Alcide hangs around after Terry's funeral, looking for more attention from Sookie for both his muscles and the intriguingly wig-like wig he has donned. They run into the orgy of fae-drunk vampires finally reaching Castle Compton, where Sookie is warmly greeted by Pam and Tara, and eventually gets Frenched by Violet once Jason introduces them, which is awful, but also... Violet's kind of a junk drawer of various very shitty things, but she's okay every now and then too: Jason compares his blood-bond situation to Sookie's with Bill in Season One, which is valid enough that she can't really question him about it, which is a really neat touch. Pam takes off to find Eric, leaving Tara in charge of Willa.
Now that she's reconnected with her humanity, community, friends and family, etc. -- thanks again for dying, Terry, it really helped her work through some shit -- Sookie's rethinking her deal with Warlow: If we're talking about eternity, maybe they could just spend some time dating and integrating their lives, he could get to know Arlene and so forth. That's when Warlow loses his temper, goes the full Ike, and decides that he's just going to beat Sookie for a while, and turn her the old-fashioned way. It's unfortunate, but dramatically so, what with those million red flags she's been overlooking the entire time.
Bill mopes for a while because he isn't God anymore, but Jessica gets very Braveheart with him about safeguarding Sookie from becoming a Faerie Vampyr Bride (drink!) and so they recruit Jason and Violet to help convince Andy to let them borrow his faerie daughter. ABCD sneaks this crew into the Warlow Dimension, where the crew rescues Sookie so that Bill and Ben can fight and fight and fight, and eventually Bill gets his ass kicked, because he is Bill Compton and obviously he gets his ass kicked at this time.
Ben storms the house, where a regularized and uninvited Bill can no longer follow, knocks out and locks everybody who is around down in Bill's old hidey-hole, and then... Gets himself grabbed by a deus ex machine King Niall, who comes out of the bathroom portal at just the right time to help with Jason staking, and exploding, good old Ben. What a tidy little storyline that was, in the end.
Eric is sunbathing on a mountain in Sweden when the daywalking leaves his system, and he bursts into flame, but we'll see. That's the half-way mark. It's really more like two episodes, with Eric's floppy dick exploding in the exact middle.
Six months later, there are new situations. Bill has written a book about his time as God, and as usual his messaging is completely confused and only makes sense to him, because what does that have to do with vampire-human relations, but whatever. Bill is great, and his book is called And God Bled, which is so Bill I can't even handle it. Sookie and Alcide are together-together, adorable together, and it turns out his wig was to hide how hot he was going to go back to being in six months.
Violet has Jason on a V-reinforced sexual slavery thing where he's chaste, but forced to go down on her -- for like, the majority of the episode -- which from here looks like one more of those lame storylines about what Jason's penis is up to, but maybe it could turn into something year. Looking at their arrangement through the lens of what happens later (as well as through having experienced it through Sookie's eyes), I am guessing at some kind of dumb-ass Gen X Dan Savage thing like, "How dare you judge someone else's unhealthy relationship! All that really matters is that they're honest with each other!" or whatever bullshit, but who knows.
Arlene has bought out Merlotte's, and Sam has become the Mayor of Bon Temps, which has kind of declared independence from the United States in certain key ways, due to how there are roving packs of Hep V-stricken zombie vampires now roaming the Earth. But that's not the only shitty thing that happens to your town when you make Sam the Mayor: A huge interfaith gathering reveals his (and Bill's plan) to... Hook every human household up with a healthy vampire protector, in return for healthy blood.
Which Sam unnecessarily calls "monogamous," which just brings in extra serosorting shades to the Hep V thing that really didn't need to be part of it -- but is otherwise amazing, and it's so cool how they tease you with what the idea is (which is B-A-N-A-N-A-S and you probably wouldn't just intuit it until he says it) and it's very suspenseful and you're like, "What is the terrible idea? Tell me the terrible idea!" It's pretty great. (Not so great: Sam's missing scruff, which makes him look like a monster made of baby's butts. Grow that shit out, tell Alcide to keep his hair short, and for God's sake somebody find Eric and toss some clothes on him, or even just like a towel.)
A night mixer is held at what's now Bellefleur's Bar & Grille, so vampires and non-carriers can match themselves up. The metaphor is so bizarre that you just kind of go with it as a gonzo form of worldbuilding at first, but then you start seeing how it actually plays out, and it's beautiful: Jessica declaring herself the house vamp of Bellefleur Mansion regardless of whether Andy accepts or feeds her. Bill promising Sookie that her werewolf boyfriend won't be enough for the coming storm, and she needs a vampire bodyguard.
And most Steinbeckianly: Lettie Mae Reynolds Thornton Daniels, having achieved new heights of both enlightenment and crazy -- and fashion! -- offers herself to her daughter in a secluded barn, after thirty-some years of emotional and sometimes literal starvation, as a final act of apology. Assuming she lives through the experience, I think it might be one of the most moving ideas the show has ever offered us. Definitely the weirdest, but also the most unexpectedly beautiful reversals of the show's central dynamics they've come up with yet.
...Or, alternately, she just poisoned her child for the last time. Either way, grab your partner, because the last image of Season Six is a massive and quickly growing army of sick and starving vampires descending on Bon Temps. "Every single human needs a vampire and every vampire needs a human" may quite soon become more than just an awkwardly worded Mayor Sam-ism.
