Consequences Of Falling

Recapped by Jacob Clifton · Aired 06-20-2010 · S03E02

So the Fuck You Crew werewolves -- who apparently predate WWII, drink V, and have been for a long time whatever's worse than Nazis -- are working for the King of Mississippi, Russell Edgington, who has nabbed Bill to offer him a job as Sheriff of Area Two, in exchange for Queen Sophie-Anne's hand in vampire marriage. Russell is part of the gayest gay couple in all of Gaytown, and mostly what they do is run around dressed like foxhunt toffs. They're sort of amazing, not least because it's hard to out-gay the wolfed-out rough trade from last week, but somehow they manage. So after a hilarious three-course blood dinner (from the tangerine-fed sparkling aperitif to the palate-cleansing gelato), Lorena shows up, and says about three words before Bill sets that bitch on fire.

Lafayette interrupts Tara's suicide attempt and takes her to see his own fucked-up mom, Ruby Jean (Alfre!) who is being tended by the hottest man in television, Kevin Alejandro. Tara takes his point -- that their family is crazy from way back, and they are the only sane ones -- but then meets the mysterious Franklin Mott, who is in town to investigate (of course) Sookie, but seems open to obsessing on Tara as well. They beat the living shit out of some rednecks, and from what it looks like, it seems Tara's darker impulses might be telling her the best thing to suicide could be dating the dead.

Jessica gets some vamp advice from Pam, who finally finds her adorable, and then heads home to a makeup sixer from Hoyt. They continue to be the most romantic thing that ever happened in the entirety of history. But what with the dead man under her floorboards -- with whom she sleeps the first night, given her lack of options -- she's not really open for business just now. night, she heads out to buy a chainsaw, but finds the body missing and strange creaking in the house.

Sam finally meets the Mickens clan formally, and it's a lot less awful than you might expect. Mom's a shifter, Dad's "regular" but in the know, and little bro Tommy is a shifter, too. Tommy is ambivalent, even given Sam's freaky niceness and heartbreaking generosity of spirit, and possibly takes Sam on a doggie run so that he can get run over by a truck. Needless to say, there's gotta be more to the story, but having such a warm welcome was a pretty nice beat in the unending action of this one.

While Arlene continues to ice Terry out, thanks to her morning sickness and general inabilities with men, Jason and Andy do the whole father/son thing some more. Jason loves that he's not getting in trouble for the Eggs thing, but jealous that Andy's getting all the attention without the accompanying PTSD. Finally, he gets so drunk that Andy has to take him on a police call to Hotshot, a small horrific meth-lab of a town outside Bon Temps where all the people are inbred and creepy -- even the sweet ones, like Cal Norrington, or the mysterious ones like Crystal, whom Jason follows drunkenly into the woods a bit before tackling his first drug dealer.

Sookie is still pretty awesome -- chasing a werewolf into the woods at one point screaming at the top of her lungs -- but soon enough gets back to making everything, even Terry's feelings for Arlene, into a metaphor about herself. She visits Eric and cries about Bill, wounding him deeply, and eventually he comes clean about Operation Werwolf -- the Nazi werewolf drainers, whom he had a long-term grudge match back in the Godric days. In the end, she has managed to let Terry know about werewolves, and invited Eric into her home... where a wolf is waiting. Eric jumps into battle, and Sookie fires Terry's gun into the melee. Note to Sookie: It's a lot easier to cut down on how many people get murdered in your kitchen when you're not the one shooting them.

week: Alcide. Finally.

Everybody is growling! Bill tears the ear off one of the wolves, and its formerly attached human starts whining how they do, and then he turns his attentions to Coot. Don't hurt Coot! Just be satisfied with the naked werewolf bodies everywhere! You can look at that formerly attached leg shooting blood and know that somewhere, Sookie is saying your name over and over and over to anybody that will listen.

Bill's about to get into it with the Coot wolf, but then a toff rides up in foxhunting clothes, and the music is like, "Are you kidding me?" The wolf and Bill both get very uptight, and Bill vampzooms into a deep bow, so this dude -- "Your Majesty," apparently -- must be very important. The King of Mississippi himself, Russell Edgington, who is in the books sort of adorable but on this show, very scary. Coot is very upset about Bill killing all the wolves and Louie's ear, and also very, very naked.

Bill makes fun of Cooter's name, and Coot gets all uppity, but Russell is very bossy with him, and he calms down. Apparently Bill was meant to be kidnapped, but not fed on and certainly not gay-orgied during the ride over. Coot's something of an improviser. Bill's shocked and weirded out that King Mississippi is using werewolves to do his bidding, because Louisiana is classier than that. Although, as we'll see, Queen Sophie-Anne has nothing on King Russell as far as half-naked gay dudes running all over the place.

