grade episode The Faces That You Meet

Recapped by Jacob Clifton · Aired 2011-08-07 · S04E07

In which the question becomes, How does my wordy-ass self manage to talk about this episode without just telling you every single thing that happened in an avalanche of breathless crazy talk? And the answer is, there is no way.

Luckily, Sookie does nothing the entire episode but fuck the shit out of Eric on every surface of her entire house and most of Bon Temps Louisiana, so that takes her out of the equation. There's one tiny conversation where Eric gets her to admit that maybe she'll be into him when he turns back into a jackass, and then they hope really hard that she'll be able to do it, but other than that it's just Fuck City. Which is fine too.

The Jesus and Lafayette essentials are, like we thought, that Lala -- like his nutty mommy before him, Marnie and maybe Baby Mike -- is a big medium, whose possession by Tio Luca momentarily gave him the witchy ability to talk you out of dying by rattlesnake bite. Back home, newfound witchdom lets him see Devil Baby Mike's voodoo friend, which: Who is she? I think an ancestor of Rene. There's got to be some kind of antidote to Arlene's "genes are destiny" thing, right?

Astonishingly, it takes all of three seconds for Sam and Luna to figure out Tommy's a Skinwalker, and less time than that for Sam to go all Slicked-Back Sam on his brother and kick him out into the street. Understandable, but trying to strangle your doppelganger -- especially one who loves you more than anything on Earth and has nobody and nothing else -- is not the wisest move.

Speaking of supernatural (amounts of) codependence, we see Debbie and Alcide's initiation into the Shrevepack. When the delightful duo accidentally walk in on Eric and Sookie's fuckfest Debbie gets some serious whiskey dick and decides Alcide is in love with Sookie. He protests, but Debbie's seen this show before so she knows it was only a matter of time. It's heartbreaking because she's actually worried about Sookie before that moment, like: Every awesome thing she does that shows she's trying means it's going to hurt twice as much when she finally dives off the wagon and into crazy.

With the boys still working their way back to Bon Temps, Tara becomes sort of Marntonia's first lieutenant. Which is fine, because she's twice as pissed after Pam's revenge move gets derailed by Fangtasia!-type lookyloos with cell phones and she threatens them both super hard. Tara sends Naomi away and resolves to kill off Toni forever, just to contain the total threat that even knowing her represents, then goes on an old-school Tara Bender that's interrupted by Marnie, who plays the vampire/rape card immediately (and plays on Tara's anger/militancy in an... eerily familiar way).

Jason has to deal with Hoyt's many feelings alone, because Jessica's off with Daddy Bill -- Hoyt still more fixated on how his BFF got raped -- so Jason just spends the night being twitchy about his feelings for his best friend's girl while Hoyt is totally trying to connect. That shit is just getting worse, and worse, and more equilateral, all the time.

Where's Jessica? Oh, girl. Watching her suffer is the very worst thing on earth, it's like if Willow Rosenberg wasn't a terrible person is how hard it is to watch. See, Marntonia's cliffhanger last week becomes spookiness as she glamours Spy Katie through Luis, then gets him to shoot Bill in the chest. (He recovers and says many speeches, don't worry). So now the Witch War is upon us, and he tells the Sheriffs that everybody in their immediate circle -- including Jess -- needs to chain themselves up with silver the day so they don't all accidentally walk out into the sunlight.

I don't know about you, but I thought he was being a drama queen! It's Bill, of course he was, but he was also right this time: Tara recruits Holly and other witches back into Marnie's Army, and it's all tied up in weird second-wave coded feminism stuff about rape and whatever, but they do a good job bringing it home without the metaphors getting too weird or gross. Like, if you thought vampires were the bad guys, now they're pretty much the victims... But if you thought the witches were being stupid, now you kind of have to hand it to them that vampires suck. Rousseauist asymmetry gives way to guerilla warfare and the witches literally Take Back The Night, with a Marnie speech that made me cheer almost as much as Russell's TV attack rant that time with the heart.