Anyway, that was Season Six. A bit ropy in parts, but still I think the best season to date, and what a strange gamechanger there at the end. You know, when you think about this show and how it is weird and how the whole idea of the Great Revelation is like, profoundly world-shaking... But then things basically go on. Nobody really knew about the AVL, or the Authority, or the Kings and Queens, because vampires were just trying to act normal. You know? Shopping for groceries, dating a vampire, blah-dee-blah.
But this bit, with the virus versus the vampires versus the other vampires versus everybody, that is actually demented enough that "everybody grab a vampire partner and make sure it's one you are okay with having intimate dreams about him or her" starts to make more sense than it should. So for that, and for you, I am grateful at least. Have a great summer and I will meet you back here in forty weeks or so.
YOU HAVE THE SUN
Alcide surprises Sookie at Terry's graveside, unaware she's still contemplating her own death and resurrection, and offers her a ride to the Bellefleurs' for the reception. She invites him for a walk; he was there when nobody else was, and he knows better than most what it feels like to walk away from a community, and to come home again.
Alcide, on Jason: "Some guys, you meet 'em and you just know they're always gonna be okay. Survivors."
Sookie: "I know, but I also don't know anything anymore."
Alcide: "That is what death does. You wonder if the ground was ever there. But it was, and it'll come back."
Sookie: "For a giant blue-collar monster, you are very wise. And hot."
Alcide: "Once I get this marmot off my head, that is."
The cemetery where they are is located precisely halfway between her house and Castle Compton, which is where the Vamp Camp refugees are headed. Drunk on light.
Alcide: "Daywalking?"
Sookie: "Bill was right? About everything? God damn it."
Alcide: "Well, there's Jason, so that's good. Let's get out of here. Or let me come with."
She said danger whore, at her darkest point: She was owning it, but it was half the truth. It was a shadow following her into the dark. There's a better word, there always is.
Sookie: "I'm a survivor too."
To love is to be taken apart and put back together, better: Do you want to be ripped apart?
CASTLE COMPTON
"Bring the inside outside!" they scream; they never want to hide from the sun. (Maryann brought the outside in, and turned that house into a forest: Superfecundity, fast becoming rot.) One pair is having sex on a divan they've brought out to the lawn; they've thrown their prison clothes into a bonfire, and dance around it. Croquet, the Charleston, fucking, volleyball: Whatever made them feel alive when they were alive.
Vampire: "Who's making a Target run?"
Vampire: "Hell yeah, I'll go!"
Violet nuzzles Jason, in a corner of Bill's yard; he is falling in love with her, after all. Sookie ran around masturbating on porches, and everybody thought she was insane, but now Jason gets it. Soon, everybody will. Violet is violent, until Jason says who she is, and then Violet grabs her for a deep kissing: "Sook, meet Violet. She's European."
Jason: "I'm Hers, now. It's fucking weird, but... Sook, I think I feel how you felt, way back with Bill."
Sookie: "Then I can't judge you. Some guys you just know they're going to be okay."
Jason: "Like somebody has my back. Six months from now, that's going to mean something entirely different."
Sookie: "Well, be careful. When your heart runs away with you it's easy to believe someone will have your back forever. But forever's a rare thing in this world, no matter what vampires say."
She assures him, for all her dour pronouncements as she works out this last little kink -- the UFO behind her, in the sunshine, that only she can see -- that she'll be fine. Pam, too high to miss Eric and too happy to be a bitch, throws herself on Sookie with a genuine smile. Tara takes her turn, too. Sookie knows they are happy, but not what they've escaped; they barely remember it, now.
Tara: "I know I'm still high, but I swear I can never hate him again!"
Sookie: "Well, good luck with that! Bless his heart."
She walks away from the revelry without noticing Bill, watching through windows. Back through the cemetery that stands halfway between his house and her own. She brings the outside, outside.
FAERIELANDE
Ben's winding garlands around a maypole for their wedding, excited as a boy in the sunshine. It's the oldest ritual, one of the oldest, any of us have: The pole stands up, straight and strong, throbbing in the sunlight. We wrap ourselves around it: 1 + 0 = Every Number In Creation.
"You know, even in ancient times the maypole ceremony was reserved only for Fae who had found their soulmates. And that was rare even then. And the proof? If light shone from their touch."
When night falls, they'll take a ribbon and wrap themselves around the pole, as we've always done. He will become dark, and light. They'll melt their wedding rings from solid steel: This one closed circle becomes two. But it's still a closed circle; it's still death. Feeding only on each other, never changing, never growing. Never to cast off or burn what isn't necessary, ever again. To be complacent and complete.
To love is to bury, do you want to be buried?
Sookie: "You know, I wasn't lying when I said I keep my promises. But a lot's changed since I last saw you."
Warlow: "Fuck that, you've been gone four hours."
"His wife hated me, hated her niece, and I was able to heal her. With words, not magic or light or... I stood in front of her, a creature of magic, and she thanked me. Arlene Fowler Bellefleur thanked me for reading her heart. I have never felt loved like that in my entire life."
Warlow: "I've lost plenty of people. What makes you special?"