Russell apologizes for the whole road-head scenario, and the subsequent orgy of death out in the middle of nowhere, and Bill tattles about how they drank his blood, and Russell gets very steely for a moment before blowing poor earless Louie's head clean off with a pistol. He asks Bill to get on his horse with him, and then clarifies that it was an order, and then Bill climbs on and puts his arms around the King of Louisiana, and they ride off into the sunrise together. Russell is already more of a gentleman than anybody else on this show besides maybe Terry Bellefleur, and that includes the naked earless man he just executed, so I can see Bill's process here.

Meanwhile, Tara is gobbling those suicide pills for all she's worth, until Lafayette busts the door down and makes her puke. Also making Lafayette puke? Her momma and the constant evocation of Jesus that always bothers him so much. "You're too busy praising Jesus to realize your daughter's trying to move in with him." Lafayette, who has more Jesus stuff around his house than the entire movie Romeo + Juliet, is very funny about his relationship with Jesus. This is because he doesn't know how hot Jesus can be yet.

By Jacob Clifton

"With a mother like you, it's a miracle she ain't tried this years ago," he says, trying to get past Lettie Mae, and she is of course making a big old mess of herself, as is her way, but Lafayette is clear: "You've failed this girl for the last time, you hear me? Now get the fuck up out my way." Lettie Mae gets the fuck up out his way, and hangs against the wall looking all crazy as usual, and he takes the gagging screaming crying Tara out to the car. Man, Tara cannot get a break. Zombie boyfriend shot dead, unending church with her awful mom, and now Lettie Mae's even making Tara's suicide all about herself.

Sookie and Jessica are at Fangtasia! trying to get answers about that weird symbol they found on the werewolf body in Bill's car. There really was an Operation Werwolf, and it really was a Nazi commando force, but they weren't real werewolves. They sucked even more than werewolves. Eric plays it cool about the Werwolf brand, and Sookie says Bill's name enough times that finally Pam takes Jessica to the ladies' room so they can stare at themselves in the mirror. I know it's all go-go boys and boobies and Eric on that throne, but if I went to Fangtasia! all I would wanna do is watch Pam put on her makeup and say fucked up things.

Eric explains that werewolves are very secret because they are territorial, vicious, and pathologically secretive. Just like on that show Pretty Little Liars, but also just like vampires. When Sookie mentions this, Eric doesn't even have time to be proud that she said it, because he is trying to impress on her that she's likely to "Run through the streets screaming [Bill!] werewolf bait," and thus getting herself killed. This is because she is a human, and thus an idiot -- also an idiot, and thus an idiot -- but it's a problem because, as he says, her life is very valuable. I think he's trying to be nice with that, but in a way where he still has plausible deniability: Not "you are special to me" but "you have magic powers so fuck it." But just you wait, because I think that whole blood-bond thing (and maybe also the dead-Godric thing) is turning him super weird.

I also want to point out that he's telling her not to alert the world at large to the existence of werewolves, because they will kill her and/or her plan to find Bill will be stymied. So in about two hours, what Sookie's going to do is run directly to Terry and Jason and alert them to the existence of werewolves for no real reason. That is literally the first thing she's going to do.

By Jacob Clifton

Jessica asks Pam about the rhythm method of not killing people when you suck their blood, explaining that Bill is strictly teaching her abstinence-only, which again hearkens back to her whole life story and her stupid parents, and again to how Bill is also her stupid parents. "It's in the heartbeat," Pam explains, while Jessica watches her reapply her lip liner: "You feel it in the blood." Jessica loves talk like this. So then you stop. Right, right, but that's not the question, the question is, how do you stop? Jessica doesn't know any sports statistics. "I think about crying children with soggy diapers," Pam says, after a condescending grin. "Also maggots."

Pam can barely keep from laughing in Jessica's face as she turns from this parasexual birds & bees talk to the Secret Life Of The American Vampire: But what if you didn't stop in time, didn't get it all over your dress like a White House intern, if you didn't abstain, if you were a dirty whore and went all the way, without meaning to? What if -- and thanks for the tips -- you didn't quite pull out in time? What would you do about the inevitable consequences? What would you do when it started to show?

Outside the bathroom (which by the way is brilliant, covered in spooky hand-painted fairytale girls doing bad, bad things -- Alice smoking a Caterpillar's joint, Dorothy with a bottle of hooch, Red Riding Hood lying slatternly along the top of a divan), Sookie makes the unfortunate parallel to last year's search for Godric. Essentially, "I helped you find your boyfriend last year, so now you have to find mine." Eric is totally offended about that, but Sookie starts crying anyway, so Sookie wins. "Please don't do that. It makes me feel disturbingly human."

Please don't say shit like that. It makes you seem disturbingly like a pussy.