In the end, Antonia's circle wastes not a day chanting those vamps out into the sun, so in the hugest Rule 34 moment of all time, Ginger silvers Pam to stay put, Sookie ties up Eric, and Bill supervises Jessica's and his own binding. (You know how little patience I have for kink, but the fanfiction doomsday clock went well past midnight and into morning during all that business.) And, because of Bill's guilt about and love for Jessica -- during a tidy/horrific little metaphorical gloss on her living relationship with her original shitty dad -- she's not as restrained as she should be. So the episode ends with Eric screaming in his cubby, Ginger riding Pam's bucking coffin downstairs as she tries to escape, and Bill pleading with Jessica as her Maker to let him join her outside, while Jason tries to run to her rescue and gets into a shootout with the King's SWAT team... And Jessica greets the sun.

week: The Witch War pauses for parley between Bill and Antonia, we find out whether Jason saves Jessica (which: duh, you've seen a television show before), and Sookie ... probably continues to fuck her brains out. At this point, who could blame her.

Antonia, having tamed Luis in some fashion, is going to play a trick. Outside the cell, Katie is playing one of those zombie-related minigames that says you have nothing better to do than repeatedly push buttons on a device. There's a zombie thing running through this season that interests me because on the one hand it suits the themes of the season -- embodying other people's shit, trading faces, getting so focused on one activism that you forget the infinite parts of yourself that make you human -- but also raises worldbuilding questions, like, I have my ideas about why the Zombie Thing in America this last few years, and why it keeps coming back, but how does that change in a world that contains outed vampires and the VRA? Are the people of this universe dealing with our social issues plus theirs, making zombies even more relevant?

Anyhow, to Spy Katie it appears that Luis is about to eat Marnie, so she pulls out her silver-bulleted gun, but as it turns out Marnie's trick is to get the human inside the cell so that she can -- and this is fucked up and amazing -- glamour Spy Katie via Luis, actually use her takeover of his brain to take over Katie's brain like a glamour Inception, which is not only a masterpiece as far as the themes of this show but also helps sell the idea that witches are scary as hell.

So much of the Witch War is about presuming conspiracies, because nobody is around to witness every single coincidence and momentary fuckup that leads you there. Sookie has only heard about the vampire attacks on the witches, while Tara has only seen the vile things vampires can do. And it's so much easier to assume complex efforts on behalf of the enemy -- to assume that Tea Partiers have marching orders from somebody, or that the gay marriage thing is coming from one central place or PBS or whatever -- when we're all really just bumping around in the night. And once you are able to picture the other side as a mindless mass of zombies, moving with a central purpose, it allows you to shrink your own worldview down to compensate.

So you have a situation where Marnie's big selling point -- besides the bullshit about practicing her religion -- is the total terrifying asymmetry of vampire's powers over humans and how you have to raise the level of your response to compensate. Which would make them look cruel, knowing these vampires as we do, so you also have to show the ways where witch power is terrifyingly asymmetrical, and this glamour-by-glamouring is a great way to do that, because it's already an overpowering of somebody else's identity: Vampires make zombies of us all. And then to make a zombie of that...

By Jacob Clifton

Anyway, Spy Katie under that influence lets Antonia go free, then is neck-broked by Luis (no blood, she orders him; he must be clean of that), and then Antonia and Luis leave on separate errands. It's very exciting.

MERLOTTE'S

Rotting Pam terrorizes Naomi and Tara -- who have recently let the idea of Toni go, you remember -- with some racist jokes and whatever, and the second Naomi gets away and Pam grabs Tara by the throat, a bunch of lookyloos from Merlotte's pull out their camera phones and start taping it for TMZ, so Pam grunts profanities and takes off: "The moment you think you're safe, I promise I will hunt down, and fuckin' shred you like confetti." In case you thought for one second Tara wouldn't have sudden death to worry about.

MEXICO

Lafayette cradles Jesus -- the suddenly healed snakebite victim -- in Mexico, screaming for Bartolo, who is busy fucking his teenage pregnant bride. Jesus, who is feeling much better ever since healer Tio Luca healed him through medium Lafayette (again, you have a ghost within a person using their combined powers as though there is no difference between them), yells at his abuelo about going so far to prove the point, he won't be what the dark brujos want him to be, et cetera, and then their screaming match turns into a fight over Lafayette's destiny, because what Jesus and Bartolo know but Lafayette doesn't is that really this whole thing was about awakening Lafayette's powers, because they still think vampires are the issue.