Sookie: "Is it that dark already? Just let me speak. Don't turn yet. Be Ben for just a second more. There's no denying I have feelings for you. You've awakened something in me. But what has changed is that my friends are safe and you're no longer in danger. There's no ticking clock."
Warlow: "I help up my end."
Sookie: "That's a Nice Guy thing to say, but do you really want me like that?"
Warlow: "What I know, and you can't, is that once we do this we've done this. You will understand that your sudden romance for Bon Temps is childish. Immortality will fix this."
Sookie: "What you're saying is that you don't love me as I am."
"I'm asking if you'll ... date me. Spend time together, off this plane. In the real world. See how we fit. We don't need a closed circle to be together."
Alcide's father was right. Alcide saw it, and walked away. He came down off the drugs, the power and the blood, and realized: Community -- like family, like love -- is a verb. A gerund that you never stop doing. And that's the opposite of what Warlow wants; it's the opposite of what he thinks will heal him. 5500 years is a long time to wait, when you think the questions getting answered: Nobody's born manipulative. Nobody was born to be buried. Some of us just forget, denied love long enough, how easy it is.
Sookie: "You could be part of this community, they'll accept you. My friends, my family..."
Ben: "You mean like Bill and Eric? My torturers?"
Sookie: "Not anymore, it's not about that anymore. Bon Temps pushed me into their arms, and I broke myself trying to make this deal for them. Gran died because she loved William Compton; I nearly died a hundred times because I realized they were people before anyone else did. Before they did. I stood watch at Godric's death because I was the only one that could."
In this, I see God.
"Jason and Tara and Arlene and Jessica are the ingredients of me, the recipe for this thing you claim to love. I'm not ready to give them up. I shouldn't have to. You keep saying come with me, come with me, like any old faerie kidnapper out of the stories. What if you come with me? Into the world. "
She was the bravest and the first; she loved because she didn't know any better. Bon Temps hated her just enough to make her feel like a monster, preparing her to meet the monsters and bring them into the light. Making her strong. She crossed a bridge the rest of us can barely see from here. In six months, we'll know.
But Ben never will. Wanting for so long, pinning so much on her before she was ever born. To the idea of purity -- of becoming blameless, washing and re-washing -- if only he can get back to that state. It's Bill's story: To yearn for cleanliness so much and so heartbreakingly long that you don't notice yourself getting dirtier and dirtier.
Prince of the first Fae, the firstborn son of God. He's entitled; he is two things at once and one of them is only loneliness: "Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?"
He knocks his bride silly, chokes her out, chains her to the maypole. It's getting dark.
I'M THE LAST SPLASH
The vampires play volleyball; Violet senses weakness and guilt in Jessica, and smells Jason's heat for her, and goes on the offensive. It's low-grade, but it's there; Jessica sees Jason overlook it.
Tara remembers Jason like this: Too pretty to call him on it, when he's oblivious. When he's focused. One thing men don't have to learn is that wanting things doesn't mean you get them. Warlow wants to be the maypole, and the rest of us dance around him. You can love Jason all day long, a lifetime long, and he doesn't even have to notice. Funny how that works. She walks off into a stand of trees, where Pam is quieter than before, and still.
Pam: "Buzz wore off."
Tara: "The sun is out, and we just escaped death. Of everyone in the world, we are the only ones who survived, and you're worried about Eric? The biggest survivor of..."
Pam: "Does she know he's gone yet?"
Tara: "She's a kid."
Pam: "So you're going to be pissed..."
Tara gets pissed, of course. Not that you should expect anything else of Pam, which even Tara gets by now: Daughter, and brother. It's not unrequited love, it's not like with Jason: He left because Nora was the place he kept his heart, and she's got to go because Eric's where she keeps hers.
Pam: "Don't even start with that shit, Tara. I don't want to, but I will Release you."
Tara: "I know. Fuck you, though."
Pam: "Just take care of Willa, okay?"
Inside, Bill mournfully confirms that he isn't God anymore: Just a man. He can daywalk like the rest of them, but when he turned down her offer to ascend to Heaven bodily that was it for their connection.
Bill: "Ah don't feel Lilith anymore, Ah... feel like Bill again."
Jessica: "That's not so bad."
Bill: "For real? But either way, Ah have one more thing to do and Ah I am nervous about it. Ah ... may have sold Sookie out to a child molester. And now they're getting married. She's going to be a vampire soon."
Jessica: "The fuck? When's this happening?"
Bill, verbatim: "Imminently."
Jessica: "Well, that sounds like bullshit to me. Get your ass together."
Bill: "Being just Bill again means dealing with the acreage of bullshit Ah have pulled. Not just this season, Jessica, but also in many seasons ."
"You said you were Bill again. Bill Compton would've walked through fire to save her life. Maybe you were an asshole, but right now you have the opportunity to make this right. Look, you told me I was here to protect your humanity, right?"
Jason: "Warlow? That motherfucker killed my parents! There's no way Sookie would agree to be his ... goddamn ... faerie vampire bride. What the fuck did you do?"
Bill: "Ah encouraged her. Understand that it was a fraught conversation with many moving parts and a complex emotional history motivating it. Ah may not have even been the primary reason she did this. But Ah'm pretty sure Ah was."
Jason: "Okay, before I kick your ass let's do this."
