Well, Bon Temps is all effed up. Jason and Sookie drive home with Bill in the trunk -- with more sexytime dreams about Eric, which can keep going on as long as you want to throw them at us, show -- and almost run over some Maryann zombies like, first thing. Sookie comes home to a big old mess of a Wicker Man in her driveway made out of organic premium fruits and meats, thanks to Maryann, and a gorgeously gothic Silent Hill house of hell.
Bill tries to bite Maryann for being tacky -- and foams up all on the mouth just like last time -- and they head over to Lafayette's, where he and Lettie Mae have Tara tied up. Somewhere between an intervention and an exorcism only gets worse when Bill and Sookie stupidly throw their powers at her.
Hoyt and Jessica have Zombie Maxine at Bill's house, where the only thing that chills out her rage is playing Bill's Wii. It's kind of sad, but mostly because I wish she was dead. Way sadder is Zombie Terry's zombie clarity, as he assumes sergeantship of the zombie population: he's used to finding order in madness. Zombie Jane and Zombie Arlene trick Sam and Andy into the Merlotte's deep freeze, which is like the busiest spot in town at this point.
Jason becomes totally awesome, like this crazy atheist survivalist bomb-shelter freak, and saves Sam and Andy from the deep freeze. Then they dress him up like the six-pack Dread Pirate Roberts so all the zombies think he's Dionysus, and he "smites" Sam into vanishing. Jason Stackhouse is so great! Even shirtless and wearing a gas mask and branches on his head, he's still so awesome.
Maxine's nasty zombie shit finally sends Jessica over the brink and she bites her ass, and Sookie does some kind of magical shit to Maryann that I don't even know. Then they figure out what everybody on the show has already figured out, which is that Maryann is like God or something, so Bill goes to see Queen Sophie-Anne, aka the Eric that Erics dream about. We only see her pert little vampire ankle this week, but it's as crazy as most people's entire vampire.
Sookie walks down the hall of the Hotel Carmilla, with the song of Godric and Eric -- so much like her own cello song with Bill -- echoing, wearing her gingham dress. Eric's in his room, sitting on the floor, bent over and hot as hell, crying blood tears. When she says his name, he looks up, but not at her. "Godric is gone," he says. She knows. She was there. And through her, so was he. "I'm so sorry," she says, reaching out to touch his chin, and he finally meets her eyes. She kisses first one cheek and then the other, but as she leans away he reaches out and grabs her hand, hungry and lonely, in need of comfort. He weeps as he's kissing her. When he pops fangs she reaches out and touches them, gasping. She offers her neck, and he bites...
Which wakes her up, eyes wide, in the Anubis shuttle to her brother, riding back to Bon Temps in the sunlight. Jason recognizes the look on her face, he's had that look before. He asks what she was dreaming about, but he means who. She stares around and offers, lamely, "Bill?" Before touching his casket in the trunk very lightly. Jason settles down into his seat, remembering his first ride back from All-State: The way the town looked different somehow. Sookie agrees, but notes that she's never left before. "Seems like something's different to me, though."
The world has gotten bigger. Gran is gone, Jason is back. She saw a vampire taken into God's hands, she sat in their nests and ate their food, she saw a beautiful church become a place for torture and violation. Tara will be waiting in the house for her, and her life can start over once again.
But you don't go home. You go to a new place every time. While she was away, the world became wild. The old safe places became not so safe; the old hiding places were touched with madness. The uncanny began to invade; the uncanny was invited in. She reached out and touched his fangs, and offered him her throat.
The Welcome To Bon Temps sign at the city limits has been defaced: Now it reads Bone Temps, a penis scrawled across the arm of the W. Welcome in, it says on the left, and FUCK OFF, it says on the right: You don't go home, and welcome home.
Everything is empty, or nearly empty. The town is dead, or nearly so. A man slams himself, his head, against the girder of an awning, just to feel it. The street is littered with flowers, across which a squat strange woman chases a protesting man; a couple throws themselves in the path of the shuttle, faster than the driver can swerve, and the windshield crumples under them. Jason and Sookie exit, staring, and they laugh. Their eyes are black; Jason asks them why and they only laugh harder, running toward the church. "We gotta find Sam! It's almost time, man!"
Maryann's Mycene goddess figure stands in Sookie's front yard, writ large: A ten-foot lady made of bones and slabs of meat, breakfast and lunch and dinner, vines and ivies and garlands and entrails, flowers and melon's flesh. Her arms are held up in celebration, a vision of abundance and growth, unchecked unto excess. It won't last long in the sun.