Sookie keeps the waterworks going, playing the role of a woman who still has her pride goddammit, and says that even if the whole boyfriend parallel was wrong (not to mention totally offensive!), at least she risked her life trying to find Godric, so asking Eric just to do some research and pull a bit on his infinite resources with no risk to himself is basically a bargain. Jessica and Pam come back out then, because Jessica's gotta be back in Bon Temps before dawn. But the second Sookie's back is to Eric -- rewind it and see -- those waterworks shut down like they were never there.

Eric remembers the brand, though, and we flash back to a German mission with Godric in 1945, when they were both dressed as SS officers tracking a werewolf bitch who surprised an American soldier, and fed on him. They jumped in, once he was dead, and pinned her to the wall with a bayonet, demanding to know who she served. Taking in their Nazi gear, she laughed, but the Werwolf brand on her neck proved she wasn't pretending. (Also, she calls them "fools" but it sure sounds like she says "Juden," and a thing I don't know much about is German language or Nazi stuff, so I could just be filling in the blanks.) Eric crumples the coaster with the Werwolf symbol and feels all kinds of feelings or something.

Into the Mississippi Palace of One Thousand Homos, which is like Abercrombie except they wear hired-killer black outfits, and of course are vampires. Out of an obnoxious pre-AIDS Armistead Maupin novel, and down the stairs, comes the desperately annoying Talbot, in a dressing gown and smelling of rose water and acting all Norma Desmond about everything. "You're late!" he prisses. "Sorry I'm not dressed, but we were expecting you last night!" he prances. "Fucking werewolves!" he hisses. "Let's show you to your room!" he minces. Bill can see where this is going, and starts looking for the exits, but Russell, who is every bit as intriguing and impressive as Talbot is, um, not, assures him carefully that Bill won't be leaving until he gets his explanation for getting kidnapped. The gay vampire heavies bare their teeth and undulate like it's a night at the Roxbury.

"I just redecorated the guest room," Talbot lisps. "Wait till you see the bed, Bill! It's marvelous." Remember Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary's legendary serial killer that bathed in the blood of virgins? Totally used to belong to her. If you remember one thing about Ripley's or that long-ago desire to know about real-life vampires, it's gonna be Vlad Dracul and then Countess Bathory. I always used to picture her as my stepmother when I was little. Or like a combination of her and Glenn Close, actually. I used to have nightmares about Glenn Close on the reg when I was little, but as a chronic bed-wetter I was usually lucid enough to summon Brigitte Neilsen or Elizabeth Montgomery to protect me... And that's about all you need to know about the inside of my head for right now.

The room is gorgeous, but doesn't have doors that open from the inside -- in fact, they're faced in sterling silver "from Morocco," with beautiful florettes and details so you can really see what you're missing as you fastidiously avoid touching the skin-burning metal of the door. I love, so much, the details throughout this sequence, it's all very in character for the much-beloved writer of this episode. (Raelle Tucker should write some kind of sci-fi novel or show , she's so great at this kind of crap. You like the blood gelato? Wait'll she gets her hands on Claudine!)

The room is not only silver-locked but light-tight, all the amenities including some gay vampercrombies outside to keep him in there, and answer to his every whim. Of course Bill is all about the niceties -- "Guests can leave of their own accord!" -- and whatever, but Russell says he's just there to hear a proposal. Talbot rushes Russell away to bed, since he's been getting the Bleeds lately from staying up too late, and sweetly tells Bill good night. Outside, Russell mutters darkly that he might have to "bring in the girl." I hope he doesn't mean Sookie, because so far this is the only time I've ever thought Bill was awesome and I'm not super anxious for them to get back together just yet.

By Jacob Clifton

Tara is still not into the hospital, even as Lafayette is driving her there, but her reasoning is actually really sound, and takes the form of the following syllogism: 1) She barfed up everything already, so there's no need for a pump; 2) They are going to pump her full of drugs on suicide watch and get her to tell them the truth; 3) The truth will cause them to lock her up forever, because here's the truth:

After my exorcism by a gnarled boxcar hobo/hedge witch in which I stabbed a little girl, I donned my old prom dress and nearly ran over a naked woman with dinosaur claws who -- when she wasn't deflowering shapeshifters -- occasionally sported the head of a bull. Thence, I was made privy to an ongoing social worker/carny-style intervention which included a porcine manservant, magical feasts in a huge imaginary mansion, and Domestic Violence Stew made from the heart of a girl who was sometimes a fawn. Eventually, I attained the level of High Priestess in an orgiastic cult dedicated to bringing about the incarnate return of the God Dionysus, which office I shared with my boyfriend, a zombie serial killer and avid blues guitarist. I was also in charge of carrying the giant egg.

