Season 7, Episode 2 Talk about fan service! On Sunday night, “True Blood” opened with its two resident studs, the Viking vamp Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) and the Louisiana lech Jason (Ryan Kwanten), getting it on — shirtless, kissing, dim light, chamber music on the soundtrack. It was as if Cinemax had broken into the HBO satellite feed.
It was a dream, of course, and the best thing about the scene was Jason, in his deputy’s uniform, waking up in a church pew and falling over while making ecstatic little noises. Mr. Kwanten knows how to make every little detail funny, and the mixture of curiosity and alarm on Jason’s face as he stole a look at his crotch was priceless.
Not a whole lot else was funny in the season’s second episode, however, as the town of Bon Temps continued its march toward a final reckoning — with the desperate, hepatitis V-infected vampires and with its own demons (and werewolves, witches, shape-shifters, etc.). In case we missed the seriousness of the situation as the show’s final season progresses, Sookie (Anna Paquin) quoted a gravestone poem about “the brutal indifference of life.” And when Lettie Mae (Adina Porter) told her nephew Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) that he was going to hell, he gestured to his surroundings and said, “That’s what this is.” So: eight more episodes to save Bon Temps’s soul.
The characters who went missing in the season premiere remained out of reach. Arlene, Holly, Nicole and Jane were still chained in the basement at Fangtasia, waiting to be fed upon by the infected vamps. Escape seemed possible when Arlene recognized one of their captors as a teacher who had taught her and Holly’s children, and appealed to their shared history — plus the fact that the hep V was fatal anyway — to persuade her to help. One hitch: The sympathetic vampire died early, while feeding on Arlene to build up her strength, and dissolved in a puddle of black sludge in Arlene’s lap. That was pretty funny, come to think of it. So was Carrie Preston’s delivery of Arlene’s rallying cry, an elegant précis of the series so far: “I did not survive four lousy husbands, a serial-killer boyfriend and the sort-of suicide of my love, Terry, to die in the dingy basement of a vampire bar.”
We also got our first glimpse of the possibly dead Tara (Rutina Wesley), as her mother, Lettie Mae, took extreme measures to track her down. In a moment of inspiration, Lettie Mae stuck her hand in a frying pan and used the resulting burn as an excuse to drink the blood of the soft-touch vampire Willa. In the resulting vision, Lettie Mae saw a white-robed Tara on a cross, a snake wrapped around her neck, delivering what seemed to be a warning in a strange language. “I need the answers!” said a distraught Lettie Mae.
In what felt like a conscious echo a few minutes of screen time later, Sookie said, “That’s not the answer,” when Alcide (Joe Manganiello) suggested they run away together and avoid the coming battle. They were returning from the nearby town of St. Alice, where the team of Sookie, Alcide, Jason, Andy (Chris Bauer) and Sam (Sam Trammell) had gone to look for the family of the dead girl Sookie found in the woods. Sookie theorized that a clue to the infected vamps’ whereabouts (and therefore the whereabouts of Arlene et al.) might turn up, but instead they found an empty town and a big pit full of dead humans, which was not good news for Bon Temps.
Last week a reader asked why I was so certain that Sookie and Bill (Stephen Moyer) will wind up back together, or at least get back together, before the show ends. It’s sheer speculation, of course, but it just seems to me that after seven seasons the producers will find a reunion too tempting, whether it’s played happy, tragic or bittersweet. And perhaps there was some evidence in Sunday’s episode: reading an entry from the dead girl’s diary about falling in love with a vampire and going to Fangtasia (a clue no one caught), Sookie flashed back to Season 1, when she asked Bill to take her there but admonished him that they were not going on a date.
The flashback — more catnip for the fans, especially the Sookie-Bill shippers — combined clips from the show’s fourth episode with a new scene of Sookie rushing home and putting on the red-and-white dress she wore to the club. I’m not saying I’m clairvoyant, but it was pretty rom-commy.
(Another Season 1 callout: Jane Bodehouse, introduced in the show’s second episode getting drunk at Merlotte’s, now moans in the basement of Fangtasia, “If someone had told me I’d die sober in a bar –”)
Now for the bad news: While most of the show’s heroes were road-tripping, Bon Temps’s scared and malcontent humans, led by the would-be mayor, Vince (Brett Rickaby), raided the Sheriff’s Department and helped themselves to the armory. The episode’s political point-scoring was concentrated here, with references to the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association and vigilantism. Adilyn (Bailey Noble) and her half-brother-by-cohabitation Wade (Noah Matthews) tried to stop them, and Adilyn even manifested her light beam (for just the second time, if I’m counting right), but it didn’t help — it just hastened the day when the halfling Adilyn will use up her powers. Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), locked in the Bellefleur attic, sensed Adilyn’s danger but it was still daylight — next week we’ll see her and her uneasy ally Andy embarking on yet another rescue.
We’ll also start to learn what serious hot water Sookie is planning to get into — so serious that in the episode’s penultimate scene she sneaked out of the house while Alcide was showering and went to Bill, to ask if the bond between them still existed.
But really, all the grim action was just a backdrop to the couple of minutes Eric Northman was on screen. The opening dream sequence may turn out to have been a goof, though it tied into some past events — Jason had similar erotic feelings about the vampire “Ben,” who turned out to be Warlow, and last season Eric fed Jason his blood. Definitely not a goof: the final scene, when Pam arrived in the Rhône (the map was right!) and finally found Eric, slumped in a chair, with — major spoiler alert! — the tell-tale black veins, signs of hepatitis V infection, climbing up his neck.
Some questions to ponder for next week and beyond: Is Eric’s prognosis terminal? Or will a cure, perhaps supernatural in nature, be found? What was Tara doing on that cross, and what was she trying to tell her mother? And who’s your favorite character at the moment? For me, it’s Jessica, by a small margin over Jason. Vote for Pam if you want, but the tough-on-the-outside, not-quite-as-tough-on-the-inside act may be getting a little old.