Eggs congratulates her on its scope -- "I think you've outdone yourself!" -- and as she laughs Karl appears, with a fat black crow on its back, wings spread, on a board. It was beautiful when it was alive, intimidating, but now it's just craft supplies. "Feathers! Perfection," she says, and pulls them out easily. "I'm thinking more meat," she says suddenly, arms crossed on the first rung. Karl offers more ground chuck, but she spurs him to think about who this is for, this altar made of life. "Corn-fed Kobe it is," Karl says, aiming higher, and she smiles like a poet. "You're finally getting it, Karl." She sends her men for more expensive meat: "Organs, kidneys, livers, anything you can find." Eggs's eyes are black today. "You want us to go kill something, so it's extra fresh?" She laughs like a Martha Stewart nightmare, and shakes her head. "Don't worry, I have other people bringing us something living to sacrifice."
That would be Sam, cowering in the motel room like Michael Shannon when Andy Bellefleur comes back bearing his clothes, from the jail cell. "Station was totally empty. Cells were all wide open. They think I'm a bad cop? You should see the square, it looks like New York City or something. People banging their heads on posts, graffiti everywhere. People pissing all over the sidewalk. This whole town's going down the crapper." While Sam does often think and remark upon the simple rural pleasures of Bon Temps and the encroaching horrors of culture, et cetera, today he is more worried about the immortal handmaiden of God who has their entire town under her command and has decided to cut him open. His priorities are basically in order.
Sam does the whole Ben Is Glory for Andy's benefit one more time, and how Maryann Forrester is to blame for all the weird stuff that has sent Andy on this ongoing bender/Body Snatchers reenactment. He asks Sam yet again what Maryann even wants with Sam, and he shakes his head bewildered: "I think to cut my heart out, while a bunch of naked people watch." He mangles the religious part, but that's a pretty good summation of the immediate issues at hand. "People thought I was crazy because I thought I saw a pig," Andy whines, and Sam reassures him that he did see a pig. He can't bear to tell him what (who) the pig was, because that would mean coming out of the shifter closet to a madman, so he just says she was a part of it, doing Maryann's dirty work. Andy wants to kill her, but as Sam points out that she doesn't die.
It makes me wonder what the endgame is. Because it can't just be the reification of order, that goes against this whole show. You can't have some Apollonian force come in and put her down, because that's worse than what she's doing -- as Sookie and Bill will soon demonstrate -- and besides, we already know supes are incomplete in their immunity against her. So no vampires, no Sam, no Sookie I think. Which leaves what sort of force or personality? It can't be somebody crazier than her, because ain't nobody fits that description.
Maybe poor Terry, whose madness keeps him sane and vice versa, and has our sole experience of wartime. Or Lafayette, who lives at the boundary of every division like Mercutio. Or Jason, who holds onto every set of opposites even when they burn him, because he's too dumb and too good to let them go. Maybe Sam, if he'd stop being such a closet case and allow himself to live on the line. Or Tara, who got us into this shitstorm.
It's hard, because you're talking about a Person who is also a Thing, and the only people we know like that on this show, that require that bifocal vision, are the vamps, and I would just puke if they stopped her. Normally I would say play bomb against bomb, let the Fellowship blow themselves up along with Maryann: that's a union of opposites all right, Apollo and Dionysus together. But then, that's essentially what Luke and Godric did, by killing each other without ever meeting, across the night: United life and death into salvation for everybody.
Which brings a whole other parallel opposition into focus: Luke's death brought Eric and Sookie together through the blood, and Godric's through the heart that pumps it. If Sam is the sacrifice (The Chariot?), then has that double-operation made Sookie the Star, the girl bringing water to the river and the shore? I can see that for sure. Tara and Eggs are already the Lovers, and the chained lovers at the Devil's hand, but they're not opposed in any way. They're just people, cracks in the dam; they're not forces, not like Sookie or the vamps. I feel like I'm missing something.
When Sam's phone rings, he's nervous but he answers, stiffly: "Hey, Arlene." We never see her eyes, so it's possible she's telling the truth as she begs him to come to Merlotte's: They're become a mad mob, zombies, they've got Terry and they're coming for her, and she's finally figured out Maryann is crazy -- "I mean, she is Hannibal Lecter crazy!" -- and now feels like her kids are in trouble, and there's no Sheriff's office anymore. Just Sam. (Maryann puts nothing in you. Arlene's shame lies in having loved and given her body to a man who hurt her friends and threatened her kids; Arlene's madness lies in loving and giving her body to a man who hurts her friends.) You can hear them, from where she's crouching in a Merlotte's booth, hooting and screaming and laughing, and he gives in. Of course. Give the man the option to walk into a trap and he will just go right ahead.