Bill: "Well, there is more. The Fae Plane can only be accessed through a portal in the cemetery -- or her bathroom, or a random bridge -- and only using a Fae's light. Thanks to various faerie massacres throughout the season, the only living Fae right now is ABCD, which..."
Jessica: "-- Jesus Christ, Bill."
Bill: "Ah fear we..."
Jessica: "Fuck is this 'we'? Have fun with Andy, I'm going back out to play volleyball."
Jason's bodyguard Violet joins the party -- "You'll never be alone again," she whispers possessively right in Jessica's face -- and Bill takes a moment to glamour and free Dr. Takahashi before they go to Andy's.
It is an oddly long scene -- considering this half of the story is two-thirds over and nobody gives a shit about the old goat anyway -- in which Bill explains what money is, and how the Doc never met him or Jessica and pronounces his name, infuriatingly, one more time, because when he said he was back to being Bill he meant he was going to Bill things up as hard as possible. So farewell, Hirotakahashisan. Nothing you did mattered and was usually contradicted by other things that people did or said, but here's a bag of money and thanks for the chance to watch Jessica prowl around in that hilarious schoolgirl outfit.
BELLEFLEUR
Andy: "Where on Earth have you been?"
Jason: "Joined a fascist organization, became a prison bitch, got vampire married. Will you invite us in?"
Andy: "Uh, no. Your girlfriend seems like The Worst."
Violet: "Assuredly I am, but I will not eat your remaining daughter. We are monogamous."
Andy: "I really wish you guys wouldn't throw words like that around. It just makes it more complicated later."
ABCD: "Well, okay. My sisters died, and I got drunk and made out with my future stepbrothers and nearly died again, thanks to Eric needing to board a UFO. And those are literally the only two things that have ever happened to me, because I am a baby that has only been alive for ten episodes of this show, which is about twenty minutes total. So I would like to do a third thing, I don't even really care what it is. Jason needs me to open a door of a UFO? And that's all I have to do to be a hero, and save the only other member of my entire race? Sounds pretty low-impact, tbh."
GIRL + BOY + NUCLEAR BOMB
Warlow: "I don't know if you've noticed this, but everybody in Bon Temps is kind of trashy? Like high society in Bon Temps is Andy Bellefleur, a man whose beer farts could fell a moose."
Sookie: "You really believe in all that royalty crap?"
Ben: "It's all I fucking have. I was a prince, among the most joyful people who have ever existed. Lilith took that capacity for joy away from me, and I took it away from them. I need to get back to the start."
Sookie: "I can't give you back what you lost. Even if I wanted to, which by the way I no longer do."
"You will fill this hole," Ben growls, "Whether you like it or not."
Maybe we just get so used to giving guys a pass on this in real life that having it said so plainly makes it seem more monstrous or cartoony than it really would otherwise be? All I know is that Bill was never honest, and she loved him for that. And Eric was always honest, and she loved him for that. But they both gave to her, because they smelled the sun on her. And now Warlow, as it gets darker, all he wants to do is take: He wants to be the maypole. But he also wants to dance around it.
The thing that sets him apart is that he doesn't want to just penetrate, or drink, like the rest of them: He wants too to be penetrated. He wants to be a yin-yang of sex and hunger and fulfillment, to go "back to the start" in a Plato, Hedwig, Adam's Rib sense. He wants to climb inside her womb, and shove her into his own. He wants to take a 1 and a 0 and add them together and somehow come up with 0, a circle that goes round and around and never ends and never started. The kindest and the deadliest kind of love. Radioactive.
He thinks she'll understand it once she's dead, but the truth is that if anything, it would take this marriage for him to get it: We were not designed that way. Souls don't ever stop. Not even Bill Compton stays in one shape for very long. That kind of love is a trap, and all he wants to do is pull her in with him. And all she wanted to do was make sure they'd both get out alive. But he can't see past himself to that, and it is getting dark. So she lightens it up.
Warlow: "Oh, come on. We both know you're not gonna use that on me."
Sookie: "No, because I love you. But what I will do is detonate it, and then I won't be anything special at all. I won't have the sun you need, and I won't want anything of yours, and if you turn me then you'll have something broken that you never wanted. I may have decided it's okay to be special, but if that's what it takes, that's what I'll do."
Warlow: "You really are a danger whore, aren't you?"
Sookie: "Survivor."
Warlow: "You were right this whole time, weren't you? I had high hopes for myself, but at the end of the day, even in Faerie, all I really want is to fuck you, and own you, and use you for your blood. And night's falling."
Ben is gone. There's nothing here to save. If Warlow is capable of winning, then Warlow already won: (+1) + (-1) = 0.
CEMETERY
Andy: "And of course you brought Bill."
Jason: "2 - 1 = 1. He's just Bill, and we need him. We need everything. Guns, vampires, everything."
ABCD: "My ESP is telling me that Sookie is not having this. She's in trouble."
Everybody: "Thank God Sookie's upset. Way easier to beat hell out of an angel than talk her down from anything."
ABCD: "In other news, I'm two weeks old and have no idea what I'm doing."
Bill, for real: "Your light, its source, is nature. To which you are closer than any other life form. You need to try and harness that, inside yourself. Think about your blood. It nourishes you like dew on the grass."
ABCD: "This choad for real?"
