True Blood is doing some interesting things this season—not entirely successfully, mind you—but interesting nonetheless. After seasons full of tonally schizophrenic melodrama, suddenly the show expects things to matter in a way the narrative isn’t fully prepared to support. The fact that the show is trying, however, that it wants the things happening to its characters to have meaning beyond whatever flight of supernatural fancy is being dangled under their noses at the moment, might just end up making all the difference.
Unfortunately for the show’s obvious greater ambitions, it’s Sookie’s story—the story that is most focused on having its character be taken seriously— that ends up suffering the most. Sookie has always been a problematic character in that she is irretrievably controlled by the men in her life, and just when it seemed she might be able to crawl out of that trap she is sucked into it yet again via the war between Warlow and Bill. Bill wants to use Warlow to help him prevent his vision of all his friends meeting the sun, but Warlow will only go along with this plan if Sookie agrees to become his fairy vampire bride. Sookie starts out on the right path, talking a good game to both men about not wanting to be controlled by them, but instead of leaving Bon Temps for good and not looking in her rearview mirror, she immediately searches for salvation in the arms of yet another man, Sam.
This is where the show starts laying down narrative stakes its own past can’t really support. Sookie and Sam’s connection hasn’t been a whisper of a thing since who knows when, and even when it was something the show cared about it was never more than a passing thought as Sookie moved on to every other supernatural man in her path. If the show played her plea to Sam as the ridiculous comedy it is, it might work, but this is something we—and Sam—are definitely meant to take as a serious proposition, and it simply doesn’t track. Sookie then basically gives in to the fact she is destined to be Warlow’s fairy vampire bride for eternity, essentially eulogizing herself at her parents’ headstones and dressing for her own funeral. It’s intended to be a deathly serious rumination on Sookie’s realization that her life is about to end, but Sookie has been so cavalierly tossed around as a character for so long it simply doesn’t have the gravitas necessary to be successful. If the show of the past treated Sookie with the care this episode attempted to, though, this sequence really could have been something.
It’s almost beside the point that Sookie’s death march doesn’t land the way it should, though, because it turns out not to be her death march at all. Eric, who has one of his best episodes despite being in very few scenes, throws a wrench in Sookie, Bill, and Warlow’s plans by attacking fairy Adelyn and using her fairy blood to get him into the alternate fairy dimension and drain Warlow, giving him the day walking power he needs to get to the vampire prison and save their friends from meeting the sun himself. Between this bit of scheming and his absolutely wonderful confrontation with Bill in the episode’s open, Eric once again proves himself the best character on the show and maybe the only one with any damn sense in his head. While Bill is off concerning himself with his own power and visions and how that connects to Lilith, all Eric wants to do is get things done, and if Eric is good at anything, it’s getting things done.