Jesus: "I'm not a fuckin' idiot, he's a medium. But what I don't get is how you can risk my life just to prove your point!"
Bartolo: "Don't be so dramatic. I wouldn't sacrifice you, you're the last of us left."
Lafayette: "Wait, this is about me and I'm a what?"

SHREVEPORT PACK

Marcus the Packmaster welcomes them to the Pack with the usual beer-busting blood-smearing biker-bar pageantry, and once the party starts Alcide goes off to brood and worry about whatever manic werepanther shit Sookie was yelling about earlier this evening. Alcide apologizes to Debbie for giving a shit about Sookie, but Debbie immediately realizes they're better off as a team, and takes him looking for her. A nice move on her part that goes kind of fucked up when they immediately come upon Eric and Sookie fucking by the river. It doesn't even really matter how Alcide reacts, at this point, because Debbie is just about to lose it regardless, but he is definitely protesting just a bit too much.

By Jacob Clifton

KING DORK

How great is Bill this season? He's turning into the best character, it's so weird. Anyway, Sheriff Luis comes to visit the King in his office, and once he says the name -- Antonia Gavilán de Logroño, a name you will be hearing ever so much -- Bill goes into red alert. Not quite fast enough -- Luis shoots him with Katie's silver bullet guy immediately -- but he's so intrigued by the mention that he ends up cornering Luis on the floor. Before he can get any answers, Luis finally stakes himself, and once again Bill has a mess on his floor. Seems like more dudes bite it on Bill's property than anywhere else, and you know every drop of vampire mess on those carpets is like a thousand slivers in his vampire heart.

TARA & TONI & PAM & NAOMI

Naomi: "I changed my mind. I don't like Tara. And everything you've shown me says that you don't really like her either. Fuck her. Let's go."

But Tara's stuck now: Pam is coming for her and it's not going to be pretty, so she has to Harry & The Hendersons Naomi on up out of there and stick around to fight in some undetermined way. I confess that I don't really know what Tara's plan is, it seems like she's just going full nihilism at this point. Like that old prom dress and crimped hair are just a fifth of vodka away. In any case, it's good to let go of Naomi now that she's been assured she was something more than just an experiment. Naomi finally leaves town, and there is a great deal of sobbing all over the place.

JASON'S STACKHOUSE

Jason listens to country and does a bunch of amazing vertical pushups and tries not to think about Jessica, which is even harder for magic vampire reasons he doesn't even know about, and you can tell he's really losing it. So when Hoyt comes in with the Eeyore cloud he's been affecting of late -- ever since Jessica glamoured him, really -- Jason assumes that it's to kill him for having thoughts about Jess. Instead, it is to close ranks because they are best friends: He's got intense girl trouble, Jason's got trauma, and Hoyt's very worried about them both.

Half the unsaid things, it's interesting, are possibly involved in this conversation but neither of them know about it: They're both connected with Jessica's blood and that's throwing things off -- Jason moreso, but even less aware of how it works -- but then also I think it's possible that Hoyt is intuitively reacting against the glamour, or at least the missing moments. Those emotions have to go somewhere, even if it's just physical neurochemicals storing up in response to situations that no longer consciously exist. I always kind of thought Ginger's extreme example had to do with repressing the cognitive dissonance that glamouring might introduce. How do you know what you don't know? You can't, but that doesn't mean it doesn't buzz in the back somewhere, and if it accretes -- which it does -- that's how you get Ginger.

Jason's not so distracted that he isn't touched by all this bro effort, but flees the multivalent intimacy and questions of all of it by preparing sloppy joes for them both, explicitly: "I'd rather be cookin' than talkin', anyhow."

THE PRINCESS OF LOUISIANA

Unable to deal with any of her boys, Jessica has gone -- or possibly been summoned -- back to King Daddy's castle, where he is giving her the information on Antonia Gavilán de Logroño: How she marched the vampires out into the sun, back in the day, and is now quite seriously and demonstrably back in play. Bill, in line with his new thing of being the only competent Monarch we've ever seen on the show, has extrapolated her plan -- destroying Earth's entire vampire population -- and come up with a very dramatic solution: Go to ground and silver themselves, every known vampire in whatever radius, at least for the coming day, while working out other plans to take care of things.

