Finally! This is what I’ve been waiting for all season: An episode that takes all of this improved story work and world building and makes it fun. Once you see an episode like “Fuck The Pain Away,” which almost seamlessly blends True Blood staple elements like sex, humor, and over-the-top supernatural shenanigans into season six’s improved framework, it’s easy to see exactly what’s been missing so far this season: A good time.
The sense of fun kicks off right away, as the opening features some awkward-yet-amusing cross-cutting of Sookie threatening to annihilate Warlow with her light bomb with Jessica freaking out to Bill post-fairy murder. Perhaps the best part is Warlow declaring he doesn’t want to hurt Sookie—no, she is his “intended” and he has been looking for her for centuries. He wasn’t maliciously killing her parents; he was saving her from them! So they could be together once she was of age! The look of disgust on Sookie’s face—coupled with her angry screed about how she doesn’t exist just to be some plaything for supernatural beings, which, okay, Sookie—is absolutely delightful, as is Billith’s realization that Warlow is in town due to Sookie burning him with her light bomb, causing him to show up at Sookie’s house and summon Warlow away like a lost puppy.
From here, things just get better: Lilith is Warlow’s maker, and the show wants us to know exactly how, so it flashes back to 3500 B.C. 3500 B.C. is apparently a time without shirts but with merkins, where fairy Warlow meets a naked Lilith and does exactly what any normal fairy would do: Fucks her brains out, then acquiesces as she turns him into a vampire. These flashbacks were likely supposed to be poignant reminders of everything Warlow lost when he was turned into a vampire, but really they’re just a silly lark into nonsense, like all good True Blood flashbacks should be. When the episode returns to the present to deal with Billith and his desire to take Warlow’s blood and use it to create the new, improved TruBlood, it is revealed that Warlow wants nothing to do with Lilith and her prophecy, and he’s pretty keen on letting all of the vampires die. Time to do some brainstorming, Billith.
Meanwhile, everything else in the episode is pushing all of the vampires of Louisiana towards the LAVTF prison camp, which turns out to be a very good thing. Once Pam is captured, Eric and Tara give themselves up voluntarily on a mission to rescue her. What we see inside the camp is combination of Nazi-esque experiments and vampire hunger games, as the task force studies the vampires in an effort to see how they can be defeated. Eric and Pam take to their surroundings immediately, Eric dominating in physical prowess and Pam in a more surprising place, a therapist’s couch. Basically, these sequences are fantastic because they are the first time in a long time the characters get a chance to feel like themselves: snarky, clever, and most of all, connected to each other. When the Governor (assisted by Sarah and Steve Newlin, of course) pits Pam and Eric against each other in what looks to be a game to the death the result finally feels like an Eric and Pam scene to look forward to.