I didn’t even know Alan Ball was working on a new show for HBO. But, he is! And Holly Hunter shall be starring in it. Sounds good!

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Glory, glory, glory in the Highest! Deborah Ann Woll is getting into the motherfuckin’ Daredevil game. Playing none other than Karen Page, the Man Without Fear’s love interest. As someone who has been *cough* a bit obsessed with the red headed actress, I can confirm that this excites every part of me.

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I write  about True Blood, so I have to watch it. The last three seasons have been unmitigated ass. Just chewy pieces of shit that get ripped up into my teeth and cause me to gag. The only soft spot I have for the show is courtesy of my hard spot (word play!) for Jessica, played by  Deborah Ann Woll. The makers of the trailer must have known this, because they threw some Jessicagoodnessgracious into the mix and I’m not feeling so terrible about the experience now. Also — there could be…action on the show? Weird as hell.

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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.

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It’s impressive how out of touch the writers of True Blood are with their own subtexts. Nothing could have solid their obliviousness better than the puke-inducing monologue that Slutty Sookie delivered to her two panting, devolved meat-sac lovers who wanted nothing more than to explode their cock-missiles all over her stratosphere.

A sultry Sookie drabbed in red lingerie stood center frame. She spoke to the two man, flanked on either side both emotionally and physically by the two other lines in their insufferable love triangle. Then somehow within the confines of a wet dream, Sookie clad in nothing but suggestions of cloth decided to launch into some absurd (in the context) feminist diatribe.

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Alright, this is what I’m talking about. I dug last night’s True Blood more than I had any episode in recent memory. On a relative scale, nothing really happened.   Everything was par the True Blood course. Couples fought. Vampires fucked. Melodrama was as melodrama is. However by slowing down the episode and giving characters time to interact on a personal level, the show hit with a funny, charming episode.

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Still stuffed to the brim with hormonal beef, remnants of little alcohol atoms rocketing around my synapses, tired from the first day of work since Thursday, I sat down this afternoon and watched the second episode of True Blood’s fourth season. Be it the chemical-soaked flesh I munched en masse yesterday, the fatigue, the lingering hangover from too much frisbee and alcohol and too little water, but I enjoyed the episode.

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Dear Eric Northman, if you die, I will be inconsolable. Somehow, I haven’t tired of your brooding nature, or your staccato bursts of malaise. Nor your continuous pining for Sookie Stackhouse, despite the fact that you’re far too good for her hillbilly ass. No seriously, if you are reduced to cinders and eulogies next episode, I am going to be one seriously sad dudebro.

And so the writers of True Blood have me hooked like it’s the good ole days. Yeah, you know, back in 2008. When I loved True Blood. I know I do a lot of hatin’ about True Blood, but it’s based out of pure emotional response and not some sort of agenda. So I can say I was pretty stoked with last night’s episode.

For the first time since the middle of season two, I was totally aggravated that the show was over. I have to wait two goddamn weeks to find out what happens to my beloved Eric? Fucking Labor Day! Do you know what I’ll be doing next Sunday? Probably sitting on my fat ass! Why can’t I do that while watchin’ the season finale? Son of a bitch.

But it’s a good aggravation, the sort of interest that stems from wanting to know what happens next. This is in contrast to almost this entire season, where my mind was a river of profanity and hate following an episode. I was a river of confusion, wondering what the fuck I loved about the show so much in the first place, and how it had run so far off course.

Last night reminded me.

Bill and Sookie In: Of Mice And Men
A good portion of the episode was dedicated to Bill and Sookie cruisin’ the swamp-ass roads of Louisiana, dreaming of what their life would be like if they could start over. Just to prove that I’m not just fickle, but also an overly emotional dude, I actually dug on those scenes. It was all Of Mice & Men & Vampires & Fairies, as they detailed the impossibilities they’d love to indulge in.

Plus, with those gap-teeth and that tendency to embark on the hopelessly stupid, Sookie can totally be the Bon Temps’ version of Lennie.

It was enjoyable though, to see the couple actually interacting for almost like three minutes without someone’s life at stake. Sure it goes to shit pretty quickly, but before Russell totally upends their dumb car, they actually come off like the rest of us couples; fucked up, trying to make it work, and hopelessly in love with the idea of their relationship.

Jason In: No Country For Old Stackhouse
Leave it to True Blood to drag in some commentary on the state of modern sports. Poor Jason Stackhouse strives to legitimize his career in the face of his spiritual successor as the High School Jock Top Shit. Motherfuckers.

Jason’s always been one of my favorite characters, because of his hopelessly retarded antics. But underneath all that bullshit, I’ve enjoyed the times when they’ve attempted to humanize him. Give him a few flourishes to go alone with his boneheaded statements and his nintety-three pack abs.

I feel for the dude. Stuck in a back road town, one of his only claims to fame seemingly about to be obliterated by a cheater, it’s got to be depressing as fuck for the guy. Even more so since I think Jason feels that there’s a good chance this kid will make it.