Blackburn and the other Sheriffs are weirded out by this plan, of course, but it gives Bill a reason to say aloud the thing that we're meant to infer about him as King of Louisiana, which is that he takes his people very seriously and that -- against the example of Monarchs we have known -- he will be going down with the ship if he must. That somewhere between working against the Monarchy while working his way up through the ranks, he's become the kind of revolutionary that actually understands why hierarchies and power exist. Say what you will about working against the Man from the inside, I think it's fine and an outdated hippie complaint to say otherwise, but when you combine it with the kind of honor and need-for-purpose that Bill Compton was born human with, things can get very dangerous indeed.

"We brace for the Resurrection," he says, which leads right into...

ROOKIE FUCKFEST

Yeah, I'm calling them "Rookie," for about a million reasons. I hope it catches on. They say some ridiculous blood-bondy stuff to each other as they slowly fuck their way home through the swamp and onto the porch and into her foyer, and I guess it's good that Sookie doesn't really have any neighbors, because how embarrassing: "I'm listening to your heart beat. I can feel it, every pulse. Through your skin, into mine. If I lay still and think about nothing else, it feels like my own heart is beating" is not a monologue that looks good on anybody, even the eight feet of sex that used to be Eric Northman.

But it's also about healing, step-by-step unraveling and rewriting the broken story of Sookie and Bill, just as her affair with Bill rewrote the various parts of her history that helped her to heal from childhood. It's a resurrection of its own. And in any life, but especially an Alan Ball life, each resurrection immediately begins to rot around you and you must go looking for the one. But for this episode at least, it's enough that sex with Eric is the best way for her to heal.

Up for discussion, once they've worn themselves out by actually fucking their way up the stairs, there is discussion of how Eric is kind of jealous of himself because he used to know her better, and desperately needs confirmation that she wants to be with him, regardless of who he becomes, so it's like this love triangle between New and Old Eric and Sookie, who actually takes quite a mature and disclosing approach to the situation: Basically that she never would have fallen for the old Eric because he was a tool that fucked with her and everybody she cares about, but that New Eric is still recognizably a part of him.

Eric, for his part, keeps quiet about the raging monster inside him that Godric was talking about before, but I think maybe it's because that goes without saying. When his feral nature starts to poke through, Sookie will probably be able to deal with it. I mean, if it weren't for the Faerie File they found at Bill's, she would have eventually forgiven him for the assault/rape/torture on the way back from Mississippi. Of all her faults, "underestimating the bullshit vampires will do to you on the slightest pretext" has really become the least of them. Part of her/our world getting bigger was/is always about recognizing the beast in men, and negotiating around it. Sweetly, she promises him at least this: That when he turns back into a monster, she will at least try to feel the way she's feeling now.

I've always seen Sookie in part as using her combined abilities -- in the books, two different things but smartly one thing on the show -- of earth-grounded fairyness and truth-telling psychicness to negotiate a place among the supe communities as a sort of magical therapist or mediation expert. If vampires represent the twinned drives of sex and death, and weres represent the submerged animal Shadow, Sookie's place in the world is defined by her radical honesty.

It's expressed in her unbearable disability, and in her feisty "no bullshit" act, but you can see it taking shape as a real power within this universe. Who better to mediate supernatural disputes than somebody whose powers are centered around discerning false from real, magical from mundane, compassion from selfishness? If she can learn to use these things actively, a sort of living Trump XIV, there is no illusion or delusion that she can't burn through. It's the reason Brenda Chenowith was such a hot-button for me, because of the danger she represented in living that role to the extent that she ignored her own shit, and burned up from the inside. Other's people faces were transparent to her, which itself became her face.

Or compare when Bill went dark in Mississippi, when he tried to rape Lorena back and she wouldn't let him: Her face was too human and he couldn't handle the intimacy of looking at her, so he twisted her neck all the way around to prove the point and it still got her off. At the time that was about disconnection, but it's interesting because it now sort of retroactively prefigures this season's preoccupation with faces and hiding behind them. What Bill did to Lorena, Sookie does the opposite of that to everybody.