I guess it's night time now, because Bill gets out of his casket in his living room, looking hot as hell. Jason's calling in the car crash, but the police station answering machine is full. Sookie "feels" that things are super fucked up in Bon Temps, while notifying Bill of the obvious, and then worse still Maxine Fortenberry comes screaming out of a bedroom, black-eyed and monstrous, laughing cruelly: "Well, if it ain't the vamper and his vamper lover!" Jason hoots, seeing her eyes, and as she rushes down the steps toward them Hoyt follows, calling out to her. Jessica's beyond relieved that they're finally home, pointing out the obvious fact that Maxine's "gone, like, totally batshit." They kids swear they don't know what's going on with her; Hoyt thought it was just her new diet pills, but now?
They ask how long she's been like this, and Jessica says it's been a day. "And I will be, for as long as it takes for Him to get His offering!" Jason immediately identifies this oath as "fucking fucked-up," and Hoyt fills them in on the town's obsession with Sam Merlotte, "and how they're gonna offer him to God." Maxine lunges at Jason -- to Sookie's amazement and Jessica's wiser terror -- attacking him starting with her lips: "Why don't you offer yourself up to me, Jason Stackhouse? You dirty little monkey!" Which, well, I mean there's crazy and then there's crazy, and trying to fuck Jason Stackhouse isn't just a good idea but sort of mandatory.
But then, Maxine's never allowed herself to want anything. She lives in the same place as Sarah Newlin, or Sookie before Bill: She's a good southern woman, a belle in her own mind, a person who couldn't even see her own rage or hatred until it was laid out before her on the table. I wonder if that made her more susceptible to Maryann, when she finally showed up. In any case, it's not that the black eyes are making her want Jason -- anybody's eyes can do that -- or making her want to play the most violent games possible on Bill's Wii. She always wanted those things, and was never given the opportunity to express them -- she couldn't even think them. They festered: Sarah's rhetorical acrobatics turned hate into love and genocide into patriotism.
Hoyt says it doesn't calm her down, just helps her focus -- "I'm gonna crack open your fucking skull, bitch!" -- and what she focuses on is destruction, hate, rage, bloodlust, regular lust. Which is why Maryann exists, and why she will always exist: If Maxine hadn't spent her entire genteel, trashy life being "calm," she wouldn't be fucking crazy now. But if she weren't fucking crazy now, she'd have spent her entire life without once being alive. Extremes call each other into being, because the world loves only balance.
"So she says God is coming?" Yes, specifically to Maryann's. Sookie asks Hoyt where that is, and Hoyt blushes, because it was once Sookie's house. "They're gonna rip that boy open and serve him up like barbecue!" Maxine cackles. Sookie asks about the clawed thing, suddenly, putting it together; Hoyt's heard that Miss Jeanette and Daphne both had clawmarks on their backs. Sookie and Bill share a look; Jason's more interested in the fact that Merlotte's has a new waitress to fuck, to his sister's amusement, and he's crestfallen to learn she already skipped the Jason-fucking part of the sequence and proceeded right to the dying: "She had her heart cut out, just like the other one."
Jason, of course, is all hopped up on weeks (days?) of bootcamp, and commits immediately to heading off to Merlotte's so he can "find out what the hell is happening on [his] turf." Bill, in an almost-approving but certainly not paternalistic way, tells him they know a bit about the creature, and doesn't want him going near it. The martial drums start, as Jason continues to underscore the wonderful mutual-respect thing they have going: "Mr. Compton, I ain't about to sit back and let monsters destroy my town." Sookie reminds him of his promise to sometimes use his head, so she doesn't have to kick it around the corn patch or whatever the Abnerian fuck she was talking about last week. "Oh, I am. I ain't never been so clear in my whole life. This here is the war I've been training for."
Bill's intrigued, and sees his purpose, and finally holds Sookie back: "He can take care of himself. We've seen that." He nods, man to man, and it's awesome, but... I've decided to punch Bill every time he tells Sookie to shut up. Especially when it's about her house, her family, her shit. So while I love Bill for finally being the only person, besides poor old Amy Burley, to love Jason for what he is, it's balanced by his usual creepy Sookie stuff. They tell him to drive straight there, not knowing it's the center of the hurricane, and to get inside quick as he can. "And do not go into the woods by yourself," Sookie says. It's a personal truth, hard-won from her time with the Minotaur; it's also the first rule of fairytales. He swears he won't, and kisses his sister goodbye.
