My Early Life

Recapped by Jacob Clifton · Aired 08-26-2012 · S05E12

With Faerielande vulnerable and Jason out of commission, Sookie and the Fae fight Russell and Steve. Or rather, they shoot Russell full of fairyfarts and Steve zooms off into the night, and then Eric and Nora show up just in time for Russell to die the True Death.

With Nora obsessing on Sookie-as-snack, Jason wakes up with a giant knot on his brain and ongoing hallucinations of his parents yelling at him to kill all vampires. Luckily, that's what Eric wants him to do: Tara, Sookie and Jason accompany the Godric Twins for a full-on assault on the Authority to save Jessica and Pam -- as well as Bill, of course, from his Lilith craziness.

But you know who's just fine with the Lilith stuff? Old Bill Compton, who takes all episode manipulating Salome into accidentally killing herself so that he can become vampire Jesus once and for all. After an entirely sympathetic speech about his entire character arc over five seasons leading directly here... He does. The season's last image is a blood-drenched Bill, reborn as something feral, with Eric and Sookie in flight.

...Which is the only real conclusion you get, from any of the storylines. After a lot of plotty sneakiness, Luna skinwalks into the form of absent Steve Newlin -- only to be shanghaied into a mea culpa for the frat house massacre on live TV. Of course, she breaks down and flips back into herself (and possibly death) just long enough to put both the Vampire Apocalypse and maybe Shifters on shout.

Along with Sam, another possible Season Six single dad debuts, when Andy Bellefleur finds himself the father of faerie quadruplets and Maurella totally disinterested in co-parenting. While the birth scene was, frankly, amazing -- weird in every possible way, with Jane Bodhouse, Arlene and Lafayette as the three Wise Men -- it's even more exciting to see what midwife Holly plans to do, now that her boyfriend's magic babies mean a possible Brady Bunch-sized blended family.

Eric, Nora, Pam and Tara form a little family of their own -- although, in family fashion, not without some steamy incestuous makeouts. Much to orphaned Jessica's glee, Pam and Tara clench in a liplock that feels much more earned than it should; even Sookie seems impressed. And over on the werewolf side of things, Jackson supplies his son Alcide with the primo V necessary to take out JD for good, leaving him Packmaster of a broken band of drug addicts -- the image of Rikki, ODing on V and sweating blood, was indelible -- with only Momma Martha as his second in command.

So that's how we leave Bon Temps: With the Authority completely murdered (even Chelsea and Roslyn end up dead) and a new vampire God ascendant, Sookie still "promised" to the ever-unpresent Warlow, Jason nursing some kind of brain injury, faeries safe for now and a whole new global situation ready to unfold summer. While some stories petered out (the ifrit) or basically never mattered (Lala; those fucking werewolves), it's funny that many of the seemingly aimless ones -- Luna and the Obama shootings, for a huge example; Jason's Warlow-and-Jessica centered vendetta for another -- ended up tying the season together (such as it was) in some vastly unexpected ways.

While it might be preferable to have had the season complete unto itself -- and it bears reflecting whether, thematically, that isn't exactly what we got -- this definitely made for a raucously jumbled, exciting prelude to Season Six. Frankly, the real majesty of Bill Compton's life and death, and horrific rebirth, ended up being powerful enough to make up for a lot of it. There's no telling where the show's heading from here -- and when compared with the light-tight box of nonsense that snapped closed around the Magick Box this time last year, that's a pretty good feeling on its own.

PREVIOUSLY

The Authority has murdered their ally within the government, and everybody seems to have forgotten that part. Somehow, footage of Steve and Russell eating a fraternity has made it to the public. After the factory bombings, newborn vampires are running around all over the country, attacking werewolf and regular trailer parks everywhere. Pam and Jessica have been remanded to the Authority Compound, which Sam and Luna have also infiltrated in search of little Emma. Lilith has been forcing some kind of intra-Authority competition to see who gets to drink all the Her and become Vamper Jesus. Andy's faerie fling has some big news for him, and Jason is now suffering a head injury after a complicated faerie plot managed to get the Elder killed, and also give Russell access to the Fairy Fugee Dimension.

DINNER

All the faeries, including an intermittent Sookie, blast King Russell Edgington through a pandimensional doorway is in the shape of the green goblin truck-face from that movie where the trucks were alive and very angry. It makes him giggle, but possibly is microwaving him from the inside out, as he pushes his way through the cheap-looking fairy blastation. I guess we'll never know the real effects, though, because Eric shows up and finally stakes Russell like he's been trying to do for thousands and thousands of years. Steve's long-gone, for the season. And now the King is dead.