Bill: "Ah am embarrassing to even myself, sweet creature. Maybe we should all hold hands? Ah am out of mah league."
They do the elephant walk, to no avail. It was sweet; in six months it'll be sweeter. But that's not the kind of life she needs, right now. That's not the verb.
Bill: "Ah noticed that back around Maryann Sookie generally needed a fright."
Violet: "BOOGEDY!"
ABCD: "Ahh!"
The UFO opens. Violet might be okay, actually. At least they're not repeating the mistakes they made with Nora, telling us she's cool without her actually being cool. Violet's a handful of mostly bullshit, but at least when she rules she rules. They rush in, and a short fight later the whole crew has a drained Sookie in hand, elephant-walking back to reality, while Bill gets himself beat to shit. Maypole like a baseball bat, he knocks Warlow onto a nearby statue, but then it's mostly just beatdown city.
It's kind of sad to think that, once the prophecies are all met there aren't any prophecies to consider: This isn't a mother and son fight, or even a father and son fight; it's nothing anymore, they're nothing to each other. Just two selfish men who cared less for Sookie than what was inside her. But Warlow is the monster now.
Jason invites Violet into Sookie's house and they bed her down, feeding her until she wakes up -- smiling, like for a moment she's their child -- while Andy hustles ABCD down into Eric's cubby and takes guard outside.
Bill hurls himself at Warlow's feet as he's leaving the UFO, and they fight in the regular graveyard for a second until Warlow can get away, then they fly to the house. Warlow comes in, knocking Jason and Violet out immediately, but Bill can't follow. Warlow glamours Jason to find the cubby and then locks everybody in there with ABCD, who faeries with the lock while Warlow stalks through the house: Sookie's hiding in the shower, like back in the motel Jason will never remember, working on her nuke again; he finds her too soon.
Ben: "In 2000 years, you'll learn to love me. I know you've been hurt, but don't push me away..."
Sookie: "I am not your damaged pet! I do not complete you.
He can't even hear her. Niall comes as called, through the bathroom portal, and holds Warlow long enough for Jason to stake him. Sookie never needed vengeance, but then Jason doesn't know how far Ben pushed the Stackhouses to begin with, and never needs to. It's enough for him to avenge them now. Warlow dies. And Ben dies too.
It's night in Bon Temps, where all the TruDeath refusers carouse, or nap after their very long day. They can feel it going, when he dies, but it doesn't trouble them. They can mourn the light tomorrow. In Sweden, however, the day is bright. Eric sits on a lawn chair at the top of an ice-covered mountain, sunbathing, healing from his pain and sadness, reading a book: Den allvarsamma liken, by Hjalmar Söderberg -- The Serious Game -- is a Swedish treasure. A man and woman who fell in love too young, and never stopped, no matter where their lives took them. Ben's death takes him by surprise, and so he catches fire. Alone, heartbroken, naked to the world.
I HAVE THE MOON
Six months later, new cases of Hepatitis V are still being diagnosed daily, confusing and bemusing the CDC and scaring everyone else to death. And ol' Bill Compton's right there to ride the wave, guesting on The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss his seven-week NYT Bestseller, And God Bled: A Story Of Death & Redemption, which is so very Bill Compton it makes my stomach hurt from laughing.
O'Donnell: "So you're God?"
Bill: "Ah was God. For like two weeks."
O'Donnell: "You realize that sounds crazy? I've read the book and you sound crazy."
Bill: "It is called a platform, Mr. O'Donnell."
O'Donnell: "Part of it is you confessing to the beheading of the Governor of Louisiana."
Bill: "Yeah, for he was a dick."
O'Donnell: "You mean like, because he created Hep V and now all the vampires are zombies?"
Bill: "Ah am makin' lemonade, sir. The fact is that vampires are afraid of human beings, which is why we were so sneaky for so long. And then humans won. And now vampires are the apocalypse. So congratulations, Ah guess."
STACK HOUSE
Alcide's wig is gone and he is back to looking hot, and perhaps coincidentally he is no longer sucky. They've been together, I'm guessing since the day after Warlow died, when Sookie realized that out of all the guys she's ever met, besides Sam who is otherwise engaged, Alcide's the only person who has really been on her same journey: Walking the line between being special and being normal, between being a regular human member of society and feeling affinity and responsibility for their shadowy group.
He was there when she figured it out, having just come back from figuring it out himself, and while I don't think they will be together very long, it makes sense why they would be now. When she was asking Warlow to be Ben half the day, she was really just asking for Alcide: Somebody who had been to both extremes and ended up back in the middle.
"We've been very secretive about who we are," Bill says on the TV. "What makes us strong, what makes us weak. And the thing we're most afraid of, is you knowing that we're scared too."
He's talking about vampires, but he could just as easily be talking about Pam and Tara, or Eric and Nora, or Sookie and Ben, or Jason and Jessica. He could just as easily be talking about anyone who ever loved.
JASON & VIOLET
True to her word, Violet's kept Jason on a chastity chain since the day they met. The show's fascination with problematizing Jason's sexuality is still a bore, but at least we're not pretending victimhood is the only way to do that. He goes down on her two or three times a night -- "178 nights in a row!" -- and has built her a cubby in his basement, where they live. He's devoted himself to her entirely, uninterested in any other women, etc.