(I will never understand people who complain about the Maryann storyline moving too slow. That shit was intense!) Lafayette agrees, but wants Tara to think about how Eggs would want her to live. Eggs, she points out, doesn't want shit. In addition, the one time in her entire life she thought she was happy -- this one hurt -- she was "a fucking zombie." So does that mean she's just broken, factory defective? Lafayette, who knows from having the deck stacked against you, points out that life is less about having problems, and more about dealing with the ones you've got. He promises to, if he must, "drag [her] narrow ass through this world kicking and screaming," and reminds her (in a radical and sort of missing-the-point reinterpretation of the text) that the Buddha said life is suffering. "Don't mean you get to check out early and leave me here." He decides to feed her, and then show her something even scarier than Maryann before her coffee.

Hoyt's brought with him some B+ and has, as usual, left behind his subtlety detector. Jessica tries to stay strong, asking what he's doing there like it's an imposition -- "It's almost dawn," she spits, like he's trying to kill her his own self. She can't look him in the eyes, so she swings her hair around and stares at the floor, desperate for somebody else to fix it. She has to be strong. He can't come in, or he'll know what she did. What he made her do. "Hoyt, you can't keep showing up leaving stuff at my door." I'll take care of it myself, like I do everything else.

"If there's one thing that I learned from this whole thing with my mama, it's that I gotta take better care of you. You couldn't control yourself!" He compares it to the dumbest and the easiest thing -- people "walking around with hamburgers on their necks" -- and she jerks away. That's not what it's like at all. He doesn't know what it's like and he never will, the way it feels so good that you can't stop. "Biting people -- getting so mad that I do bad things by accident -- that's in my... It's in my nature."

"That first kill, it's got a way of making you feel like that's all you are. But you've got to know that you are still ... capable of goodness, and of heartbreaking generosity of spirit. And if you can cling to that with everything you've got, you're gonna be all right. I promise."

Hoyt's nature tells him to go home to Maxine and do whatever his momma tells him, until he's in the grave: "We can fight our natures together!" Always a bad idea, but this time? Impossible. It's too late. She's done it now. It's her nature now.

She locks the door behind her, and he leans against it. She can feel him there, and the blood in his veins. He can't feel her heat, because she has none. And when he's kicked the door and called her name and gone, weeping -- still ignorant of what she really is, still able to believe we can fight our natures, together or apart -- she'll make her way straight to the consequences, and pull that trapdoor open, as the sun is pulling at her, just below the horizon. Pulling her down, into the earth. And it will choke her, she will gag. But she'll climb into bed beside a body, and smell for herself what she's done, and in just a little while she'll be every bit as dead as him, for awhile.

Across the cemetery Sookie makes her way through the house, alerted to the sound of footfalls, and grabs the man in her kitchen, kneeing him in the balls in the cold half-light. "Unh! My family junk!" he says, chicken leg still held aloft, and she apologizes. "It's five AM, what are you doing eating my chicken in the dark?" He shakes his head: Couldn't sleep, too many holes in heads, and Gran doing handstands in her grave if she saw her house redecorated by a maenad, so he came to clean up. "And then I got hungry," he shrugs, taking a bite of chicken. After all, he figured she'd be with Bill anyway. Her face melts, ugly-crying, and she holds out her arms wordlessly to him. It's been a night.

By Jacob Clifton

They've been cleaning awhile, the sun's in the sky at last, by the time Sookie has told him about the werewolves. "Holy shit. Bigfoot? Is he real too? Santa?" She asks him to focus, explaining that there's nothing either of them can really do. "Every sound I hear, every time the phone rings, every shadow, I think it's Bill. I keep expecting him to come through the door and say... Sookeh."

And yes, it's as adorable as you might assume. Jason offers to visit Andy -- leaving out the whole werewolf part, I'm sure for at least an episode or two -- on her behalf, explaining that they went through "some pretty intense shit together during the whole Maryann thing," which he says he doesn't technically really remember, and though I'm still a little confused about how knows what, I think he's mostly lying, because of Eggs: "And don't even think about reading my mind, because I just wanna put all that behind me."

"Come on out, you big coward! What have you done with Bill?" Sookie shouts, tearing into the woods outside Merlotte's after the seven-foot-tall V-addict Nazi werewolf. You know, like a rational person would. Terry follows, taking point and giving her some Army signals, which she sweetly tries to accommodate. Terry finds the guy's size-ten tracks, and then they end. Terry wonders if he turned himself into a bird or something, but Sookie just can't wait to reveal the existence of werewolves to every single person in the world before lunchtime, and sure enough, there are the wolf tracks -- in northern Louisiana -- and a pile of biker clothes right where the human tracks end.

Tara is, to say the least, freaking out. Why? Why, you might ask, is Tara freaking out at the moment? Well, it's because Lafayette has driven her two hours, into the morning light, to the good old sanitarium where they keep his intensely crazy mother, Ruby Jean Reynolds. He promises not to commit Tara quite yet, unless she chills out, and asks for his mother quietly at the front desk, terrified and quiet and willing to take it this far, to prove his love for Tara.