Sookie: "Jason! She threw you like a mile through the air!"
Jason: "Momma? Daddy? I guess I have a head injury that's making me hallucinate our dead parents and also think it's my Season Two storyline again."
Sookie: "Oh, good! That should be really interesting and fun."

Nora: "All I know is, I'm going to eat that little blonde girl with the tits."
Eric: "You will not feed on Sookie. She's merely a waitress. Whose fear is why we're here, and is the reason I got to kill Russell -- thanks, by the way -- and whose house I own. She took care of me when I was a baby-man. We fucked in Narnia. It was even gayer than my storyline with Bill this season."
Nora: "That's a lot of kooky information, but I'm gonna eat her though. Eat her face!"
Eric: "Thank God I fucked the interesting back into you."

AUTHORITY

Lilith: "Bill! Salome! Whoever! Come drink the Me!"
Bill: "I am too busy being officious and shitty and dorkier than I've ever been -- for almost the entire episode -- but stick a pin it that."
Lilith: "Okay, I'll just be over here with blood all in my pubes."

By Jacob Clifton

Sam: "Hey Bill! Funny how I'm always naked in your bedroom, huh?"
Bill: "Vampire guys! This is not breakfast, this is a shifter!"
Sam: "Oh, so now you don't eat shifters? Every episode I try to get murdered, and I'm never good enough."
Bill: "Just please don't try to talk me out of going crazier than I ever have."
Sam: "No, this is about me. My girlfriend's werewolf daughter got gay-adopted by a..."
Bill: "Oh, I have no interest in that storyline. I guess I should probably kill you now though, since you know information."
Sam: "Like how you have a bunch of naked humans downstairs for breakfast? Yes. Other information I have is, I have magic powers that could solve literally any problem on this show, and I never use them ever, so..."

Sam turns into a housefly and spends the rest of the episode flying around that way looking through a honeycomb lens and having such repetitive experiences over and over that it's like something out of a movie about recurring nightmares. Bill bops around all over the place trying to catch him for like one second and then realizes that it's cutting into his "bitching at everybody" time, so he just blows Sam off for the time being.

FANGTASIA!

Nora: "I cannot stop thinking about that faerie girl of yours. How is it that in five years of this show, people have only just started being able to smell her like this?"
Eric: "Ambition is unattractive in a woman of your beauty. Let's talk about Godric."
Nora: "Yes, forever and ever."

Tara: "Hey, you must be my Great-Aunt Nora, nice to meet you."
Eric: "Be nice to this one."
Nora: "I didn't even like Pam that much -- you know, the daughter of yours that I never met and doesn't know I exist? -- so why..."
Eric: "First, Tara's family. Second, she never stops yelling about everything all the time, so you wanna stay on her good side."
Tara: "So they got Pam."
Eric: "Well, we are definitely going back into the Authority that we just left ten minutes ago then."

STACK HOUSE

Sookie: "Jason, you look fucked up in the membrane. We should go to the ER."
Jason: "Why would you say that, just because I keep talking to dead people that aren't there, and they keep telling me to kill everybody?"

The Godrics immediately appear without knocking, because A) Vampires are rude and B) Eric still -- to Racist Ghost Corbett's shame -- owns Adele's house.

By Jacob Clifton

Sookie: "Tara! Can we be friends again yet?"
Tara: "Whatever."
Jason: "Oh, man! I totally forgot you died last week and got turned into a vampire and now you're a stripper. That whole thing just slipped my mind."
Tara: "Again, whatever."
Ghosts: "Faaaaangers! Raaaaaacism!"
Jason: "I know. Just wait until I'm like ten percent more crazy."

Eric: "So we just busted out of the Vampire Vatican after trying for about ten episodes in a row to escape, and we're wondering if..."
Nora: "Heeey there, Sookie..."
Eric: "-- Quit. So we're wondering if you'd like to come with us to go immediately back there."

Jason: "Will I be allowed to kill vampires?"
Eric: "Baby, you can kill 'em all."
Jason: "I'm in. Sook?"
Sookie: "Um, maybe. But why?"
Eric: "Right, sorry. They have Jessica, whom you love, and they have Pam, whom I love..."

(Tara: "-- Me too. The only thing more inevitable than the two gay characters on this no-longer-very-gay show getting together is the two bisexual chicks that wear leather. Pretend to be shocked by this shit later. Also, I'm going to passive-aggressively remind you several times that you owe Pam for bringing me back to life, for which I'm still acting like I resent you, even though I totally don't, basically because I like to hurt feelings.")