It's also the reason Maryann fell in love with Sookie instantly, and wanted only to destroy her; it's maybe the reason shapeshifters like Sam and Tara so desperately need her support all the time. It's why I'm loving New Eric, as a sort of magical LSAT or final exam, because the way he's acting is the very Last Temptation. Sookie, at least for the moment, has the option of passively giving into that silence that first attracted her to Bill, but she's not blocking out the noise of Old Eric like she would have before: She's actively trying to unite these opposites in every current moment. Neither dark nor light nor neither, but both. So I'd like to think that this moment is one of those: Not active, like Buffy or a cop, but actively gaming the entire table through her own (literally) open mind, like an alchemical sort of shamanic circuit judge.

FANGTASIA!

Well, before Pam can even think about silvering herself or going to ground -- much less get her feet under her for the attack on Tara -- she's going to need to get pretty again. The best thing that you can do on your worst day is dress up pretty, and Pam's known that longer than anyone alive. So before day falls, she summons good old gobliny Dr. Ludwig -- last seen debreeding Sookie's Jamiroquai attack -- to give her a truly horrific spa treatment. Chemical peels, injectables and all the rest give us a little bit of Real Housewives satire -- "Best I can do is remove the outside rot, you're still decomposing on the inside" -- but it's a little more compassionate than it seems, even as satire, because you have to realize that even when people define themselves by awful shit, like appearances, that's still how they define themselves. That when Ludwig says Pam will have to keep doing this every day for the rest of her existence, that there are some deals you can't unmake.

Which leads back into the other thing, the main deal of the season, which is all about faces, wearing other people's faces, scarring your own face to become somebody else. When you burn a witch, it's her face you must burn last, Jessica's first thought is to eat Marntonia's face, Tommy walks in skins, Tara gets her hair straightened. Pam's appearance defines her behavior and self-control: "I am not a zombie!" she screamed at the rubberneckers earlier tonight. If you really looked on the outside the way you do inside, would you be more beautiful? Or less?

HOSPITAL

Sam has brought dying Tommy to the hospital in whatever nearby town, and they've fixed him up. I forgot until this episode that Luna precisely said she got super sick after the first time she skinwalked, or Tommy's barfing would have made sense. Anyway, there's a list of symptoms that we'll eventually link to skinwalking, but in the meantime Sam's so worried about his brother -- having abandoned him for the housefires on his properties -- that he just wants to make him better. Tommy tries like hell to get out of there, and Sam graciously allows the personnel to feel his own forehead to prove that Mickens boys run hot, and eventually they're cleared to leave.

STACKHOUSE

Bill drops by with silver for Eric's protection tonight, knowing that Sookie will watch out for him as well as they would at the castle, and it's relatively awkward -- Eric has no problem admitting that their reunion was "a happy one," and Sookie for her part can't quite hide her gratitude to Bill for letting him go free -- but everybody's being pretty authentic and trying to avoid the true death of awkwardness, to the best of their ability.

PROM NIGHT II: HELLO TARA MAE

Well, Tara's just walking down the middle of the road drinking, as expected -- just because Jason didn't shoot this one doesn't mean it hurts less -- and nearly gets run over immediately. ("Watch out for giant pigs!") Eventually she hears a rustle in the woods and assumes it's Pam, back to kill her. She sort of impotently tosses her bottle at the sound, but it's Antonia that appears: "Oh, hell no. You're the second-to-the-last person I wanna see."

Antonia tells her not to blame Marnie for everything, and Tara takes a while figuring out why Marnie is talking about herself in the third person, but Antonia hits her with some kind of ghost-witch whammy that tells the whole story of Luis's rape and torture in a handy second. It's as close to Take Back The Night second-wave as the story's going to get, but it's effective: Tara is the only person on Earth that might understand exactly how deep Antonia's wounds go, or how you'd travel 400 years for payback.