Like things on a list, Sookie asks after Tara. Hoyt stumbles. "She's been... Partying pretty hard, over at Mary... It's just something that people say!" he says, as Sookie grabs her sweater, but she doesn't understand what he's really saying. She thinks it's just something people say, and she's not concerned: she'll fuck this lady up and then it will be her house again. But you never go home. Bill accompanies her out, and Hoyt wonders if he should have gone along. Jessica, looking as ragged as she has been, declines: "And leave me alone here with her? No fuckin' way."
Sam heads into his haunted bar for like the eightieth time, Andy following with a flashlight, and though he can't see the people he can smell them. Andy doesn't have time to wonder what that's about before Arlene appears, smiling brightly, with a huge-ass knife in her hand. And when he asks if she's okay, she's happier than we've ever seen her, overjoyed with the love of God: "I am now! Because soon He'll be getting what's His!" They crawl out like zombies, and Andy is weirded out, and they begin praying. Andy shoots his gun as they laugh, coming out of every place, and they just laugh at him. Nothing new there.
Terry grabs his arm, and it goes shooting off into the bar. "Hey, at least shoot the cheap liquor! Bottom shelf, bottom shelf!" Arlene shouts; he takes the gun and drops Andy. "We call this move 'stress inoculation,'" he explains, shooting out random glass and things, and then a guy in the arm. He's worried a moment, but when the man laughs they all begin to laugh. Terry's madness is the war; his sanity is also the war. He's better prepared for this than any of them, because this world -- madness, killers everywhere, chaos and no accountability -- is not substantially different from what he knows. You don't go home.
Sam takes his moment and grabs Andy, busting free of a bubba and heading for the back door before ending up in the kitchen. He hauls Andy over the counter, toward the freezer, but they snatch at his feet, laughing. "Cut his feet off!" they shout, and he finally kicks free. They jump in the freezer, and lock it from inside. Outside, Terry calls them all to attention: "We have our EPW right where we want him. And there ain't no place for him to go." Which, he explains to Jane Bodehouse, means that they've secured the target. "Mission accomplished!" he shouts, and they cheer like a battleship full of retards. He orders "Bodehouse" to call Maryann, while inside the freezer Sam and Andy worry about the fact that they can't actually fight back: these are their friends and neighbors and cousins. Jane rushes to the payphone, but gets distracted: "For a good time, call Peanut." She hoots to herself, because she does love a good time, and completely forgets Maryann altogether.
"It burns where I'm tied up," Tara complains, black-eyed and struggling. "It burns like fire, Mama!" Lettie Mae worries over her, protesting that the bonds aren't doing any good, but Lafayette assures her that it's in everybody's best interest to keep those insane arms tied up. "Tell your mama what you need," Lettie Mae says, stroking her daughter's face; Tara is still for a moment before headbutting her viciously, and going into another round of hysterics. Okay, that was kind of awesome.
Lafayette grabs Tara's face roughly, turning those black eyes up: "Tara, you're stronger than whatever this is, and you know it. Now, get the fuck up out of there!" She spits, suddenly, and he jumps back. She laughs; Lettie Mae prays fervently that Miss Jeanette were here, and Lafayette scoffs. "She don't need no damn backwoods witch. She need Thorazine and a padded cell." Tara begins to pray.
Tara watches Lettie Mae through a blurry haze as her mother prays in turn. "Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me: bless his holy name." Tara moans at the old formula. "And forget not all his benefits who forgives all your iniquities." Lafayette takes up the prayer, surprising her. "...Who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction. Hallelujah God." He sits down, drinking wine from the bottle with an arch look. "Jesus and I agreed to see other people, but that don't mean we don't still talk from time to time."
Lettie Mae weighs his soul and finds it acceptable. "You've been good to my Tara," she says, as Lafayette smokes, as Tara wriggles and moans. All possession is being trapped. Tara's convulsions against her ropes are Maxine's convulsions against her neighbors. It only looks like possession from the outside. "I hadn't left a hole in this girl, maybe whatever's in there wouldn't have crawled in." She applies a cloth to her daughter's head, trying to give comfort and succor; she doesn't know that this particular hole was all Tara's doing.