Eric: "Oh and PS, Bill has joined an apocalyptic death cult and might be bringing about the end of the world and I was thinking, if I show him you, maybe he'll turn back into a total pussy."
Sookie: "That does sound highly likely. Sold."

AUTHORITY

Bill: "[The longest, bitchiest, cuntiest speech about how the vampire guard people can't catch even a housefly, which asks us the question, Why the fuck would you pick to be a vampire guard and get pissed on all night by the sucky likes of sucky Bill Compton when you could be out in the world being a vampire, having sex forever and ever, until the end of time.]"

NEST BEHAVIOR

Salome: "Have you seen Chancellor Candyman? I need to murder him real quick."
Bill: "That's so weird! I was just murdering him earlier."
Salome: "Any particular reason? Because there's like three of us now in the entire Authority, and Barb is too lovely to kill."
Bill: "Lilith has been appearing to him and telling him to kill us both and become Vamper Jesus. So I said nuts to that, and killed him."
Salome: "Huh. She was saying the same thing to me and I forgot to mention it to anybody that she's been bugging me since last week, pretty much nonstop."
Bill: "Me too, and I also forgot to mention it. But it's no big deal, because she just said to tell you that you're super pretty. And also that you are Vamper Jesus."
Salome: "Thanks for passing along that message! You're a really good friend. Let's have lots of sex."
Bill: "I love having sex with you because of your amazing personality."
Salome: "Ditto."

Salome: "Any particular reason? Because there's like three of us now in the entire Authority, and Barb is too lovely to kill."
Bill: "Lilith has been appearing to him and telling him to kill us both and become Vamper Jesus. So I said nuts to that, and killed him."
Salome: "Huh. She was saying the same thing to me and I forgot to mention it to anybody that she's been bugging me since last week, pretty much nonstop."
Bill: "Me too, and I also forgot to mention it. But it's no big deal, because she just said to tell you that you're super pretty. And also that you are Vamper Jesus."
Salome: "Thanks for passing along that message! You're a really good friend. Let's have lots of sex."
Bill: "I love having sex with you because of your amazing personality."
Salome: "Ditto."

SHIFTERS

Luna: "Man, I just hate that you are a werepuppy and not a shifter kid, because we could totally just turn into rhinoceroses right now and bounce."
Emma: (Adorbz.)

Sam: "I'm back! Okay, Bill has lost his motherfucking mind, which explains why he tried to eat me for breakfast. So I'm gonna spend the rest of this episode flying around aimlessly while you figure out a plan."
Luna: "So pretty much just like every other episode with us?"
Sam: "Don't be scared, baby. I'm going to protect you. By doing nothing at all."
Luna: "So pretty much just like... Ah, fuck it. Good luck out there."

VAMP JAIL

Jessica: "So, long story short, Bill and Eric are religious fanatics. Like, you know my whole family? Like that. My Uncle Henrickson once actually broke off from a cult that was already a breakoff of a cult to start his own cult. This was in Salt Lake."
Pam: "Bill yes -- he's been looking for something to feel guilty about since he was born the first time -- but not Eric. He's being tricky somehow."
Jessica: "But nest behavior! I can see it in their eyes. Bill's talking about vampire apocalypse and making everybody read his Crazy People Bible..."
"You know how crazy feeds crazy? They want to conquer the world, and they're just crazy enough to do it. And it doesn't matter how many people get hurt or killed," she says. In case you were wondering when this shit was going to get so heavy-handed and simple-minded that it fell apart right in front of you:

By Jacob Clifton

Which, okay. Yes, a theocracy is a bad thing. And any church that looks forward to the end is not a church you should be involving yourself with. And you can use belief to justify anything, and people often do. But that's true for everything, and every tool's a weapon if you hold it right. It's the same immature, concretized view of religion that says things like this that the monsters you're talking about hold. The only difference between a crazy Christian and an obnoxious atheist is that a stable person of faith knows to shut up about it and the other two don't, so they're still fighting a fight that started when they were kids. They've had no reason and no opportunity to learn what religion actually is, which is something that has as much to do with the literal existence of God as the concept of music does to a 1984 Rockwell cassingle.

So you have two people who don't know what they're talking about, yelling at each other forever and ever and each thinking that it gives them the moral upper hand: When you're talking about the culture war, you're talking about this. People who do believe in Santa Claus fighting with people who don't believe in Santa Claus, and the rest of us -- who know that whether Santa Claus exists is the least important or interesting part -- wishing the hugest parts of our social and political lives didn't rest on the gamble of which kind of stupid is going to win this round. When you don't know anything, everything is up for debate, which is why a cartoonish scenario like this Sanguinista stuff has been making everybody look bad all season: It takes the false equivalency bullshit, and makes it real. The truth is, religion is purely a force for good in this world. It's the rest of this shit that makes it stink so badly.