The most awesome guy on TV -- Kevin Alejandro, who eventually comes to every television show I ever recap, as if our fate's predicated entirely on how much I adore him -- is trying to get her to eat. Meet Jesus. He takes in Lafayette, and they exchange a certain look, and Ruby Jean speaks the hell up.

"Oh, that's just my son Lafayette," Ruby says, confusing Jesus, who thought her son was dead. "God killed him because he's a faggot," she explains reasonably, "But he keeps coming back. Hey," she says sweetly to her dead son, and nods toward Jesus. "This is Jesus," she says, emphasis on the first syllable, it like her sister's best friend. "He's a Mexican but he ain't raped me yet." Jesus tells Lafayette to stop apologizing for her horrible behavior, and they meet shake hands. There's something really touching about Ruby Jean's love for her dead son. She's so informally loving, and so formally hateful at the same time. He's so dead to her, and still so welcome as a visitor. Alfre Woodard is a goddamn treasure.

Jesus thanks both cousins for visiting -- although Ruby swears she has visitors all the time, "coming and going, coming and going," with that Alfre Woodard intonation that says she might not be lying about it -- and asks why her visitors, including Lafayette, won't leave her alone. Jesus puts her food in Lafayette's hands, promising Lafayette will be his hero if he gets her to eat, and she spouts some more racism, scratching at her crotch through her housecoat as Jesus leaves. Tara stares at her future, and eventually gets the Staring Problem face back from Ruby Jean, hilariously. Lafayette reminds his mother who she is, and Ruby Jean looks closer.

By Jacob Clifton

Terry Bellefleur gives Sookie a gun, because clearly what Sookie's crazy ass needs is a gun. Does she know how to use it? "I ain't that blond!" she says, checking the chamber and shoving it into her waistband. "...I've always liked you," he says after a moment, "And I'd miss you if you got killed." She kisses his beautiful cheek, and takes off to wreak some other kind of damned havoc.

So the deal with the old Mickens folks is that Melinda was sixteen when Sam was born, and Joe Lee was doing twelve ("For a crime I didn't commit!"), so she ended up giving Sam away before telling him about the pregnancy. He finally got out, and they had Tommy. She tells the usual justification you don't ever want to hear them say -- "Merlottes seemed like good people. They had money, and a big house. They said they could give you a better life. Did they? Did you have a good life, Sam?" -- and Sam says that yeah, until he was fifteen, and then he turned into Wishbone.

"Was that the real reason you gave me away? Because of what I am?" No. I mean, yes, Melinda's a shifter and Joe Lee isn't -- what Melinda, sort of heartbreakingly, refers to as "regular" -- so on the show that means there was a chance, but she did pray on it. Joe Lee, a non-shifter, tries to give Sam a speech he's no doubt given Tommy too, in his time. "What you are is special, son. You got something extra in you, you should be proud of that." Sam points out that also it sucked, and Melinda nods, saying that Joe Lee -- like Hoyt a few minutes ago -- will never really understand. They sort of sit with the idea that Sam had it rough in some unspecified way, and then Tommy makes a play for center stage, all about how he never knew he had a brother, and they get all trashy on each other, and Tommy takes off.

Ruby Jean, apparently, made Lafayette promise not to tell anybody she's been in the nuthouse for at least six months -- well before Season One of this show -- after he found her on the streets. Lafayette explains that he's -- in addition to Jason's road crew and Merlotte's -- a drug dealer and prostitute and stripper and whatever else he does because he needs to pay for Ruby Jean's care. "Only reason why I'm paying's because I hate her raggedy ass so much I don't wanna take care of her my goddamn self." Tara sees through that, since he could easily have left her to the state, but this is not about Ruby Jean. This is about Tara, who might end up like her.

"There's some darkness in this family, Tara. My mama, your mama. But they ain't strong enough to beat it. We are. We've been fucking fighting tooth and nail to survive this bullshit our whole life, and I ain't letting you give up now." She gets it -- and she does get it -- and they get funny and flirty and get out of there, back to the team of two we so rarely get to see because one of them is always high or suicidal or PTSD, because this town is bad luck for them. Lafayette's intake narrative is not so great either:

By Jacob Clifton

Why, just last night I went to the bathroom and when I came back my boyfriend had been abducted by slightly gay Nazi werewolf drug addicts. You just never know.

By Jacob Clifton

Being a prostitute/stripper/drug dealer was going okay until one john-slash-draining subject got kidnapped by the town whore and my occasional webcam stripper, who was dating a V-addict witch at the time. At this point I was kidnapped and held captive in a dungeon under a fangbanger bar in Shreveport, where I had to shit in a bucket. After nearly being killed a few times, witnessing a few beheadings, and begging to become undead, I took a short detour into Gotcha Journalism before being forced into a blood-bond with a sexually ambiguous vampire sheriff, who now haunts my dreams and has enslaved me to sell the blood of the Vampire Queen of Louisiana. I did take some time off to become one of the bridesmaids of a demigoddess, and very nearly was implicated in the murder of my boss -- who is occasionally a collie -- but mostly I've just been assisting in various vampire schemes, which beats the hell out of being found dead in Andy Bellefleur's car.

