THIS WEEK ON True Blood: Burning Down The House

Just wait until you see the last scene, my friend Adam told me. True Blood, he said, is a truly awful show. Momentous words coming from the only dude in my group of friends who still watches this show besides me. One by one the buddies of mine have ducked out. Everyone else has been felled by the trite themes, the clichéd characters, and the spread-thin storylines.

Just wait until you see the last scene.

And saw I did.

If there is any doubt in anyone’s minds that True Blood is a disasterpiece, I can’t fathom how it remains after the final scene of Burning Down the House. A scene so shockingly embarrassing that I wanted to cover my eyes. This was the sort of uncomfortable that could only be matched by my Dad talking about grooving my Mom’s g-spot. Catching my brother flinging loads off a high-speed fan sort of uncomfortable.

This show is just a train wreck.

I want to dig deep into the synapses of the people who wrote this final scene. A gang of assholes clad in leather rolling out of a van. These same assholes rolling out of the van while what sounds like a Linkin Park cover of said “Burning Down The House” wails in the background. Just to finish off the discomfort, all of this rolling out of vans has to take place in slow motion. Let us grind this scene down to an overwrought near-halt so all the viewers can drink in Billy Bob, The Snotty Bitch, The Red Haired Chick (I love) and Viking Guy walking like bad asses out of a car on a cheap seat to do battle with a Haggard Lady Who Casts Honey Comb Walls and shit.

My God.

The entire scene is so contrived that it blew my mind. However, I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked in a show that has devolved (or perhaps has always and I just wasn’t worn out by it at the time) into peddling cheap caricatures in lieu of characters with depth. How can you have depth when there’s no less than fourteen storylines occurring at once in Bon Temps? It’s like the writers now reach their hand into a bag of double-baked tropes when they want to write a scene.

“Hey we need to convey that these people mean business! Like, totally bad ass! Yeah like those awesome people in Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Rotting Cultural Psyche!” Then they pull some tropes out of that sagging, worn-out bag. Fucking fortune cookie stylee.

Leather Jackets: Means they mean business. You know what you do in a leather jacket? Well, if you’re not fucking or drinking in them you’re fighting or blowing shit the fuck up!

Slow Motion: Walking slower makes everything more awesome. In fact, they aren’t walking. They’re swaggering. That’s what the kids do these days anyways, swagger, right?

Techno Remix of Shit Song: Everyone knows that a techno remix makes things edgier. Fuck! Could we be over doing it? With their leather jackets and the slow-motion, these motherfuckers are already edgy! Those edges are sharp! We’re talking fucking Ginzu! Throw in the techno remix and all of a sudden we mean fucking business.

Quick-Cut Ending: Bam!  The fucking shit is over! You thought you were going to see this shit go down, and we pull that fucking rug out from under you! You’re all… Man, these swaggering leather-jacket bad asses are totally going to light shit on fire to some sweet techno remix angst bullshit! Boom! Nope! Psyche, idiots!

Boom! Shazam! Kapow! Four dorks rolling around in a suburb all of a sudden is transformed into a totally bitchin’ rock fest thanks to the power of hysterically overplayed motifs.

As I said, then the episode ends. Last week was wonderful in the sense that it predicated its central thesis around a feminist agenda that the form of the scene actively betrayed. This week what stuck out was how fucking lame the show’s idea of awesome comes off. There’s only two more episodes left in this season, and the breeze you feel is being generated by my fist-pumps at this fact.