Jessica: "Eric and Bill weren't even gonna warn Sookie Russell was coming!"
Pam: "[Reprise of one-note Sookie joke.]"
Jessica: "...According to their Vampire Bible, she's an Abomination..."
Pam: "[Same again.]"

But it's the same question everybody confronts in this episode, some to their detriment and some to their victory: You spend all your time arguing about the cup, you're never going to see what's inside. Especially if that's somewhere you couldn't point to if you tried.

JACKSON'S TRAILER

Alcide: "Even though I just joined the Shreveport Pack about sixteen minutes ago and never hung out with him, apparently being abjured by JD has ruined my entire life and now I just sit here behind your four-foot anti-vampire rabbit fence cooking huge sides of meat and talking endlessly about our inscrutable history nobody cares about."
Jackson: "What's weird is that the difference between how good you look in a shirt and out of it is way more miniscule than you'd think. I'm just saying you can wear some motherfucking clothes, son."
Alcide: "Vanity is my reward in this lifetime. Do you have any idea what it takes to look like this?"

JACKSON'S TRAILER

Herveauxes: "We dare anyone to care about any of this!"

Finally, Momma Martha shows up. As happy as we are to see her always, this time especially. I realize saying this about a werewolf risks underplaying the intensity of my meaning, but Jackson Herveaux is one of the least interesting people ever to appear on this show.

Martha: "Remember that one chick? Your girlfriend?"
Alcide: "No. Wait, yes."
Martha: "Well, she's in my back seat puking and shitting herself, so do you have a minute?"

Rikki goes the full Gia on them, laughing and humping things with her butt, Alcide with her butt for example, and getting mean and screaming and then giggling and shaking all over like an old sick dog and doing handstands and whatever, walking right up a wall and flipping over, things of this nature. Turns out a crack-fueled JD went full paranoiac about the Holy Vampire War and is now just force-feeding the whole Pack on V and Monster Energy Drink and getting them riled. Who does that? Who looks at a bunch of werewolves in a barn they never leave and is like, "This needs to be trashier."

STAKE HOUSE

With Tara, Eric and Nora in top-of-the-line travel coffins (like from the hotel that one season, the ones that look like iPods) in the back of the truck, Jason and Sookie raid the Stake House for vampire-killin' supplies. It's hard to pay attention to everybody because he's still hallucinating the ghost parents, but basically he tells Sookie one hundred times that he is a one-man anti-vampire army and he's never going to stop killing them once he starts, because he has a brain injury pushing on his sweet little brain and making him a kill-crazy person in medical trauma, and instead of hearing him say any of this his sister just kind of pouts and acts more Sookie Stackhouse-y than she's been in a while.

By Jacob Clifton

Alcide: "Wait, you mean if I could have got some of this into JD we could have had a real Packmaster competition? Fair and square?"
Martha: "He was a good wolf, once."
Alcide: "So was my dad. Seems like mostly what werewolves talk about is how they didn't used to suck, but now they do. Makes me wonder what we'll be talking about say a week from now."

Rikki: "By the way, thanks for the Fuck & Run, you chump."
Alcide: "I just have a lot of feelings."
Rikki: "Whatever, that's clear. So what happened was, he held down all us girls and poured blood into our throats and did some rapes*."
Alcide: "Man, if only I weren't so against drug abuse I would do some V."
Jackson: "I clearly have better V than what your girlfriend's shitting into my couch stashed all over this trailer. Look at me."

*(Why? Because it's True Blood. There's always gonna be rapes.)

SAM

Flies around. Finds Steve's room eventually, and makes up a plan of some kind. What is it? Well, what do you think it is? Luna's a skinwalker with access to Newlin's clothes and a boyfriend who is somehow risk-averse and foolhardy at the same time.

MERLOTTE'S

There's a fairly delightful scene in which Lafayette, at the end of the shift, brings Cajun margaritas to Holly ("Oh my Goddess," she says, just in case you forgot one of her two traits she has) and Arlene. They are so good that everybody is adorable, even Arlene, and everybody dances around enjoying his delicious witchy cocktails.

My friend Erik was like, "They're being too awesome. He's going to have a demon face or a smoke monster is going to eat them in a second." As though she heard him say this, Maurella immediately appears with Andy on her arm and her fairy belly full of belly-fairies. Oh, and Jane Bodehouse is at the bar, drunk but looking wicked cute. She must have had a makeover during that time I thought she might be the Dragon because she is looking great. Still ruint, yes, but better than she ever has before.

