THIS WEEK ON True Blood: She’s Not There
I tried to approach this season of True Blood with a healthy set of expectations. I told myself that it is, at best, pulpy empty fun. Even with that in mind, whew. Going from Game of Thrones to True Blood in the span of a week is fucking brutal. Brutal! It wasn’t that the season four premiere was awful. It was the same as the last two seasons or so have been. Intermittently entertaining, trying too hard to cram in too much story, and at times utterly painful to consume.
The episode starts off with everyone’s least favorite Gap-Toothed Wunder hanging out in fairy land. The douchey kid from the hotel a couple of seasons ago is hanging out and they’re all high-fiving and staring at the nipples of chicks in their fairy lingerie with me. You have to hand it to faeries, or fairies, or however you want to spell it. Immortality treats them well.
Shit hits the fan and all of a sudden the Fairy-Faery-Godmother is some evil wench thing. A civil war breaks out amongst the fairy-faeries and they start lobbing bullshit light grenades at one another. Oh yeah, Sookie is with her grandfather so the writers can give her an excuse to cry glorious behemoth tears down her face while she makes that awful, pained, contorted expression.
It was about this time, with the flying flinging light grenades and Sookie chortling out commands that I remembered. Oh fuck me, this is True Blood.
Sookie makes it back and the blatant and awkwardly executed prologue to the show ends. You know it’s the end of a prologue type thing because there’s a weird soft fade out, which they never do. Or they do, but I’m paying poor attention. It’s at this time that they hit me with the most obvious and easiest cop-outs of all shows. Now listen, even my favorite show did it, but it’s a cop-out.
The mysterious passing of time.
Nothing screams SOFT RESET like taking a character out of the lives of the other characters for a year. It’s easy, yo. The best part of this easy cop-out is that it gives the writers the chance to give the characters some interesting scenarios. Unfortunately for True Blood it just gave the writers an excuse to throw too many storylines at us. Par for the course.
The rest of the episode played like the show was called…
What Are Those Fucking Bon Temps Yokels Up To!
Come along children, I’ll tell you.
Magically and through the grace of a YEAR PASSING BY GOODNESS TIME FLIES Hoyt is now a douchebag. The Momma’s Boy who stood up to the Levianthian Gash that bore him out is all of a sudden now longer a sweet tempered bro. He crashed into his house and bemoans Jessica not cooking him a sammich and generally behaves in a manner that doesn’t jive with the previous three seasons of character development. NBD!, as the kids say. A year’s passed. Things change!
Wee!
Meanwhile Jessica wants to fuck everything and isn’t happy dating Hoyt. Kudos to Pam for pointing out to Jessica that maybe she isn’t exactly ready for a long term commitment. You know, she hasn’t lived in the world and everything. She’s young as fuck, inexperienced, and spent the beginnings of her life with some crazy ass Christian family. Wait, which reminds me.
Has everyone forgotten that Jessica is supposed to be 16 years-old or whatever? Actually maybe she’s close to 18 or whatever with the passage of time, but let’s be clear: Hoyt has been a pedophile for a good couple of years.
Sookie is running around town so of course Dawson and Pacey have to show up. Jesus Christ, Sookie. You need to realize that Eric is everything that is hot and holy in this world. Bill is just some Emo Kid that probably wrote you poetry every day for a year and mailed it to you because he stole The Notebook out of Jessica’s room and wept his lame vampire tears all over new suits.
‘Cause supplies!, he’s the King. Cheap reveals!
The two of them are so unique and interesting as foils for one another. I hope you were able to unearth that raging subtext that occurred between the two of them when they both put forth their speeches. Bill, the politician! Oh ironies of ironies, as Eric spat about The Talking Heads being untrustworthy. I get it, I get it, I get it! This show is good for me, since I have chapped-lips from all the mouth breathing I do. It keeps the shit on the reg. I can process it.
Meanwhile Tara is busy being offensive to me. You have to love the lazy storytelling in having her compete in MMA matches. Because they still occur in dingy rooms with smoke and yelling everywhere. Check it: they’re fucking fancy rooms with smoke and yelling everywhere. And oh yeah!, she’s a lesbian.
Do you hear that aspiring female MMA fighters? You’re lesbians. I mean, I’m sure some of you are, but for a show that consistently challenges stereotypes to the Nth Degree, that whole segment smacked of laziness. Oh she’s mad! She’s an MMA fighter! They fight in pool halls! Lazy. Riffing off of stereotypes.
There’s a zillion other lame storylines zipping around. Tommy is hanging out with Hoyt’s Mom. Sam is gallivanting around with a bunch of other shifters. As they trod off into the night as glorious stallions, I had to chuckle at how fucking lame the show could be. But that’s not all! This season premiere is double-stuffed!
Terry and Whatever Her Name’s Kid is totally evil. Vygotsky be damned, apparently it’s all nature. Jason is hanging out with a bunch of toothless goobers and is now kidnapped, Andy is on V, stuff is happening somewhere and doing stuff and uh, and uh, and uh. Oh Lafayette is Warlock Mister T. Hookah.
Where the fuck was Alcide? They feel like cramming nineteen storylines down our throats, and they can’t even cram Alcide down ours? Dirty pun! Oh, I like it. I like it good.
The episode ended with Eric telling Sookie that she’s his, and I hope you weren’t surprised when it was totally a ZOMG-moment when the owner of the house was revealed. Eric drops that line about Sookie-possession and millions of viewers cried out, “I’m yours too! You’re too good for her!”
It was the ultimate set-up episode, because they took the Coward’s Way Out and write an enormous hunk of time passing into the show. So instead of riffing on already established stories, they had to reintroduce everyone. Most of the people I don’t care about, and the people I cherish not in the show for enough time.
That’s right, it’s True Blood.