Lafayette points out that he kicked her out too, on her birthday no less. "I was feeling all Poor Pitiful Me because of the shit I had brought on myself. If I wasn't acting like a stupid little bitch, I would have seen trouble coming after her a mile away, and I would have handled that shit." He's more right than Lettie Mae, but no less wrong. He could have warned her, and he did, but he couldn't have handled it. It doesn't take other people to save us, we do that for and from ourselves. That's what God looks like. That's what she's doing. "He's coming," Tara laughs. "He's on his way. And He's gonna kill us all!"
The altar has already begun to stink when Bill and Sookie arrive at Maryann's. The music inside the open door is slow, the wrong rpm, like a drunken invocation. The door is open because there is no need to close the door. This is what Jessica's father was terrified of: the branches, the leaves, the vines, growing through the house, in a soft candlelight. The presumption of unchecked nature in a house abandoned. The lush and nasty smell of loam and blood and vegetation. It is terrible and it is terrifying; it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on this show not involving Eric's body.
Her house is haunted, now, by life. And this is the song that it sings:
Hello walls... Don't you miss her since she up and walked away?
...Aren't you lonely since our darling disappeared?
...She went away and left us all alone...
We'll have to learn to get along without her if we can
...We must all stick together or else I'll lose my mind
I've got a feeling she'll be gone a long, long time...
Inside, Sookie grabs at Bill's hands because things are getting Unheimliche up in here: The picture of them as girls, with fucked-up leprechaun Gran, lies broken on the stairs. On that Mycene statue, the Goddess with her arms upstretched, running down her skin: the yolk and white of an egg, broken on it like a ship against the cliffs.
Lafayette calls, terrified, asking when Sookie's getting back in town; his voice ratchets up when he learns where she is: "I'm here," she says, "In what used to be my living room." You never go home. He screams into the phone: "I ain't half as worried about her as I am about you up in that fucking house. Get out. Run!" Bill stares at Maryann's Minotaur mask, lingering, thinking, as Sookie grabs him, pulling him toward the door.
"What are you doing in my house?" Maryann says, covered lusciously in blood and dirt, streaked with rain, surrounded by the forest. Sookie begs to differ on the matter of ownership, but Maryann is wiser: "It is now." Bill strongly suggests she remove herself from the premises, and Maryann laughs appreciatively, collecting him with her eyes the way she once did Andy Bellefleur, outside the police station: "My, you found yourself quite the specimen! Though I daresay there's nothing stopping him from one day leaving you cold."
Sookie swears she's not scared, as though that were a threat and not a promise, and Maryann holds her against the wall, by the throat. They share memories, of the chase and the Minotaur, its claws. Bill tosses Maryann onto the couch, telling Sookie to run, and he pops fang, holding her by the throat in turn. "Yes, ravage me!" she shouts, undulating beneath him, turned on for a moment beyond the limits that we've seen. First the food, and then the sex, and then the violence: what would it take to surprise Maryann, or to delight her? The unknown, and death. She offers her throat, and then goes further, holding his head against her neck, knowing he'll soon struggle: "Ravage me!"
He shoves himself back, finally, black ichor choking from his throat. Maryann laughs at Sookie's confusion, as he continues to choke and barf. "What did you do to him?" she asks, as though the blood of god could ever feed the vampires. When Sookie was scratched and Bill fed her himself, she choked like this, coughing up white bile. Maryann finally looks closer and sees it, the secret; for the first time, Bill's not there to keep it from light. "What are you?" she says, delighted, attracted. And when Sookie's hand rises to push her face away, it shines like a sun. A mask of light and a sound of sparks.
Sookie stares at her hand for a moment before grabbing Bill. "None of your business!" she shouts, hilariously, and he goes moaning and choking after. At the door, Maryann is joyful: "That was fun!" she calls, but it's just Lorena play-acting; alone with her thoughts, her immortal memories, her boredom that's older than Godric was, she has fallen in love. "What are you?" She touches her face, blissfully, and laughs to herself. She's not crazy, she's ecstatic.
"Aren't you glad I didn't take your advice and quit drinking?" Heh. Andy passes a bottle to Sam, while they shiver. "And if I'd left this town when I wanted to, nobody'd be in this situation," Sam worries. Andy tells him he's been good to the town, notwithstanding the occasional nudism, but Sam continues to stress. All this time being invisible, being the good boss and the quiet mystery, the shapeshifter, he's become a celebrity. "What if Terry had shot that guy in the head instead of the shoulder? People are gonna start dying soon." Thinking he's helping, Andy says that's already happening: Miss Jeanette, and Daphne. He can't remember her last name.