One thing that I like about bringing Tara and Antonia together in this way -- although I could happily go my whole life without seeing Antonia's constant raping ever again -- is that it retroactively gives so much more meaning to Tara's OTT victimization last year. I never really got upset or bored by her story last year because it made sense to me, I always love the Tara stuff each year and it's been stated outright that this season is about recompense for all that, but bringing her into Antonia's Circle is a lot more powerful and a lot less glib than it seemed, back when she joined that New Orleans fight club. You know? It's nice to know that this season is willing to tell this story -- how you can only regain your power once you realize it was never really stolen -- in more than one way, because it makes last season even better.

GOING TO GROUND

While the vamps and SWATs make Castle Compton light-tight, the King and Princess are down in the cells silvering themselves. It's heartbreaking, watching him hurt her like this, and even moreso when you see where it leads her: "I used to have a whole box of silver earrings and necklaces. My mom gave 'em to me when I was 13. She said she never wore 'em, but maybe one day I could. Oh, I hope Eden's got 'em now."

As much as we talk this season about Jessica recapitulating Bill's mistakes her own relationships, there's also an interesting return here to seasons, in which Bill's role as her father by necessity recapitulates that of her own father's abuses. When Mr. Hamby chained his daughters, when he installed that beeping door-monitor that kept them locked inside, it was because he thought the night would take away their innocence. He named her sister Eden. And now, in this new Eden, Bill -- with whom she's already dismantled and rebuilt their relationship a few times, into the healthiest one of the entire show -- is forced once again to tie his daughter down.

He thinks better of the last length of chain, too pained to continue, and asks for twice the amount on himself. Maybe he thinks about how newborns are stronger, maybe he thinks about how he released her once as her Maker, maybe he thinks about those things, but mostly he's just reached the limits of what he's prepared to do to hurt the person he's become closest with in the entire world. It's always Bill's weakness toward his loved ones that fucks him up, but that's true of everybody.

Ginger injects Pam with her last treatment before morning, then pulls a swatch of silver mail across her face and closes Pam's deliriously wonderful pink couture coffin.

Sookie chains her lover up, downstairs; the last thing he asks is for her to stay with him, through the day.

I hate that somebody told me about Quentin Tarantino's foot fetish because now you can't stop thinking about it, it's like how Whoopi Goldberg has no eyebrows and now you have to think about that every time you see her face, and even moreso you have this Rule 34 situation where any time anybody gets tied up on a show, you can bet the internet will explode about how it's kinky bondage LOL, even if the people are getting tied up because somebody's robbing a bank or whatever. Cigars often just being cigars.

So I got irritated all by my ownself, watching fathers tie up their daughters and Sookie tie up Eric, hearing Pam scream "fuck me!" because it hurts so bad on her skinless face, and thinking about some imaginary giggling nerd calling it bondage and fanning themselves about the hawtness and whatever. But on the other hand, I don't know, because they're always biting each other on this show and this is the one time where it's like actually important to hurt the people that they love the most, not sexy at all, which makes it sort of bondage in the larger sense. Like I said, it's my issue that I even went there, much less that I got preemptively irritated about it, but it's still interesting to compare and contrast this situation with, and beyond, some simplistic fanfic "hurt/comfort" deal. (And even funnier, in retrospect, that I saw almost none of that among fans, in reality, when all was said and done. Making me, as usual, the worst of all.)

By Jacob Clifton

Ginger injects Pam with her last treatment before morning, then pulls a swatch of silver mail across her face and closes Pam's deliriously wonderful pink couture coffin.

Sookie chains her lover up, downstairs; the last thing he asks is for her to stay with him, through the day.

Jessica: "I don't know if I can go back to him... Bill, he loves me so much, it hurts to even think about it. But I don't love him the same. I think if I was still human, I would... But I don't have a human heart anymore."

Which is exactly what Bill said to Portia, by the way. And which he now, because he loves Jessica, must refute: "If you've fallen out of love with him, it doesn't mean that you've lost your humanity. We are, at our core, human."

Bill's shining new pragmatism has given him such a Zen high that he can even look at this new threat as a sort of cosmic justice for the bad actions of bad vampires, and how if Antonia is justified, that means they have to hold onto their human hearts even more strongly. When you compare this mature and complex response to Bill's self-hating vampirephobia of years past, it's striking how much the year without Sookie, the year of his monarchy, has changed him: Same words, opposite meaning. He's closer to Godric than you would've thought possible; it's funny sometimes just by riding the whole merry-go-round all the way around you end up where you started but also in a whole new world.