I mean, I guess it's funny -- or would be, if she weren't so obnoxious -- but by the end of the episode it makes a different kind of sense: The relationships we're about to be presented with have to run the spectrum, every possible kind of symbiosis between human and vampire, and having established Jason as the first person to be playing out Sookie's Season One narrative, keeping him in a blue-ball loop for six months seems like the cleanest way to do that moving forward.
CHURCH (DAY)
Mayor Sam Merlotte has called an all-faiths meeting at the church, with whoever the white preacher is and Reverend Daniels bringing their congregations together, for reasons we don't know yet but are artfully teased until the very last second. I could not have dreamed what he -- and Bill -- are planning until it happens, and then it is suddenly the only thing that makes sense.
Andy: "What about the separation of church and state?"
Sam: "Like there's a state to be separated from, and like this is about church in anything but the subtlest sense. Baton Rouge is a mess, Washington DC is a mess, the whole world is a mess because it's ending in slow motion. Bon Temps has to act with sovereignty for now."
Andy: "I'll sit up there with you at this meeting, but ABCD and I aren't coming to the thing tonight."
Inside, the humans are lining up to get tested for Hep V, for which humans are only carriers. Jason and Sookie kind of laugh about how a single pinprick blood test is supposed to be painful.
Sookie bit into her own arm, gnawing at it, to save Warlow after Eric's attack. Didn't even think twice. It wasn't about him penetrating her, it was about her nurturing him. The show's always had a precarious relationship with female power: Maxine Fortenberry exercised hers in one way, Arlene in a second way; Sarah Newlin took down other women and married a scared dumb gay guy and slept with men in power to get hers. So you could look at Sookie biting into herself as the ultimate doormat move. Or you could see it another way.
We talked about this in the spring with The Good Wife, but I like it for this too: This idea that asking people for things paradoxically makes them like you more than giving them things:
Do you know how many times I have been taught to play pool? Or chess? Works every time. You can look the person in the eye and say "This is what I am doing right now, it is a magic spell on your brain using brain science," and they would love you more for saying it out loud. I mean don't say that, that's a weird thing to say, but the point is that if you did, it wouldn't matter. We love to give, we love to be owed, we love to be shown vulnerability, and we love to spend whatever particular capital we have. If I say "I need you to do this thing for me," what your lizard brain hears is, "You have the power to do a thing I can't," which generates all four of those forms of affection.
Now, implicitly I just described men, but obviously the same things are true of women. So think about that for a second: When I say about men, "we love to give, we love to be owed" it sounds powerful and magnanimous, or like a little boy with his chest out. If I say about men, "we love to be shown vulnerability," you think of beta wolves rolling over to show you their neck. Right? But imagine if I said about women, "they love to be shown vulnerability" or "they love to give." What image does that paint for you? Nothing flattering, nothing we haven't collectively been fighting for fifty years. But they're the exact same words and they come from the exact same place. The exact same impulse. It's just that we're trained to see one side of that as power, and the other side as weakness, because what is masculine is good and what is feminine as bad.
I love that song "Running Up That Hill" because it's great and iconic and all of those things, but mostly I love it because it's a trick and a trap: You hear it and you think it's about trading something for something -- "I'd make a deal with God / And get him to swap places" -- when the truth is, it's about sex. Penetration. And the non-insertive partner in this case saying that even just the assumption that he's hurting her, or getting something from her, is itself offensive: If you honestly think fucking me is hurting me, then how much am actually I worth to you?
You don't want to hurt me/ But see how deep the bullet lies
Unaware I'm tearing you asunder / Oh, there is thunder in our hearts
We build our culture around this idea because of other things having to do with gender imbalance and reproduction -- that women will be the ones having the babies, which means women are the ones who need to be regulated in the worst case or in charge of sex in the best case -- and the economy of etiquette and severity of our reaction to sexual assault is built on these things, so it's easy to dismiss or overlook the underpinnings of the idea here. We needlessly connect those very real social factors to the idea that if women's sexuality is hard to obtain, then men's sexuality is somehow a triumph, because the dick is more important than where it goes. That because our culture is based around the idea of not getting to put your dick places, that means the coolest thing you can do is put your dick places: Tops over bottoms, men over women, vampires over humans. Maypoles over the people dancing around it, giving it its meaning.
But that's a story about dicks. It's barely a story about men, much less women: It's a story about penetration and how it defines all of us. How can you be a danger whore when you're the one biting into yourself? What's whorish about offering to nourish someone else? How can that power dynamic possibly still favor the dick? We do that without even thinking about it, because the danger only goes one way: Dicks are radioactive. So what's about to happen actually answers and reverses a lot more than just the vampire/human dynamic -- the blood's always gone both ways, with differing effects -- but also the very idea of who's on top when it comes to penetration. You're not taking if I'm offering; your power is deconstructed when we're sharing.
Is there so much hate for the ones we love?
Tell me: We both matter, don't we?
Which is why, I guess, Sam sells the town on his and Bill's idea using sexually coded language, after the preachers do their grandstanding preacher stuff -- "I can't hear you on this side of the room!" -- and they play musical chairs in the church pews to mix the humans all up together:
Rev Daniels: "Take a look around... From this day forward, we are going to be one community. Because there are roaming bands of sick and hungry vampires out there, and they are on the march. Now these vampires are organized, to boot. They're hunting together, and they are wiping out small towns like ours. Because they think we's easy pickings. Are we? Are we easy pickings? Are we low-hanging fruit?"