"Landry," Sam shudders. "Daphne Landry." He laughs, angrily, wondering if that was even her name. Of course it was. I invoke the rule of this show, which is that nobody has it together enough to lie about anything, ever. Half of their conversations are like, "You didn't tell me you were going to slaughter the town/the humans/the vampires/my family!" And the answer is inevitably: "I, or someone in the know, told you precisely that." I was going to say it's the supes, but the humans are the same way. Everybody leaves shit out when they want to fool you, but nobody ever lies. Daphne didn't lie about a single thing. She fucked him and she told him he was wonderful, and she told him not to be ashamed. And if he somehow thought that meant they were going to have werebabies together, that's on him.
The CGI frost on their breath is untenable. Andy conveys his condolences on Daphne dying, and then starts talking fucking crazynuts. "When I was growing up I had a nanny. Her name was Annie. Annie the nanny! She used to say to me that, uh, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. I think she told me that because she thought I was one of the blind, but... You got the burden of being the one-eyed man. I envy that." You shouldn't: that's you. That's all Andy's been this year. Sam's a supe so he doesn't get to be in that story. But Andy, maybe his tenuous sobriety is the same as Terry's shellshock: stress inoculation that keeps him from being taken over. I do know that it's fun to watch Andy dance around, because he's adorable, but if he ever gets the black eyes, won't your heart break a little bit? Maybe he'll get just one. Anyway, Sam's like, "I have no idea WTF you are talking about"; Andy admits he doesn't either. That's how you know it means something.
Jason parks out back in the underbrush and assembles his weapons -- fireworks, nailguns, the gas mask from his Strangler games, but once again no guns -- and heads into Merlotte's. Jane's asking Sam through the door if he knows a Peanut Burch, unable to remember who he is or why she called him or whom she was meant to call instead. Mike Spencer drinks beer from the tap; there is angry cunnilingus close by. Old people are fucking against the pool table while a guy snorts coke and a man and woman lap mustard from a young girl's thighs. Only in Bon Temps would you see this much orgiastic activity and not a single guy-on-guy. Thank God for Fangtasia! and its lapsed morals.
Once this was home. Appalled, Jason tells them all to cut it out, but of course they just keep laughing and redouble their efforts. Brandishing a chainsaw, he is at a loss for a moment, but then cuts their CD player in half with a barbaric yawp, cutting all the way through the bar. They stare, disappointed, getting mad. There are punches thrown before he's able to grab Arlene and point the nailgun at her poor empty head. "Ambush! Ambush!" Terry screams, but the rest of them cheer. "Yeah! Nail her!" Arlene's all for it, but Terry suddenly gets afraid for his "special lady." She tells him it'll be fine, she needs a haircut anyway, but he's not having it. Terry finally calls a timeout, and they parlay.
"All right, Stackhouse. Name your demands." Jason tells them all to leave, and he'll hand her over. Arlene laughs, and Terry calls to his troops. "All right. The order is to retreat. Immediately." There is resistance, but Terry informs them that when he gives an order they'd better fucking follow it, which is enough to get them moving. "We will unfuck this situation at a later date!" Jane Bodehouse continues to be totally amazing, all wolfish eyes and smacking lips and general craziness. Terry marches them out, and Jason hands her over before locking the door. "Oh, baby. My hero," she moans outside. "I love it when you get all military like that. Where's your guns, baby?"
Bill is barfing out Sookie's car window as they race to Lafayette's. She threatens to call Eric, if only to get ahold of Dr. Ludwig, but of course Bill's gotta bitch about that. He asks about the mysterious powers she expended on Maryann's face, but she's just as surprised by that one so she glosses past it. "It was Maryann that attacked me in the woods. Even though I don't have a scar, I could feel her there on my back when she was touching me." Honestly, the sentences that come out of Sookie's mouth. I wish somebody would make her diagram them once in a while. Bill and Sookie agree to kill Maryann, and then Bill in quick succession A) Decides to use Tara in some fashion if they can and B) Demands that Sookie hand over her wrist so he can suck on it. It hurts her. He doesn't care.