Andy: "Can you hang back while I get the shit kicked out of me by my witch girlfriend?"
Maurella: "Cool. I'm going to pour this entire canister of table salt in my face because of elemental magic, or really just to be doing something weird in the background of this scene."

STACKHOUSES

Sookie: "Bill's not evil, he's too boring to be evil. And of all the people who know the cost of a Civil War..."
Ghost Momma: "Your sister is real dumb."
Ghost Daddy: "You should have a really boring talk about relationships where it seems like you're talking about her five thousand boyfriends, but really you're just talking to yourself about Jessica and saying the same shit as every time this happens."
Jason: (Does.)

From the creator of the show Six Feet Under comes an entire conversation from the show Six Feet Under about how you can never really know anybody else -- or can you? -- and we only love in others what we want to replace in ourselves -- or do we? -- and how ultimately all the people we loved are unavailable in some way -- are they really? -- and maybe this was because we are sabotaging ourselves -- or maybe not? -- because we don't believe -- or do we? -- that we really truly deserve blah blah blah self-hating narcissism so maybe you just A) Give up and go fuck yourself or maybe you B) Believe in stars and magic and love and the circus and whatever it is that horrible skeptic pessimists think the rest of us idiots are doing instead of actively hating everybody and everything, especially ourselves, and it's all so hoary and Gen X tragic that you can actually hear "The Battle Of Evermore" from the Singles soundtrack playing in the background and then finally, finally, Eric Northman.

Sookie: "Jason, that was really well acted, but I feel like maybe you have a brain trauma."
Jason: "How could you even tell?"
Sookie: "Based on the softball-sized bump on your nut."
Eric: (Hangs puckishly down in the driver-side window so his hair looks crazy, and pretty much giggles in Jason's face, because as we've seen, Eric Northman is pretty cute when he just wakes up, and the sun just went down.)
Jason: (Makes a very excellent grumbly sound that is almost as cute.)

Jay pulls over so they can do their big trick, which involves Chancellors Northman and Gainsborough driving their "prisoners" -- mainstreamer Tara and the tasty human Snackhouses -- into the Compound proper.

MERLOTTE'S

Holly: "I cannot believe I am midwifing for your pregnant girlfriend that I just found out about! And yes, I'm narrating what's actually going on for some reason, but also can you believe that the only Wiccan character on this show comes pre-loaded with midwifery powers, and do you think that's realistic, because actually it kind of is."

By Jacob Clifton

Maurella: "Okay, later! Oh, sorry. You sired them, now it's your sacred duty to see that at least half of them survive into adulthood. The Light Pact has been made flesh. I honor what was, what is, and what will never be. Farewell, Andy Bellefleur."

She bounces -- which is sad, I like that actress, but who knows what'll happen -- and Jane Bodehouse applauds... Everything. Just the whole fuckin' thing. Not applauding: One Holly Cleary, who just went from having zero problems to having 99 problems in the space of twenty minutes. You know what is good? Andy Bellefleur. You know what is excellent? Andy Bellefleur with a shitload of babies. Come on.

PACKMASTER

All juiced up on performance enhancers, Alcide beats JD like he's the Tour de France.

Wolves: "Where JD once had a face, now it's just soup. And not our kind of soup. Maybe we should do something, since we're also on drugs."
Martha: "Stand back! I borrowed this crossbow from my niece Katniss! It was a Winter's Loan."

Everybody instantly bows to Alcide as Packmaster, even though Martha is standing right there, and suddenly this pointless storyline is over. But wait, Alcide has a speech.

"This stops tonight. We're wolves. We respect ourselves, we respect our Pack, we respect Nature (?), without exception. We do not surrender to nihilism. We do not take advantage of those who are younger or weaker than we are. This is how it's going to be in this Pack from now on. Or else."

Wolves: "We do not! Surrender! To nihilism!"

...Ya got me. I guess what this is saying is that to believe in Nature is to resist the idea of ever planning our lives around eschatology? That when you say you wanna be "saved" what you really mean is you just want to rest? That the timeless immortality of The Now Of Wolf Thought is ironically the only rational response you can have to the human artifice of a teleological end? That our unhealthy addiction to the human construct of apocalypse -- or Rapture, or Singularity, or nuclear annihilation, or Heaven -- is what keeps us from truly acknowledging our power in the present? That if we ever realized we were programmed with this self-fulfilling concept of a Future Ending that never comes by the people that control us -- that jam tomorrow is what keeps us from wanting jam today -- we'd start a fucking riot and get it over with and move on into a better story we wrote for ourselves? That by instantiating the Armageddon they've got us so afraid of, we'd find out it was Heaven on Earth all along, just waiting for us to mature into accepting it, so we could finally get home? That "As Above, So Below" applies here too, and that jumping into the thing we're afraid of in our own minds or lives is the only way we can ever change or grow on the personal level, which is why it's so important to keep us terrified of change and of ourselves? Probably. That's probably what he meant.

