“You are destroying the world on the basis of a book that’s thousands of years old. You call that evolved?”
The multifarious plots that have made up this year’s season of True Blood having mostly been resolved or incorporated last week, the season has finally come to a sharp focus on one major plotline amid the soap. The religious fundamentalist takeover of the vampire Authority by Salome and her devout followers is now threatening the uneasy coexistence between vampires and humans, as all Tru Blood factories are now out of action and the starving vampires of the world begin to turn on humans as the nearest food source.
Battle lines are being drawn, with Bud Dearborne’s now defunct hate group looking like just the first of many, while supernaturals, threatened with a human vendetta, draw closer together in opposition to the ‘normals’. But Salome’s religious revolution is already starting to crack, as such revolutions often do, with dissent in her ranks as to how seriously to take the vampire Bible.
That this plot has come to be the most prominent is hardly a surprise, even though (as I’ve often remarked) the idea of vampires deciding to conquer the world is pretty hackneyed now. Blade did it, Being Human did it (twice), and even True Blood itself did it earlier, with Russell Edgington’s frenzied rampage in season three. That Russell is once more instrumental in this reheated plot might somewhat smack of running out of ideas.
But to be fair, there may be a limit to how much you can do with True Blood’s premise, that of vampires “coming out of the coffin” and trying to integrate into human society. The old ‘faction that wants to go back to the good old days of hunting’ plot is pretty much the biggest threat you can have, short of a full scale war which might be spectacular but would lack the depth we have in the machinations of those trying to provoke or avoid just that situation.
What’s made this particular take on the situation interesting is the religious fundamentalist angle. There’ve been snarky little barbs at religion throughout this season, and it’s hard not to see the vampires’ sudden piety as a comment on all fundamentalists, particularly in a year when a Christian-dominated hard-right Republican party is facing up to the polls with a similar religious devotion. The show’s dealt more directly with that kind of thing before, with season two’s Fellowship of the Sun, but this seems more subtle and, as a result, more applicable to fundamentalists of all stripes. It can surely be no coincidence that the opponents of the Lilith cult this week kept referring to “evolution”, and how the religion was holding vampires back.
Having dealt with the vengeful Ifrit, Lafayette’s brujo demon, and the Obama-masked hate group already, this week mainly concerned itself with the vampire religious conspiracy and Sookie’s continuing search for her parents’ murderer. Without having to juggle so many plots, and with a couple of episodes yet to go, that meant that this week could afford to breathe a little with regard to the characters. Hoyt particularly got what seemed a proper end to his torment, and some lengthy scenes resolved his conflicts with his mother, Jessica and Jason.
The scene in Merlotte’s Bar, mostly a three hander with Hoyt, Jessica and Jason, was actually genuinely tearjerking. Kudos to Jim Parrack, Ryan Kwanten and particularly Deborah Ann Woll as Jessica, who conveyed genuine sorrow as the camera lingered intensely on her in close up. Having in short order split up with the love of his life, found said love in the arms of his best friend, and been suborned into a psychotic hate group, Hoyt’s finally had enough of life in Bon Temps (understandably, as the writers seem intent on making him have as horrible a time as possible). So he’s off to work on an oil rig in Alaska. But before he goes, he wants to say goodbye to Jessica and Jason, then have Jessica cure his torment as only a vampire can – to glamour him into forgetting he’d ever known either of them.
It’s sad that Hoyt chooses to bury his pain rather than deal with it, but honestly, mightn’t we all do that, given the chance? Jess’s glamour must be pretty powerful though, for him to ignore the holes it would leave in his memory, holes that not even the unconvinced Jason can poke through, pulling Hoyt’s truck over in his cop guise as a last desperate attempt to get his best friend to change his mind. To no avail; Hoyt remembers his sister, but not him. So it looks like he’s really gone. But hey, this is True Blood, and not even death is a barrier to coming back, so who knows?