With the do-rag and the tank top, Jason's sort of dressed like Lafayette. He calls Sam and Andy out of the freezer and they do the whole thing again with checking the eyes, "If we gonna get out of here," Jason says, "We gonna need a even bigger divergence." Which, the Stackhouses, you have to love them. Of course, a keg comes flying immediately through a window, and then the zombies are right back in there. So the whole thing with the mean cunnilingus and the mustard and the nailgun accomplished apparently six seconds of calm and quiet before everything went back to the way it was, only now Jason is there and he's gotten Sam and Andy out of the freezer. Even with this pointless Benny Hill running around bullshit it's still like fifteen minutes short. I don't get it.
Terry's very spooky and in a whole other war movie now, shushing the zombies and putting down his gun on the table. "Sam Merlotte. There's no escaping, Sam Merlotte. The God Who Comes always gets what he comes for." He lights a cigarette and cocks his eyebrow: "And as for you, Jason Stackhouse. Not cool." Jason points out that no normal God would really be interested in zombie trash like the Bon Temps revelers, and Mike Spencer tosses popcorn in his buddy's mouth and says probably God will eat Jason. Or maybe they will. They laugh like hyenas, and then Sam abruptly gives some lame hero speech and stagedives backwards into their zombie arms.
They are praying super hard now, and tied-up Tara is doing it too, unceasing and freaky. Lafayette puts down his wine glass and slaps the shit out of her, but she just kind of rocks back and forth and keeps at it. "This has got to be the worst motherfucking intervention in history." There's a knock at the door and he thinks it's Sookie, but it's some V-using sorority girl who refuses to take no for an answer... Until Bill appears, scares the piss out of her, and menaces Lafayette about it. Lafayette tells him to talk to Eric about the V-selling, and makes a point of inviting Bill inside his home. After inviting him to slow his roll.
One would think Tara would be happy to see Sookie, since Sookie's been ignoring her almost entirely for, um, twenty-two episodes of this show now, but one would be wrong. "Get me the fuck out, you cunt, or I will kill you." This house is empty. Once it was home. Sookie leans in and tries to do her mindreading thing, but there's just a black cloud. All that fake civilization bullshit just fallen away. Lettie Mae is sort of fascinated, sort of astonished by the fact that Sookie is psychic, but I guess those are the little things you miss when you go on a thirty-year bender. Tara asks her to stop raping her brain, which is... Exactly what she's doing, and it's gross, and this whole thing is gross and violating, and the reason that we know that is that Bill says, "You have to go further into her mind than you ever have before," which is gross on this show, and beside the point, and simultaneously Tara notices the bandage around Sookie's wrist: "You try and kill yourself?" Which is, if you're not careful, exactly what Vampire Boyfriend is about. He could leave you cold.
"I don't blame you, with your fucked-up life," Tara spits, and Sookie pushes further into her mind, and sees the first proper Maryann orgy-orgy, with the Reese's Pieces and the dancing, and then there's a black abyss. "Abyss" is the word Sookie uses. Nobody seems to notice what that means: You never go home. This is a violation. Then Bill's like, "I've been raping girls' brains for two hundred years" and tries to give glamouring a try, and Sookie says she doesn't want to hurt her, but Bill doesn't care, so while Lafayette watches worriedly and holds onto Lettie Mae's hand, the two of them force their way into her, together. That is disgusting on every level this show has, and it's going to bite them in the ass.
Arlene tearfully thanks Sam for his service, "For giving us all this gift so that He can come into the world," as they tie him to the roof of a car. Jane cheers when the first of Jason's flares fly over; in zombievision it's beautiful. A figure stands on a car close by, with killer abs and a gas mask, with flashing lights all around courtesy of Andy Bellefleur. "Silence! It is me, the God Who Comes! Ah-ha-ha! I have come, and now I am here!" Mike's not sold; Andy remembers that the Horned God has horns, and runs off to get them. "Sam Merlotte, you are my offering! People, your work here is done. Go home!" Jane's bummed, but God is serious. "He is the best offering ever! You will all have great weather! And good crops! Now leave!" Terry calls bullshit, because God has horns, and Jason does some kind of American Gladiator shit -- my notes say "JS: power move," like that's a thing -- and Andy holds up the branches behind his head, and it's awe-inspiring and hilarious.
Sam slithers down off his other car and comes over through the crowd asking Jason to "smite" him, but Jason can't hear him through the gas mask, so Sam ends up yelling, "Smite me, Lord. Smite me, motherfucker!" So Jason smites him finally, and the lights -- which is like Andy Bellefleur and a flashlight and some PLUR -- go crazy, and Sam vanishes. Which is confusing for his fellows, amazing for the zombies, and dangerous for the fly that Sam now is. They all jump around and cheer, and Jason tells them to report back to Maryann that he's way pleased. Jane Bodehouse goes, "Thank you, God," and he says, "You are welcome." Fake gods always have really good manners. That's how you can tell.