Sam puts it to them now: The plan, which sounds insane at first and then less and less insane, is to match each human non-carrier of the virus to a Bon Temps vampire -- which remember, our vampires are the only ones not affected, the ones that got from the Hot White Room to Bill's house in one horny, drugged-out piece -- who will protect their homes in return for sustenance.
After six seasons of this, you may recognize the model, considering at least twice a year Sookie would Choose Me and then immediately remember that she was going to be murdered by somebody -- Debbie or Russell or whoever -- and immediately have to hook up with one of her supernatural boyfriends again. Giving her the faerie light was a good step toward equalizing that situation, but the stakes just kept rising anyway: How much healthier then, now that we are all Sookie Stackhouse, to make that bond a new kind of social connection? It's ambitious, but way less weird than it sounds. This is the end of the world. It's not like some weird idea Bill had, it's a way of saving Bon Temps from the rest of the destroyed globe. And Sookie's probably the only reason they thought of it at all.
There's a lot of pushback, especially once Sam starts throwing around words like "monogamous" to explain the setup, but it's daytime now. They can be brave when the sun is out. They can be repulsed by the idea, for now. But it's getting dark. And when he invites the whole town to what's been rechristened Bellefleur's Bar & Grill, for a free mixer sponsored by Arlene the owner, he knows the darker it gets the more they'll show up. Zagat's doesn't rate lifeboats on a star system. And it helps that healthy vampires are stronger than the zombie ones -- who aren't really zombies, it's explained: They are just like normal vampires, but a lot hungrier and more desperate, because they need more blood more frequently to keep themselves alive.
Of course, what we won't see is the majority of the results themselves, so there are still some unanswered questions: What happens to carriers? What happens if you sleep with a carrier and don't know you're infected? How do we inform people about the risk of blood-bonding? How has Hep V only hit 1/8 of the vampire population -- were there that many vampires ignoring TruBlood all along? (That's marvelous, it's always seemed like a marketing mirage and social-lubricant lie to me.) And what's most interesting to me is, how do you de-eroticize something you've been fetishizing since before you found out they were real?
When we talk about gay Scoutmasters, okay, we picture some guy with a mustache walking in off the street, wanting to abscond with your kids. We are not completely to a point in our culture where we understand that you're really actually just talking about gay moms and dads wanting to take part in their kids' lives. Same thing with gay marriage: Why, when gay people are just straight people who are cruddy at it, would they take the long way around? Isn't the whole point being bad at monogamy and commitment? Aren't all gay people into leather and pedophilia and glory holes? (Me, I say kids get it easier than most adults: Some princes want a princess, some princes want a prince. Blowjobs don't really need to come into the story, any more than a kid's story about a girl and a guy needs to have blowjobs in it.)
We aren't to the place where gay people -- where any minority -- are people, in these ways, which is how privilege works: Women are just men who can't drive, black people are just white people who've managed to become poor, gays are just straight people who do this one weird thing. Where you run into trouble, assuming everyone fits (poorly) into your own standard, is in situations like this, where you're getting in your own way -- and mine -- for no good reason. Being exotic is helpful until it stops being helpful, at which point you are a in cage that happens to be your entire life.
And since you can't talk a person out of their blindness while they're experiencing it -- since nobody's mind was ever changed by being called an asshole -- then maybe this short, sharp shock, this lifeboat situation, is more important to human/vampire relations than what it, itself, engenders. The idea that vampires are people is more revolutionary than fluid-bonding with one to save your family: Vampires profited, after coming out, from mixing up their eros and thanatos and selling themselves as these sex creatures from beyond, which is true to an extent, but has now become the least interesting thing about them.
"If we're gonna be safe, every single human needs a vampire and every vampire needs a human. I hope I'm gonna see all y'all tonight. If I don't... God be with you."
BELLEFLEUR'S AFTER DARK
Vampire James, of course, is a rocker in the band. Lafayette is there, everybody's there except Andy. A strangely wet-haired vampire caresses an old lady's neck; a bearded guy asks a young woman about her results, hurriedly. Jason jokes around with Arlene and passes a plate of corn around the place, giggling with a young lady while he refills her iced tea, much to Violet's lack of amusement. A woman playfully shows off her fangs to a friendly woman: Death plays Mercutio here, crossing racial and age lines with abandon, and everyone's invited. Thunder in their hearts.
Jessica searches, worriedly, for the only family she's interested in protecting; she heads out into the night, disappointed. Sookie and Alcide confirm their status, as Arlene calls everyone together -- "Come, all my children! Eat!" -- and agree to stay no more than an hour, before they go. They have each other, they don't need to be a part of this. They're here for the community, not for the lifeboat.
Willa: "Anything good?"
Tara: "I used to hate vegetarians, but now watching these pigs dig into their barbecue it makes me wanna..."
Lettie Mae interrupts their giggling, trying as hard as she can to be polite, to make a good impression on her daughter's newfound sister, and eventually she gets Willa to make Tara talk to her. Eventually Tara relents, as she always will, and takes her mom to a barn or garage nearby.
Tara: "What the fuck you want?"