There’s probably some ethical dilemma here for more people, but I hope Jason blasts that kid’s stupid arm off with a shotgun and then dances in his blood.

Jason actually comes off like the rest of us humans; fearful of being outmoded in the face of newer, superior versions of ourselves. Quicker, faster, their potential not yet wasted, or withered, or perhaps worst of all, close to being actually actualized.

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Eric Northman has spent this season on a butt-fucking rampage of revenge. He has pouted, killed, pouted more, brooded, killed, and ultimately pouted some more. Going into last night’s episode, I was fucking stoked!, shit was about to go down.

But then? Then Eric just pouted a real lot, signed some court documents, and pouted some more.

Oh True Blood, if you were as good as your previews, we’d have such a great relationship. I’d buy you ice cream, and we’d swing on the swing set near the lake and talk about the time when you locked your keys in your car and you came over and we snuggled and watched Man Vs. Food until you fell asleep on my shoulder.

But seriously, last night, what the fuck?

We finally got the big reveal! Sookie is…Navi from Legend of Zelda? Or something like that? I actually think its sort of dope, despite the fact that it’s also sort of seven shades of lame. Sookie herself knew it, and the writers had her drop the self-aware “That’s fucking lame!”, which of course makes her existence as a Fairy Lady a bit more bearable.

Unfortunately, Sookie has to be the dumbest fucking fairy ever, running off as always when she’s explicitly told not to. Bill wakes up and he’s all like RAWR, RAWR, WHERE ART THOU, SOOKIE?! Then he gets up in Jason’s face like it’s his fault that his sister is the most aggravatingly impetuous bitch ever.

Seriously. Sookie is every annoying chick in a horror flick rolled up into a ball of hot buck-toothed misery. She deserves a pickaxe in her dumb chest. But she’d just catch it with the gap in her teeth and then use it to mow the lawn or some shit.

If you take a step back, the entire episode, much like the entire series of True Blood, was just Sookie running back and forth from Bill and Eric. Like, seriously. But that’s okay, because the rest of the denizens of Hick Trash, Louisiana can fill up the episode with sugar-pop bullshit.

First off, Tara’s got to fucking go. Like, seriously. Let me describe Tara to you in one sentence: Annoying ass chick who just bulges her eyes, quivers her bottom lip, and acts really pissed off.

There you go. Find me a scene where at least one of this qualities isn’t true.

She’s in the good though, because she may be soon fucking Jason. But Jason’s wrapped up with a Were-Panther, from Nearby Hick Trash, Louisiana. As an aside, Were-Panthers are probably the coolest thing in the show since good old vampires. So there’s that, for Crystal.

Meanwhile, when did True Blood become LOST? The whole flashing to Sam’s life of douchery wasn’t needed, and sort of just jumbled up the narrative. Do we really need to complicate Sam’s life? He’s already a shifter with yokel parents who fucked a Tree Goddess, and now he’s also a thief and a murderer.

I only got a place in my heart for one Sawyer, yo.

But Sam’s back-story wasn’t the only thing that was hacking the narrative structure to pieces. Lafayette and Jesus go on a ridiculous V-Trip on some Universal Islands of Adventure ride. The entire five minutes it ate up were entertaining, but I was left wondering why the fuck it was in the episode. Like, do we really need another storyline involving more characters on some epic bullshit? Isn’t this show already a disastrous potpourri of storylines?

I would have enjoyed it, if it wasn’t wedged into an episode that was doing absolutely nothing to the main narrative, other than having Fairy Gap Tooth run around and get rubbed down by the two guys she’s sweating.

That’s my main qualm with this fucking shit at this point. There’s so much bullshit going on, with so many characters, that the entire thing comes off as a tonally-uneven, fractured narrative of misery. There’s so many storylines going on, that the pacing is total fucking bumper cars, and everything is tethered together more by wishes than anything.

What is connecting the Eric Buttfucking Rampage storyline to the Jason Stackhouse Fucks Panthers storyline to the Sam is Sawyer From LOST storyline? I’m not really sure. But they hop and skip between the lot of them so quickly it’s some jerky, hodgepodge of suck. Sure they’re characters that existence within the same universe, but beyond that?

As far as the main storyline goes, the entire episode was high-fructose bullshit. Pure filler. By the time Russell finally appears on screen, almost the entire episode had been burned up with a bunch of different characters accomplishing almost nothing. Sam was sitting in the woods, Tara was probably just quivering somewhere and stammering, Sookie was in-between running to/from Eric/Bill.

And god dammit, I like Russell’s storyline. I also enjoy Eric’s butt-fucking fiascoatron. I love Hoyt and Jessica’s relationship more than both. But I’m given so little time with every character, it’s like I’m watching a bunch of vignettes tied together under the same umbrella.

There’s two episodes left. And as I always say, if the episode is as good as the preview, I’ll be happy. If it’s “The Lives of Hick Trash” again, I’ll be here next week. Lamenting and groaning and whining like I’m just another member of Bon Temps.