Terry swats at Sam, who you'd think would be getting better at flying by now, and Terry atten-huts the whole zombie squad over to Maryann's house for debriefing. ("Anybody who wants to debrief me can do so right now," Jane shouts, of course.) They run off cheering, and Jason's hot body is hot some more, and we've missed it. Dang church. Then Sam wanders out ass-naked in a Merlotte's apron and spraying a fire extinguisher on all the flares they set off. Jason's impressed, Andy swears he's done drinking, Sam's clothes are...? Probably gone with the zombies, if we're doing the whole thing.
Bill goes, "Tara, you are safe here. You have to do exactly as I say." Tara stops chanting and tells him she's not his fucking slave girl. Lafayette goes, "If ever there was a time to listen to a white man, this would be it." Lettie Mae prays uselessly. Sookie finally shoves her way in, and the black slowly trails out of her eyes, and Sookie holds onto her. The first moment is comfort, and the rest is misery and terror. She remembers everything she did, and realizes that makes her insane. She's not insane, she's in crisis, which is halfway to fixed, and they fucked that right up, but whatever. Right now, she thinks she's insane, and right now she is right. You don't go home.
Sookie pets her hair and the Jesus music plays and she cries for a million years, then sees her mom and apologizes and cries for a million more years, and then sees Lafayette and cries for a million years yet, and meanwhile Sookie wigs out because she saw the Minotaur and Maryann and how it all fits together, while she was rooting around in her poor friend's skull. Tara remembers to worry about Eggs, who is just as blameless as she is and just as scared, but Lafayette assumes the worst and bars the door. Worse and worse.
Outside, Sookie and Bill put the whole Bon Temps season together in agonizingly slow detail, because that's how they do everything, and Bill flashes back to this one time in Chicago a hundred years ago when he was reading this one book and this one page was really interesting and what it said was: MARYANN IS A MAENAD WHO DRESSES UP LIKE A MINOTAUR AND PRETENDS TO BE A SOCIAL WORKER. HER LIKES INCLUDE: HOT SHOWERS IN THE AM, ORGIES, EATING EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME, SCRATCHING YOUR GIRLFRIEND ALL UP, QUALITY WEED, HITTING KARL, AND DOING A SPOOKY DANCE. ALSO DOES EVIL ACTIVITIES ON THE REG, SUCH AS CUTTING OUT HEARTS AND VIBRATING AT DOG PEOPLE OR PIG PEOPLE. He's like, "Sookie, I have a vague idea of what Maryann's about. But right now I have to run off and have a secret meeting with a secret vampire person who has many secrets," and then totally peaces.
Sookie's like, "Well, I probably should be here anyway so I can save the whole town, because when I left town things really went to shit." Like Maxine, who is now on her knees pulling on Hoyt's shirt, trying to get out of the Compton house so she can go be in orgies, heaping a thousand miles of bullshit on him and his personality and his manhood, just completely insensate to the slow burn Jessica's been working for the last however long. Hoyt tells her to be a freak, be mean, whatever, she's not going to go eat Sam at Merlotte's, and she relates that to Jessica being a "devil slut" in some way, and Jessica gets scary. "I'm getting real tired of this shit," she says, and Hoyt tells Maxine to be nice or he'll lock her in the cubby until Vampire Bill gets home. Then she punches him in what she calls his "penguin dick," which I don't even know, and calls Jessica a "vamper tramp," calls Hoyt and his father both "half men," making the two of them "a half-man and a dead whore," and how unlovable that makes both of them, and Jessica pops fang and very calmly says, "Look, lady. You have no idea how little control I have over my actions. You also do not know that I haven't eaten in days." Hoyt is put upon, because now they are both going crazy, but Maxine won't quit, so finally Jessica just zooms over and bites her. About ten hours past sainthood, but still awkward for the young couple.
The title song plays over a beautiful pool, or a moat, across which Bill swaggers in his black jacket, stepping over running water, stone to stone, on the Queen's beautiful estate. There's a greenhouse to the east, and four be-sunglassed Matrix agents in the courtyard. A man welcomes Bill into the house, which is covered in water: mosaics of waves, a coral arch, seashells. The queen is waiting for him, as she feeds; her meal's shapely ankle dangles, dripping blood. It's like coming home.