Okay, so True Blood put forth perhaps the strongest of the three episodes so far—strengths magnified, weaknesses relatively muted, a couple of good twists, nice atmosphere (courtesy of guest director John Dahl, of Red Rock West and The Last Seduction fame), more kinky sex, etc. And here’s the thing that’s worrying me about it: I still don’t care. On a fundamental level, creator Alan Ball just hasn’t invested his characters with a lot of heart; they’re emotional vampires, feeding and feeding and feeding without suggesting anything like a soul. They can be funny. They can be sexy. They can scary. (And tonight, they were all three to some degree.) But I’m becoming more convinced that the show won’t transcend “time-passer” status.
First thing’s best: Last week’s cliffhanger, which had Sookie greeted by three malicious vamps at Bill’s house, was not a dream sequence. Turns out the dude actually hangs out with this crowd, though not exactly by choice. When his fanged friends are around, Bill has a hard time glossing over the world of many vampires, which isn’t about integrating with humans at all, but about snacking on their plasma and keeping them around as sex slaves. When Bill’s cohorts circle Sookie like vultures—virgin blood being the best-tasting blood there is, after baby’s blood—it’s a testament to Bill’s hold on her that she doesn’t run screaming.
What I like about Bill’s friends—one of whom, you’ll remember, was the vamp in the videotape with the late Maudette—is that they add a much-needed element of danger to the show. They’re unambiguously evil and vicious, which adds some tension and suspense while allowing us to see how Bill struggles against his nature in order to keep from going down that path. We’ve seen already that vampires are being persecuted—as it’s been said more than once on this show, humans have been responsible for mass destruction of their own—but they are monsters, after all, and a sizable number of them have no interest in “coming out of the closet” and integrating into society. Unlike Bill, these new vampires are not wracked with self-doubt. When they appear a second time, they have a victim cocooned in other room, hanging like a fresh carcass in a meat freezer.
Meanwhile, back in boringsville, Sam and Tara commiserate about carrying a torch for an unattainable partner—Sookie in Sam’s case, Jason in Tara’s—and how it’s keeping them lonely and unsnogged. It doesn’t take these dim bulbs too long to realize that they have a short-term solution in each other: Their boss-employee relationship isn’t really jeopardized because Tara doesn’t care about the job, so what do they have to lose? It’s worth noting that theirs is the most conventional pairing we’ve yet to see on the show; we don’t see much, granted, but it’s the first time that sex is expressed as anything other than raw aggression.