced like Pentheus by this army of wild women, dancing in this sort of half-erotic, half-manic group choreography, and the dude actually joins their dance for a while before he is baptized with a G&T to the face, but then instead of destroying him or chasing him into the street, the women leave him behind, and head out into the dawn.)
Sookie arrives just as Bill's gotten Jessica to agree that two parts O- to one part B+ is "not so gross," and is of course adorably over the moon about it. He's just as overjoyed to see her (Is it love? Or panic?) but she approaches Jessica first, speaking honestly and respectfully and more than a little affectionately, and Jessica's posture converts from back for more, bitch? to please be my best friend before she's even done. "Jess, I feel like we got off to a bad start. And it's totally my fault. I never got a chance to hear your side of things, find out what you're like, none of that. Can you forgive me?"
Jessica's a bit wary: "You really want to get to know me?" Sookie smiles sweetly. "Of course I do. You deserve that. And, frankly, I'm curious about you!" Charming as hell, able to be human in a way she can't be when she's around humans; not even Tara gets this side of her. Jessica doesn't want to be friendly, but she's clearly taken. "I've just got one huge favor to ask. Give me tonight with my boyfriend, and we'll have all night tomorrow to ourselves. Just us girls." Bill's impressed, because of course he would have no idea that teenage girls ARE PEOPLE and would like to be approached LIKE PEOPLE, and would thus find this whole deal to be like this eldritch mystery.
(Stephen Moyer, I read his interviews a lot because I really like him and I really like knowing what he's doing with the character, because until now I didn't get the character at all, because he just seems awful to me -- dorky when he's not being controlling, scary when he's not being petulant -- but he said the most awesome thing, which is that if you said the word "daughter" to Bill Compton, he'd think of a "beautiful little well-mannered Victorian beauty." And instead: Jessica, "this hideous, sex-and-blood hungry seventeen-year-old." That's so beautiful. I love imagining Bill Compton dressing up his American Girl Civil War Dolly and brushing her hair with the brush he bought separately, right, and then in comes Jessica dressed like Courtney Love and throwing used tampons around the place like Molotov cocktails. The fact that Jessica is about fifty times more interesting than Kit Kittredge and Nancy Spungeon, combined, is something only this show could do.)
For example, I didn't know I loved Jessica as much as the idea of Jessica until I saw her fall in love with Sookie just now, and realize how sad and lonely and desperate to connect she really is. I can see her really getting to appreciate the dorkiness of both her new parents, even if she never ends up like them. So Jessica smiles sweetly and then without even stopping, hops off to bed. "Good night," Sookie calls -- tenderly, but firmly -- and Bill's jaw drops down to the rotting floorboards of his old house. He loves her so bad! "It's almost like you glamored her..." he starts, but that's not what this is about.
Sookie asks Bill about Bartlett, and his smile falls. He doesn't look at her, but it's only because she wouldn't want him to. Not in this precise moment. "He. Hurt you," Bill says. It's enough.
"Oh my God," though. "Is it that easy for you to kill? Does human life mean so little you can just kill on command? Toss someone in the water?" Is the Reverend right? Is Nan Flanagan selling a line too? "I cannot have people dying every time I confide in you!" She talks about her three-week-old angst about cutting off Rene's head with a shovel, hilariously, and talks about how this act "haunts" her, and now she feels like she's responsible for Bartlett's death. Which only means something because it was the fulfillment of a wish you're not allowed to wish. That whole conversation in the bathtub was rubbing a lamp. Now you see what a genie can do, you want it back in the bottle. "I always thought, as different as we are, somehow we could still be together, and... And now I don't know. I don't know anything."
Bill is so sad, staring at her, his one shot at redemption, a thing that makes the centuries worthwhile and not just some cartoon in some graveyard moaning and bitching. But is it love, or is it panic? She begs him to speak. There are tears on his face; he's too afraid to move, much less speak. Finally she pushes past him, toward the door again, and he meets her there, superquick.
"Sookie," he says -- And this is good. If you're in the mood for dorky romance, it's good. If you're in the mood to laugh until you cry, it is excellent. These two are really good for a lot of different moods when they get like this -- "I cannot, and I will not, lose you. For all the ways I have dismayed, aggrieved, or failed you, I swear I will atone. But I am not sorry. I refuse to apologize for what you have awakened in me. You... You are my miracle, Sookie." Whatever the holy hell that means. He takes her hand. He's still like a billion times less creepy than Edward Cullen. "For the first time in 140 years, I felt something I thought had been lost to me forever. I love you." Tears roll past her smile. "And for that, I shall never feel sorry."
And then, of course, Sookie has no options, because that was precisely what she needed to hear, because that's exactly how she feels. And that's the upside to being unable to read your lover's mind: when they surprise you. "Oh, damn you, Bill Compton. I love you." She kisses him, and it is totally intense and their sweet song plays, and then they fuck like eleven different ways and crawl around and hunt each other on the quilt and whatnot, and it's pretty much softcore, which is okay in a first episode of the season, and then later he's coming in from behind and she classily moves her hair out of the way so he can bite her, and blood gets all over the nice comforter, and then he continues to fuck her while kissing her, and her blood sorts of spills out of his mouth all over her face and... I lost track of what's going on a while back but I'm pretty sure I wasn't meant to see any of that. They have been fucking -- and maybe that's your thing, maybe subjectively you thought this was like a five-second scene -- since the Louisiana Purchase by this time, according to actual science.
Meanwhile, Royce has this whole plan to get out of there, and Lafayette keeps shushing him, and then a seven-foot wiry figure that can only be Eric comes swooshing down the stairs into the dungeon wearing the following: track pants with the Swedish flag, highlighting foils in his hair, and flip flops. And yet, he is Eric, which means he's both totally terrifying and wildly sexy even in this getup. "Shushing won't do you any good, sweetheart," he says to Lafayette, without looking at him. "We hear everything. And since you made me come all the way down here, I'm gonna take out some of the garbage."
Eric kneels down to look at beautiful Royce Allen Williams, and asks him to talk about the burning house of love. Royce tells him he doesn't know anything, as Lafayette cowers behind a pillar, and Eric's voice gets more intimate, more personal than ever: "Crimes against vampires are on the rise. We even lost a sheriff just days ago. We seek answers." It's more engaged than we've ever seen. He picks up Royce to drag him upstairs, but Royce pulls out a silver crucifix and slams it against Eric's face. And that's the last stupid thing Royce ever did, obviously.
Horrible inhuman shit happens, growling and roaring, blood everywhere, Royce's head bashing against the ceiling, Eric's gun show holding him sideways so he can eat Royce's kidneys out of his screaming body before TEARING OFF A LEG AND BEATING HIM WITH IT. And the whole time this horrible howl-growl, like if a minotaur were blowing a shofar on the worst day of his life, and the blood as this happens sprays across Lafayette's face. And after the fucking just now, I would have thought this would have been a piece of cake, but no. Because Eric doesn't want anything anymore, doesn't care if Royce has contacts or can lead him to the Sherriff's kidnapper. He just wants to destroy him, and I don't blame him, for marring that face for even a second. You don't do that shit to Eric. Lafayette knows that. So he sits behind his pillar and stares, with Royce's blood splashing across his face, wondering what Eric will do , and if there's anything he can do to survive it, because what this moment is teaching him is that maybe there isn't a way. Not even Lafayette can work it every single time: No promises, no demands. Just panic.