"All right now, let's get the fuck up outta here, it stinks in here. But hooker, if you ever try to pull the shit you pulled last night again, I swear your ass is gonna get a room to Ruby Jean. And I'm gonna make sure the motherfucker spooning your peas ain't half as hot as Jesus. Is you feeling me?" She is. And are they clear? They are. He does a complicated set of very gay moves, tosses no less than three Jesus-seeking glances over his shoulder, and they head back to Bon Temps.

Sam tries desperately to bond with Tommy, which is clearly the right call, but Tommy is impenetrably trashy, and he can't seem to get in there. He tries the big-brother thing, the abandoned-teenager thing, even the unwitting-shifter thing, but Tommy won't budge. Eventually he realizes Tommy's honestly afraid Sam's there to disrupt his [clearly very grody, scary] lifestyle, and promises he's not there to take anything away from him. Having nothing to give, and a girl-butt to boot, Tommy strips off his clothes and prepares to go running through the forest -- after a snort at Sam's cutie-pie dog form -- in the shape of an adorable/snarly bulldog, revealing in the process some horrific scars all over his body which he will only explain thusly: "I used to get in a lot of fights." (Grody! Scary! Bad things! Arkansas! Avoid the Mickenses!)

Jason finds the weirdest things to be jealous about, but in this case it does seem kind of unfair that he's getting the bullet-hole PTSD hallucinations while everybody else is falling finally at Andy's feet. Maybe, Jason thinks yet again, he deserves to be in jail. "I keep trying to do good all the time, but all I ever end up doing is just hurting people."

(Screwing every girl in town was going alright until they all started screwing vampires too, at which point my sexuality got a little confused and I started to think I was a serial killer. Once that turned out to be untrue and my sister cut off his head with a shovel, I turned to drugs, first with a transvestite prostitute of my acquaintance and later with a pretentious Wiccan. About a month ago my vampire father-figure -- whose blood I was draining for my own sexual gratification -- got blown up right in front of me and I woke up in bed with yet another corpse, so I joined a paramilitary cult in Texas and eventually fornicated with my new evangelical father-figure's wife, who shot me in the nuts with a paint gun. I got back to Louisiana just in time to stage the annunciation of the Horned God incarnate, but ended up becoming the zombie slave of a minotaur. Now I've blamed my first murder of father-figure number three, and mostly what I do these days is see bullet holes in people's heads, which is just real hard on my boner.)

"You're a good guy, Stackhouse. You got a lot of heart. You're prettier than most girls. If you just applied yourself right, you could accomplish almost anything." Which, Andy swears, is the reason he's babysitting Jason and keeping him from turning himself in. Jason cranes over the table and holds Andy's head close to his breast: "I love you, Andy." Andy's been getting a lot of that, but he means it. "You're my best friend," Jason says, which Andy points out is just sad. For everybody.

Sam chases Tommy through the forest and onto the road, having the time of his life, until Tommy waits just long enough to lure Sam out in front of a truck, and then shifts easily into the form of a bird, flying out of harm's way. A suddenly human Sam finds himself rolling in the dust, victim of a near-murder by his trashy new brother.

A stranger in very pointy boots and split-cuff jeans breaks into the Compton house while Jessica's out, rifling through Bill's office until he finds a very secret drawer, and in that drawer is a very secret file, and in that file are secrets about Sookie Stackhouse not even Sookie Stackhouse knows: Clippings from her childhood, photos more recent including one in her Merlotte's uniform, even a genealogical chart going back many generations, with just two names circled: Adele's husband Earl, and Sookie's own. (Hmm.)

By Jacob Clifton

So yeah, I'm not sure I understand this, but I'm not sure we're supposed to just yet. Like old Europe, vampire marriages are dynastic and serve to consolidate power. I'm still unclear on why Bill can help with this -- unless Russell's still trying to figure out why Sophie-Anne values him so highly -- but moreso I'm concerned with his saying that the kingdoms will cease to exist altogether. I mean, how many vampires are there really? I'm sure a lot of kingdoms are like twenty people -- all continually bowing to each other and acting all snippy and weird and bugging each other's houses and whatever -- so why go about it this way?

It's a very fucking Anglo-Saxon crowd over at Merlotte's once they start applauding Andy's murder of that young black drifter. Jason drunkenly takes in the media attention on the TV, and then the actual clapping of the many white people of Bon Temps around the bar, and something sort of snaps and before you know it he's standing on the table, looking down at Andy, giving a little ridiculous speech (any speech that concludes "you're the wind beneath my wings, man" is a bad idea) Andy shoves him back down in the booth. "You got nothing to be embarrassed about," Jason whines: "You shot the bad guy. Right in the head! Everybody loves you!"