Lettie Mae: "To apologize for the way I handled things. Everything. I'm talking about your ... whole life. I am so terribly sorry."
Tara: "I am for the first time in my life speechless. What is your game?"
"When your father left... I loved him with everything I had in me, and I hurt for myself. So much so I forgot to hurt for you. There were even times when I forgot to... I forgot to feed you, Tara. For days at a time, I would forget."
Tara says she made do, and in a way she did. But that hole is a lot bigger than she even knows. Maryann knew, Franklin knew. Pam knows, I think. Lafayette knows, but he thinks it's just part of her now, like himself with Mama Reynolds. But of all of them, Lettie Mae's made the long walk back. She remained stuck in her selfish little bubble, perhaps, and she faltered and stumbled, but we've watched it happen. Every painful step. Every time we thought, that marriage won't last, that promise is a lie, this woman is a time bomb. That she, like Tara, was doomed to be synonymous with her weakness.
"It was my job to feed you," Lettie Mae says, slipping off her sweater to reveal a neck-baring chemise, "And I didn't do it. I thought I never could forgive myself." Tara's eyes go wide, and she steps back, fascinated and horrified. But Lettie Mae's repentance is overwhelming as a flood. The only thing worse than your mother being a monster is your mother being a person.
"This whole thing, all the trouble in this world -- it's a blessing, Tara. It's a chance for us to heal. Come here. Let me feed you. Let me take care of you. Let me nourish my baby girl."
She sobs, hungry, desperate as ever. And when Tara goes to her, and feeds, it's not as a child to a mother -- or a woman to a lover -- and it's not a lamb to the slaughter. Lettie Mae was always the vampire, here; caught in her own needs and thirst. We would have had no Maryann if it weren't for this, to begin with, if it weren't for Lettie Mae's desire for wholeness: She found Miss Jeanette in the first place. I still wonder if it wouldn't have worked -- if their story hadn't twisted back on them and made Tara so cruel and jealous of her placebo sobriety -- but it was the same desire, here as every time she's ever tried to reconnect.
There will always be problems, and impediments: Without those things there are no stories. Something weird will happen here. But it won't be tonight. Tonight, Lettie Mae has found a way around their history, her selfishness and her cruelty, her penchant for making Tara a metaphor for herself. Tonight, her desire for shortcuts to redemption meets her bullheaded determination to become human in a way that closes the circuit.
And not only that, but in a way that reverses the entire flow of power and energy: Not just between these two broken women, but between parents and children, and vampires and humans, for all of our sakes. She is being penetrated, sure; but for Tara, and for all the good night folk of Bon Temps, better to say she surrounds. She is big enough for us all; she is running up the hill. And Tara, walking back into the nest of hate and sadness she's spent her life fleeing, holding her mother in her arms, giving her mother the gift of forgiveness, is the strongest and the bravest she's ever been. In this, I do see God. You bet your ass I do.
BELLEFLEUR
Andy and ABCD are watching Toddlers & Tiaras when Jessica knocks. He's ready, he thinks, for the vampire hordes; he cocks his gun before he answers.
Jessica: "You didn't come tonight..."
Andy: "No, you murdering piece of shit. I did not."
Jessica: "I came to offer you protection. For both of you. I'm not asking for your blood."
Andy: "Then what the fuck do you want?"
Jessica: "What I want is to give you your girls back. But I can't. So I offer safety. You will never have to worry. You have my word."
Jessica: "You've got it anyway."
You can see him, taking what is given without a word. Jessica sees it too, and opens her mouth; when he closes the door it is quieter than a slam. And she takes the long walk out into the driveway, to settle down and wait. Hungry as ever.
BELLEFLEUR'S
Bill stops Alcide and Sookie on the way out, of course. They think they're safe, but he disagrees: She needs a vampire, not just a werewolf. She must not be buried and she must not be torn apart.
Bill: "More so than anyone else here, you need protection..."
Alcide: "She's got me."
Bill: "You're not good enough. And you can growl at me all you want, bright-eyes, but it doesn't change the truth."
Sookie: "Not interested."
Bill: "I have made the long walk back. You can trust me again."
Sookie: "That's the thing, though. Even at your best, I never could."
It was the thing she liked. Silence, after decades of endless noise. And without him, without the world he brought her into, who knows? I think she'd still be the village idiot. I think she'd still be miserable, just a lonely waitress disgusted by the men around her. But that's the thing about first loves, isn't it? You never really find anyone that mysterious or fascinating as that first time you heard only silence. Alcide and Sookie can't look into each other's heads, like with Ben, but he's not a blank-slate monster either. And perhaps she could explain this, they could work out a deal, but that's when Alcide smells them.
Back at the party, everybody's dancing. Young and old, black and white, dead and alive. Making their deals, negotiating their relationships; as many ways as there are to love, or to hate, there are more ways still for us to keep each other alive. The camera pulls back on them, all dancing together, under the lanterns, under Arlene's watchful and loving eye, and back to the edge of the forest: Twenty monsters, and then fifty, and then a hundred.
JACOB CLIFTON is a freelance writer and critic based in Austin, Texas. He currently recaps Pretty Little Liars, Ray Donovan, Mistresses, and True Blood for TWoP. Jacob can be found online at jacobclifton.com, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as a regular column for Tor.com, Geek Love.