Case in point – Godric popped up again, as Nora and the apparently converted Bill made an attempt to convert Eric with a few drops of Lilith’s powerful blood. Nora joined him in partaking, and was pretty surprised to see not the expected vision of Lilith, but her calm-as-ever maker, to whom Eric appealed for help. But Godric demurred at fighting the vision of Lilith that appeared behind him; “it’s not me that needs to fight her”. At which point she ripped his throat out rather graphically, covering herself once again in blood. Still, Godric’s already been disintegrated by sunlight in season two, so I wouldn’t rule out seeing the enticing Allan Hyde again.
As a result of all this, it looks like Eric really is converted, along with Bill. This led to a very tense scene in which he tried to bury the hatchet with a suspicious Russell. Is Russell right to be suspicious? Eric’s slippery, to be sure, but it seems out of character for him to be able to fake quite such submissiveness. There again, I’m still not entirely sure that Bill is a true convert. These are the heroes of the show, and it’s not unnatural to suspect that, if they go over to the villains’ side, they’re probably faking it.
Russell himself has had enough of faking it though. After a quick meal from a local frathouse (Russell and Steve seem to be the only vampires to have left the Authority bunker in weeks), he’s ready for the next phase of his plan – obtain some fairy blood (from the obvious source) to complete the vampires’ conquest by walking in daylight unharmed. Trouble is, that’s expressly against Salome’s interpretation of the vampire Bible.
Too bad for her. As I mentioned many weeks ago, it looks like Russell’s far from a true believer, it’s just that his aims happen to partially coincide with the fundamentalists. I never thought they’d be able to control him, and now they’ve reached an uncompromisable disagreement, it looks like I was right. Abandoning that louche Southern accent for his (presumably original) Germanic inflection, Russell took to the table to roar defiance at his former cohorts before lighting out for the wider world. Sookie should look out.
As if to underline this, she had to deal with the newly vampirised county coroner as early as the pre-credit teaser. Star Trek alumnus John Billingsley has been fun as Mike Spencer over the years, always lending the role a faintly creepy, unwholesome air, and he’ll be missed now that Sookie’s turned him into mush with the aid of a pair of chopsticks. His interest in Sookie had been hinted at earlier, and it was nice to see it finally followed up on – in a pretty terminal sort of way. As a vampire, he didn’t just fancy her, he found all that fairy blood wonderfully intoxicating.
And it was with the fairies that Sookie was mostly concerned this week, the last plotline that has yet to be resolved or intersect with the Authority story. With the discovery of a mysterious scroll in a hole under her gran’s bed (Jason’s investigative experience seems finally to be paying off for him), the Stackhouse siblings were back on the trail of the enigmatic ‘Warlow’, the vampire responsible for their parents’ death.
Discovering that the weird glyphs on the scroll were in “no human language”, it was time for a quick visit to fairyland and a chat with the ever-obliging (and pleasantly open-shirted) Claude. Turns out the scroll is a some kind of deal done with Warlow, by which the first fey Stackhouse daughter is his by right. Meaning, of course, Sookie. The scroll dates from 1702, so that rules out Bill being Warlow, but not Eric. However, with Russell presumably now on the way, my money’s on it being him. It’ll certainly be an anticlimax if it’s a vampire we’ve never seen before.
So, it looks like everything’s finally coming together. Elsewhere, Sam and Luna, apparently aware of Steve Newlin’s new ‘pet’ (ie little Emma), have stowed away in the good reverend’s bag as mice, and are now running the halls of the Authority. New favourite double act Pam and Tara have put themselves on the bad side of the newly theocratic Authority by staking the odious goth Elijah, installed as Eric’s replacement. Since staking other vampires seems to be a no-no generally, this will not make them popular.
Only two more episodes to go then, and this felt like the calm before the storm with all its character development and long, introspective scenes. It’s taken a long time for True Blood to settle into some kind of focus this year, and I can understand some people’s objections to that; at times, it’s seemed almost wantonly rambling. But for me, the strength of the characters, both in writing and acting, have kept it consistently entertaining even when we didn’t know which plotline to look at first. Let’s see what the season’s climax will bring…
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