THE ASSAULT

Gate Guy: "Eric and Nora, why are you here? Did you fix the Army problem?"
Eric: "No, we forgot all about that because this isn't really a season finale so much as the end of a twelve-episode prequel to Season Six. Just let us in."
Bill: "Sure, whatever. Let 'em in. I can always feed on Sookie if I'm a bad guy, or it doesn't matter if I'm a good guy. I could still go either way, because this show would be nothing without constantly leaning on my ability to go either way to provide every plot."

Sookie stares up at the security camera so Bill can get a good luck at what he's been missing for the last... What, week? It's been like a week. Maybe two. But an eventful couple weeks. Bill Compton and his old friend PURE NIHILISM got reacquainted, for starters.

NEWLIN'S APOLOGY

Barb, mid-rant: "...I can't ever find anybody, Compton and Salome are off buttering each other's biscuits half the time... You know, I hate to say this, but ever since Roman cashed in his chips the work ethic around here has just gone straight to hell."

Lewlin shits shimself while they're getting the camera set up, and you start to realize that Luna could possibly be about to blow the lid off absolutely everything here, and start the Holy War for real. And that maybe this is a good thing... And then she does. Skinwalks back into herself, in the bargain. And ol' Sam, still hanging around as a housefly, dives right into Barb's mouth and turns back into himself, splitting her open from the inside and saving everybody. Which is when -- having put not only the Lilithista pogrom on shout but also maybe shifters -- Luna keels over, maybe dead also.

I always thought skinwalking would kill you because, last season, it sprung from self-hatred. But this season, she's just been doing it whenever she feels like it or possibly from feminism. So there's no reason for it to kill her, and they've even talked about it on the show, and I hope the whole thing is just a myth since skinwalking doesn't mean the same thing anymore -- Bill finally having taken his rightful role as the character whose self-abnegation ends the world, as we'll see; Tara having finally managed to kill Tara and become a better monster in the process -- still, it would be a hero's death.

This is my favorite thing that was ever said by a human being in the history of human beings, and I know I bring it up a lot -- it's from Churchill's autobiography, My Early Life (1874-1904) -- but watching her in the camera, choking on blood and screaming the truth, it struck me again:

"You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was meant to be wooed and won by youth."

The world under Sanguinista rule doesn't even know what's happening, nor how tenuous it is at the top -- everybody high on drugs and crazy on religion. It's not the best thing, but it's not the worst thing either, it's just the end of the world in slow motion. It's like a cup with nothing inside, and nobody's allowed to look for sure. And that is untenable and it's unfair, and most of all it's pure nihilism, because the world never really ends. So the world needs to know what's coming for her -- that the wolves and shifters have their place in the Holy War not because of Nature or Time or any of that, but because vampires and faeries are old and full of shit, and the rest of us are very, very young.

She may not know she's doing it, she's just there to save her kid, and I guess martyrs never do, and I guess shifters are the people you'd ask about the difference between cups and what's inside them: Luna Garza has just ended the world. The best death I can imagine. Generous, and true, and also fierce.

AUTHORITY

"Thank You Lilith, O Mother, for the gift You have bestowed upon me. And I swear upon my life, Thy will shall be done. Vampires shall rightfully rule this earth. Now. Guide me, O Mother, as I surrender to You completely..."

Salome breaks off her prayer, because what else is going on is that Jason and the rest of their little paramilitary crew has just killed about a hundred people -- starting with poor old Chelsea -- in sundry fashion, fairly beautiful in some ways (Jason), risibly silly-looking (Nora) in others -- and suddenly there's a lockdown on the lockdown that was already locked down. Nora and Eric make their way to some kind of Molly Cave of technology to do technology things, Jason continues to kill all the people, and eventually Sookie and Tara get down to the vampire jail cells.

Jessica: "Sookie? Hi!"
Pam, bitchily: "What the fuck are you doing?"
Tara, bitchily: "I'm getting you the fuck out of jail, bitch."
Sookie: "Everybody hold still while Eric and Nora disarm and unlock everything..."
Pam, lesbianly: "Nice plan."
Tara, super-lesbianly: "Sure beats yours."