By Jacob Clifton

Sookie waits around in her house with her knees jangling and Terry's gun in her hand. I actually feel for her even more than in this episode: Being told to sit still and wait to get killed can be hard, especially when you're nuts like Sookie. What's that noise? Just Eric, standing on the other side of her front door. He knows that the werewolves came, but probably not just how Stackhouse crazy she got about it. She fronts, as usual, like she's Iron Man: "Just one. This morning. He took off before I could get anything out of him." Like that was the problem: His stealth! Not the fact that he could literally pick his teeth with your bones, no, he was just too cowardly to face your five-foot blonde wrath. But of course Sookie doesn't give a shit about her impending murder by a roving band of Nazi werewolves on V: Does Eric know anything about Bill or not.

Okay, so what happened back in 1945 was that Eric was so intent on finding out who was behind this (pinned-to-the-wall, remember) werewolf lady's group that when she offered to tell him in exchange for some blood, he was down. Godric was there, telling him that's totally gross, but something about this particular thing was just too important to Eric, so he ignored Godric's request (not order, see) to honor the blood, and fed her. She laughed and said her herr was a vampire, and then, all keyed up on V, ripped her arms free of the bayonet and dagger, and got ready to kill Eric. Godric snapped her neck, and they were totally tense because Eric still hadn't learned to master his emotions after all this time, but at least they knew it was a vampire running Operation Werwolf, and Godric promised they'd find him.

By Jacob Clifton

Sookie, of course, wants to know why in this flashback Eric and Godric are wearing SS costumes -- it's hard to consider either of them a sex object when they do that, unless you're really sheltered and/or shitty -- and essentially I guess these guys, the Fuck You Crew, were Nazis at that time but aren't like because of that. "This pack dates back a lot farther than the Nazi Party... They're much more than that. These are not ordinary werewolves, they're organized, well-funded, highly trained, and fueled by vampire blood." So they're like the trash that trash threw out, essentially.

Sookie wonders why Eric didn't just tell her this tender tale of woe last night, not that it means all that much since we still don't know why Eric was being so intense or who the vampire in question -- Russell? -- even was, but then she doesn't know who Russell is either, yet, so I guess that horrible idea will see light in a later episode. Eric admits that he wouldn't mind if Bill vanished forever, but he's "risking everything" to tell Sookie this incredibly vague and elliptical and not-very-helpful vignette in order to satisfy his debt to her, now that Werwolf is after her.

Eric makes like he's leaving, after all that enigmatic (even for him) this-and-that, but he's not leaving: Sookie's going to invite him in. "So I can protect you. Or have passionate primal sex with you. How about both?" Sookie, hilariously, instructs him not to try and distract her with nasty talk, and he smirks that he already has, but then there's her engagement ring right there on her finger, and he's like "Dang."

Warm blood bisque infused with rose petals is the dish in Mississippi, and Russell's waxing on about the natural gas resources in Louisiana, the music, the general excitement of stretching beyond one's borders. Not to mention Sophie-Anne, whom he characterizes as a "delightful eccentric" before Talbot rudely compares her madness to that of "a monkey on a trike." Russell gives Talbot a tiny little smackdown about saying everything we think, and goes on. "For a number of reasons, she's incapable of managing her Queendom." If he knows about the money, then, wouldn't he also be able to figure out the V scheme? And why did this show make her so sucky and weird?

Andy tells Jason to stay in the car, which as a Stackhouse and an idiot (redundant?) he is duty-bound to eventually disobey, and there's a whole fight with Kenya about "his town" and how "his town needs him" and "whatever happens in his town" and whatever, and she points out that there aren't any TV cameras to catch the speech, so shut up. Her partner Gomer Pyle, almost incomprehensibly, "You sure did sound smart on the TV, Andy!" He is distressing.

Also distressing: Poor old Calvin Norris, patriarch of Hotshot Louisiana, shirtless with hands in the air and looking like he was born to be in every episode of C.O.P.S. ever filmed. He starts throwing a real trashy little fit -- "get off my land" and "fucking pigs" and that sort of thing -- and there's a whole loud complicated bust, and at some point Jason sees a blonde girl (Crystal Norris) headed into the woods, and of course goes off to see and I'm assuming bone her, and then suddenly he's back in the thick, having successfully caught a runner from the back of the compound: His first drug dealer. Note, please, that despite being nearly as naked as a Nazi werewolf, his ears remain firmly attached.