But Jessica just hears the guilt and the powerlessness in what he's saying, his dramatic laments that he hasn't done enough good before they die today, because it's what you'd expect him to say. It pisses her off: "But you have done good. You made me. And when we survive the day, I am going to eat that fuckin' witch. Startin' with her face."

As much as I side with Bill on general principal, it's a brilliant move to have Jessica voice the younger, quick-to-revenge viewpoint. In other circumstances it would be Blackburn doing this, and Pam, but putting just these two of them in a room together and having them debate this thing makes it so much more real, because Jessica rules so hard. Bill says, "We deserve this, culturally, and we'll make it right," because first blood will always go the vampires, because they're the predators. And then you've got Jessica saying, "We didn't do a fucking thing, kemosabe. This one's on Antonia." And she's right too, because as far as she's concerned, everyone she knows is about to die, blameless.

STACKHOUSE CUBBY

Eric's not doing so great, under the floorboards, and he's conflicted enough that you could almost think it's starting already. He recklessly begs Sookie to remove the silver, that he doesn't want her to remember him bleeding under silver, and she says a very canny thing: It's not the first time she's seen him this way. At the Fellowship, he willingly gave himself to Newlin so that Sookie and Godric could go free, and that was how their little family-of-three got started. Eric gets her to admit that she maybe loved him a little even at that point, and she just refuses to go there because he was so complicated back then that she has been blotting it all out the whole time, which takes him the logical step:

Eric: "Sookie, I don't want my memory back. If you can overlook the things I've done, and forgive me for them, I don't want to remember. I'm perfectly happy as I am with you."
Sookie, nearly chuckling: "Uh yeah, me too, but I'm still not letting you out."

LUNA'S SCHOOL

Luna: "You got a lot of nerve showing up here. Too bad about the educational crisis in this country, or I would call the security guys we used to have."
Sam: "I am very confused when people don't treat me like the nicest person."
Luna: "Well, you were amazingly a dick to me the other night when we fucked."
Sam: "Problem."

And then, pleasantly surprising this, they instantly put together the fact that Sam was never there, and all the barfing blood and fever of Tommy, and realize that Tommy kind of raped her. They both think about barfing, but it's not because they are skinwalkers: Just the regular kind.

MERLOTTE'S

Andy shows up for his Holly date, and Arlene exposits that -- since Terry is a Bellefleur -- they've been living at the Bellefleur mansion while their house is getting rebuilt. I would like to see more of this: Caroline and Portia dealing with the onslaught of Andy, Terry and Arlene all at the same time. You don't even need a poltergeist devil-baby to see the comedic potential there.

Arlene, because she is Arlene, instantly deluges Holly with one hundred reasons her relationship with Andy will never work out and it's obnoxious, then becomes doubly so as she remembers that she's married to a Bellefleur man and thus must except him from the generalizations she was just making. In the end, the sour note goes back to being adorable as Arlene sort of gigglingly teases Holly about her date and there's the whole "stop lookin' at me!" cuteness that happens when coworkers tease you about dating. It's great.

Not so great: The date itself, which descends into hell moments after Holly sits down, because Andy is fiending for V. I can't do the math right now but I think the last time he had any onscreen was at least the day before the full moon, which means it was at least two episodes ago. He babbles about the motel where she's staying -- it's the same place he was living with Jason during their stint as the Maryann Ghostbuster duo -- and then just wanders away into the oubliette of addiction, leaving Holly feeling foolish for getting tricked into a date in the first place.

By Jacob Clifton

STACKHOUSE CUBBY

LUNA'S SCHOOL

MERLOTTE'S

One thing that is beautiful about Antonia is her Christianity, which I get is confusing, but makes a lot of sense once you realize that, 400 years ago, there weren't witches. They were just called women. In the same way that bisexuality is a "phase" for women and damnation for men in our modern world, women's spirituality was beside the point for so long that you could act just like a witch, but as long as you did it in the red tent and kept that hair covered up, you still belonged to the Christian world. (At least up until the New World, when suddenly they decided that women's sexuality and spirituality were some interchangeably terrifying thing, and we're still dealing with the fallout from that one.)