Eric and Nora fuss and are cutely sibling-like, and I guess she's here to stay, which I am totally okay with because she is finally the person she was meant to be. There have been times she was annoying and there's been a lot of time that she was boring -- and then there was that whole time where she getting tortured for weeks for no reason except to make a painfully weak stab at the idea that Salome prized subtlety, somehow, at some point, but was in reality just meant to give the illusion of complexity to what was actually a straightforward and incredibly simple story -- but when you stretch out and look at just her storyline, it's pretty cool.

By Jacob Clifton

Godric was a good man, but also very bad vampire. The Sanguinistas do make sense, at the most basic "top of food chain" level, because they just want you to be the best vampire you can. Salome does have access to the blood of God. The Apocalypse is coming. Roman was asking them to do to themselves what eventually drove Bill absolutely crazy. Salome spun a convincing story, about vampires extinguishing themselves on the altar of shame, before the Lilith stuff even came into it, and then Lilith, well shit, we all make God in our own image. I mean, once the Nest Behavior and drug cult stuff started, she sucked -- as did everybody -- and I'm still not entirely clear on what Godric's Ghost dying meant or even when she flipped sides, but I don't care. I liked Sam Finn, too; for somebody that didn't have a lot to do this season I think she did okay.

Shut up about Nora and talk about the girls kissing! Girls kissing! Well, I tend to think Pam is pretty much 100 percent pandering fanservice, so nothing she does really surprises or delights me -- she's like the Dame Maggie Smith of this show, put there specifically for people who are not me, and really enjoy her whole thing -- and ditto chicks kissing, but it actually goes down pretty cute: Jessica has to remind Sookie that vampires can't touch the doors, once they're unlocked, and even as she's saying it Tara's so anxious to get in there and kiss Pam that she burns herself on the lock anyway, but she gets right up in there.

Salome: "Whatever, Lilith is apparently never going to shut up until I drink it, so..."
Bill: "Ah wonder how our regime would survive, should the philter affect you adversely."
Salome: "You're sweet, but I'm not really about politics anymore. We're talking about the fucking Rapture now."
Bill: "Then go for it, mah liege."

She chugs it, and his face does about sixteen amazing things. One of them is silly, but one of them is sexy, and you realize suddenly that Bill is the scariest person and in fact has always been the scariest person. It doesn't rule out his other lives, his other selves, but it's there: Maybe he was the best mainstreamer because he had to be; because the only other option was to do or be what he's about to do, or to be. Everything turns into its opposite eventually, especially on this show, but the idea's come up before that Our Bill Compton was just the lid on Vesuvius and the fight going on inside him was a lot harder-fought than it is for most of us. This face he makes, you could believe it.

And honestly, of all people, I couldn't believe it was Bill Compton that helped this season click into place for me: Godric was the only hope for peace and there is no hope for peace, right, but those aren't the only options. They never are. And saints do the scariest shit the closer they get to God. Being boring was the only thing keeping Bill good, and the better he was the more boring he got.

Anything you repress, it's going to come fuck you up in a resentful way when you least expect it. Nothing new there. But one of the neat things about this show is that it goes both ways: Whatever darkness we have in our consciousness, there's a compensatory unconscious brightness. That's always left out of the conversation because we're so used to being afraid of how we're going to fuck ourselves up unexpectedly. But if you think about how much negative stuff -- pain, fear, self-hatred, regret -- we carry around in our daytime selves, does it not bring you comfort to know that just under the surface there's something shining, just as bright?

His face looks like the whole world ending. Saints do the scariest shit the closer they get to God. And vice versa.

EXIT STRATEGIES (AND BONUS SCENE)

Jason's still kill-crazy when the ladies make their way back to the lobby, and Jessica throws herself on him joyfully. What has been for him a descent into mental disarray and visitations was the opportunity for her to get a little clarity on him: How much she's missed him, how much work she did without him knowing, to keep him safe. He's Hers, and doesn't know it; she's His, and thinks that should be enough. He glares past her until she lets go.

By Jacob Clifton

His face looks like the whole world ending. Saints do the scariest shit the closer they get to God. And vice versa.

EXIT STRATEGIES (AND BONUS SCENE)

Jess: "I've missed you so much! I've been an idiot, and I love you, and..."
Jason: "-- I can't ever love a vampire. Sorry. I can't do it."

Just like that. At the elevator, Eric and Sookie hang back.

Eric: "We're going to get Bill."
Jason & Pam both: "Oh, for fuck's sake."
Sookie, verbatim: "Make sure it's safe up there for us? We'll be up ... momentarily."

Inside the elevator, Jason twitches and sways.