Outside Merlotte's, Tara's drinking Wild Turkey straight from the bottle. Guess Lafayette got busy? A couple of rotten-toothed rednecks come giggling out of the bar, talking about sex in a vague gross way before one of them notes that they're standing on the spot where "Andy put that serial-killer nigger down." Tara takes notice of this, but once the other one starts pissing on the spot where Eggs died, she gets into it with them. After one big punch sends one of them face-first into a nearby car, she's reminded that she's "the one who went and fucked a killer," also that she is a "bitch," and just when you think she can't possibly take both of them out, even drunk -- that this is about to turn on her in an ugly way, like everything else that ever happens to her -- Pointy-Boots (Franklin Mott is his name) shows up and bashes the more broken one down for the count, holding up the fresher one by the arms so he can apologize.

"Serial killer weren't enough for you? Now you gotta go fuck a goddamn vamper too?" She punches him, and Franklin again urges the man to apologize. He is not interested. Tara bashes him again, and again, back and forth, and the blood starts to flow, and she loses herself, and Franklin Mott's fangs come out, and he moans while she punches, again and again and again. It feels good.

By Jacob Clifton

Instead, pointy boots with slit-cuff jeans comes sliding up to the bar like Thomas Cromwell, all full of ill-gotten information about Sookie, like where she works and who her best friend is. Tara tells him she's not a waitress, she's a bartender, and she's not working, she's just there trying not to kill herself. How's that going? "Well, I'm still alive." He grins and flirts. "Makes one of us." Her eyes go grossed-out and angry, but she can't look away from him. Last time she looked in their eyes...

Tara finally gets him a TruBlood, although the microwave's busted and all they have is B+, and asks him if he's a friend of Bill's. He isn't. And she? Fuck no, she thinks. "Not really," she says.

Jessica's consequences have vanished once she gets back home with the chainsaw. So what happened there? She doesn't know she's had a visitor, but with the show we don't necessarily know it was Point-Boots that took the body. Maybe he woke up, after a couple days; maybe that blood she poured into his dead mouth worked. Maybe it's a virgin birth after all. Or maybe this is Agnes Of God, and somebody else cleaned up her mess. Either way, her consequences are only just beginning.

Very drunk now, Jason's getting loading into Andy's cop car -- front seat, for the first time ever -- when he gets a call to Hotshot. Now, Hotshot is to Bon Temps as Bon Temps is to Shreveport. Chillingly tiny, impossibly insular. (In the books she always describes it as a collection of shacks organized around a single crossroads, and how the inbreeding is just a known and shivery fact.) So after some of Dispatcher Rosie's usual dumbness, we learn that Kenya's busting a meth lab, and Andy takes old Jason down there with him. Kenya yells at Andy for showing up when he's off-duty, and twice as much when she sees Jason in the car, playing with the CB.

By Jacob Clifton

Blood gelato, for dessert. Russell explains that, regardless of what Bill says, it's clear that Sookie is right up in the middle of his shit. He killed Longshadow, he honestly loves her, he'd take down a regent if he had to, for her. Russell finds this somewhat romantic, but you know who doesn't? Fucking Lorena, who appears in a riding outfit complete with crop, and almost completes a sentence about Bill's delusions of humanity before he... Picks up an oil lamp from the mantel and, um, totally sets her ass on fire. Like she goes whirling and screaming into the foyer, totally on fire, and everybody's like, "Damn."

Moms are fucking getting it this week, aren't they? It was a cute outfit, too.

By Jacob Clifton

Eric makes a gentle sort of fun of Bill and Sookie and how queer they constantly are, and Sookie's not feeling that, but she's not interested in letting him inside either. She'd rather listen to him be all petty and silly about marriage and whatever -- even the digs about how she'll get old and die and Bill will be just this boring and elderly-acting forever and ever -- than invite him in, because who knows what would happen ? "One minute you lie to me, the minute you ask me to trust you. You do something generous and selfless, and then you follow that up with something nasty or downright cruel."

Eric hears something, and asks suddenly and intensely for an invitation, shoving her up against the door, hand at her gullet. "Invite me in," he says, and she whines that he's being rude, but he fangs at her and something in his eyes changes her mind. "Mr. Northman, will you please come in?" she whispers -- she's so funny even when it's serious, I love her -- and he goes inside, where there's a wolf waiting. Eric and the wolf rush at each other, and clearly there is going to be yet another murder in Sookie's house in about a minute, but first Sookie fires her gun into the middle of things, and the screen goes black.

week: Talbot gets the Lorena marks out of the foyer's marble, Tommy keeps fighting Sam for his creepy fucking family, Jessica's corpse-baby gets found, the weirdest sex that has ever happened on this show, Alcide finally shows up, a way-cheesy were bar, and... The second-weirdest sex that has ever happened on this show.

Check out this interview with Joe Manganiello, a.k.a. Alcide on True Blood.

Discuss this episode in our forums, then see why vloggers Val and Beth discuss vampire pregnancy in TV is the Answer!

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