So Antonia is taking a firm Christian tack that you might overlook if you try to connect her spirituality or intentions with Wicca, because she's not one of those. (She doesn't even really seem to have a concept of what witchcraft means to Marnie and the others, because she doesn't need the distinction between God and Goddess to prove her point that we do in the present day.) She is carrying out evangelical spiritual warfare, in God's and Descartes' name:

"Vampires are not immortal. They're only harder to kill. And that is where our humanity is our great advantage, for our human spirits are immortal. I stand before you as living proof of this very fact. I have matched my human spirit against their emptiness, and I have won."

They're zombies, in other words: Emptiness equals expendability.

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Sam surprises Tommy at their house and attacks immediately, and it's sad, but only because the actor is so good that he makes Tommy's stuttering apologies and pathetic attempts to explain how it all went down seem almost legit. But the Lunar aspect of things means it wouldn't matter if Tommy sat down and explained every moment of the last day to Sam, because that was the unforgivable one. So Sam's dark passenger shifter-self takes over, and one more time he strangles and kicks Tommy out the house altogether. Just like he does three times a season.

You even get to see Sam playing out the "assumption of conspiracy" angle that powers the Witch War, because in his formulation, Tommy was actually trying to eliminate him and become Sam: The bar, the life, the girl, everything. That once he killed their parents he became a killer, and Sam is . Which is a compelling narrative, and takes a lot of the sting out of Sam's hysteria, because it's Tommy: There's no real reason to believe otherwise, if we hadn't seen how it all went down. How tempting it would be to actually do that, if he didn't love Sam so painfully much and so poorly.

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Jason: "Sookie, are you home? Oh, hey. Why are you covered in blood and hanging out in an armoire?"
Sookie: "Dude I am very busy right now."
Jason: "Okay, well you seemed concerned that I might turn into a panther..."
Sookie: "--Aw man, my bad. You totally aren't going to."
Jason: "Thanks for the memo on that. Listen, why are you covered in blood, though?"
Sookie: "I've been tying up Eric in silver, and I got some of him on me."
Jason: "...I have to go."

She explains about the Witch War and the spell and how everybody's about to commit suicide, and as the little gerbil in his head starts ramping up toward the Jessica part of this, the sun goes black and the wind comes up and Eric starts screaming. And if he couldn't already feel Jessica, out there across the cemetery, Sookie completes the circuit for him: "He saved my life, Jason... He's not gonna make it without somebody there for him." That's all it takes -- that and a few seconds to sink in, and then he's on his way, out through the crazy wind, toward the Princess.

Out in the world, everything is going crazy. Ginger rides Pam's pink coffin like a broncho, screaming every bit as loud as her charge. Eric shrieks for the sun, Jessica and Bill strain against their bonds. It's sad in the same way that Andy is sad: They're finally being offered the one thing they can never have. And it's going to kill them. Maxine sees her neighbor Beulah go screaming out into the day, and does't even turn the hose on her as she bursts into flame. Jason gets into a tussle with one of the SWAT guys on Bill's lawn, screaming Jessica's name.

Jessica rips herself free of her chains, shrieking and calling out for the guards, and when one of them arrives, Bucky, she snaps his neck and takes his keys. She lingers in their cell for a moment when Bill commands her, as her Maker, to... The pause lengthens as you watch her push and pull inside... Not to save herself, but to free him as well. She ignores his pleas, perhaps because she's desperate to get out, or perhaps because he released her a year or so ago, but it's the moment of pause that makes it so interesting. Then she's out, and off, heading for the door, squealing with joy. In love with light.

JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps True Blood, Gossip Girl, and Pretty Little Liars for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, on Twitter, and on Facebook. IRL work appears in BenBella's SmartPop series of anthologies, most recently A Friday Night Lights Companion.

By Jacob Clifton

They're zombies, in other words: Emptiness equals expendability.

MERLOTTE TRAILER

SPELLTIME

By Jacob Clifton