Tara: "You better not go and get yourself killed, hear? You and I got a date. Long time coming."
Pam, which I am so fucking sure: "If that's not an impetus to survive..."
Momma: "Baby, you still have to kill all the vampires."
Daddy: "You're in an elevator with four of them, for starters."
Jason: "Nnrgh."
Jessica: "Uh, Jason? You doin' all right?"
Jason, intensely: "Comin' for you, Warlow."
Nora: "Um, did you just say Warlow? What do you know about Warlow?"
Jason: "...Fuck you just say to me?"

Eric, verbatim: "She's a mad God, Bill. She's nothing but destruction. Don't do it..."
Bill: "You want mah Precious!"
Eric: "Fuck no. Throw it in the fire, you tool. See if I care."
Bill: "...Nope, still crazy."

Sookie: "Beel, this isn't you."
Bill, scary: "What the fuck do you know about me? For all you know, everything I did while with you was an act calculated to elicit a particular response."
Sookie: "I know that's not true."

Uh, actually you know it is true. You've broken up with him like six times over it, because it's totally true. Queen Sophie-Anne ring a bell? Faerie lore, genealogy, King Russell, secret files? Letting the Rattrays beat you bloody so he could get you addicted to fucking him? Nothing?

Bill: "Because of the light you bear? Did you ever consider the possibility that it's a handicap? One that blinds you to the most obvious of truths, that you are an Abomination? Just like the vampire Bible states?"
Sookie: "Bill, I don't know what you're talking about, nobody knows what you're talking about. That was some really inelegant ranting. But I'll tell you something. You are certainly stronger than this. You are capable of sympathy, and kindness, and generosity. You are unique, among all the vampires I have met. Don't throw that away."

And then a funny thing happens, because he explains very eloquently exactly why he has to. His entire story, from his first birth to his second one, assumes a very different and a very sad shape, but a compelling one, shaped like the whole world:

"I have spent my entire life as a vampire apologizing, believing I was inherently wrong somehow. Living in fear, fear that God had forsaken me. That I was damned. But Lilith grants us freedom from fear. Vicissitudes 9:24, Fear not, for my blood is beyond fear -- fear of sin, fear of mankind, fear of retribution -- for thou art begat by God. And this world is but a spring to slake thy sacred thirst."

They can't believe him, because it sounds so crazy; they can't believe him because they love him. But it's true. Our Bill is the opposite of the real Bill Compton, no less real for all that, but a shadow just the same. And the whole time he was crippling himself he told himself it was for us, for the right reasons, for the good of the world, and it was bullshit. He took Jason's way out, he took Hoyt's way out. He took everything that was true and shining about himself and pushed it way down, shattered it into sparks. And the more he crippled himself out here, in the world, the Other Bill was down there in the well, getting stronger and fiercer and realer and meaner and scarier, and more and more twisted. Convinced the cup is more important than what's inside; crushed into a diamond by the pressure down there.

By Jacob Clifton

What Tara Thornton did to the little black-eyed girl -- what the witches did to Eric Northman -- Bill did to William Compton a hundred years earlier, and a million times better. And he's been doing it the whole time, all of it under their noses. Without even his knowledge. And that is sad, and it's sickening, and it needs to end. Even Tara was eventually allowed to die, because nobody deserves that. It isn't generous and it isn't true, it's just disgusting. "You cannot hurt the world," sure, but you sure as shit can hurt yourself.

By Jacob Clifton

Which means you can also save yourself.

When Bill drinks God down, his face goes scared, for a moment. They can scarcely breathe; the end of the world is poised on their breath. They mourn -- they cry for him, this hateful twisted thing they loved; his sacred, infinite thirst -- and they should, they'll never see him again. In a moment, they'll be running for their lives. He blossoms into light; he shatters.

William Compton left a wife and two children home in 1862, when he left to serve the 28th Louisiana Infantry. After the war, Compton took a shortcut on his way home, and he ... got lost. His son Thomas died in 1868; daughter Sarah lived until 1910. In 1972 he joined Nan Flanagan and Louis Pasteur in their quest to invent TruBlood and disrupt the vampire hierarchy, all so he could return to a paltry kind of light. A few weeks ago, he ended TruBlood production the world over, plunging the globe into a darkness it still doesn't quite comprehend. He was a King and a saint, a Chancellor, a mainstreamer and a Sanguinist, an Ambassador to the sun; he was Vampire Bill, the first vampire most of Bon Temps ever loved. Redeemer. A revolutionary and a monster, a cult member and eventually a cult leader. He took a shortcut, and he got lost, and then he died. The whole world is ending and the King of Louisiana is dead.

What rises now is something better. It has to be.

JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Pretty Little Liars and True Blood 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, his novel The Urges, and the novelette "The Commonplace Book," which will appear on Tor.com in October 2012.