Reviews @ PXDCO

My Ever-Patient Mister and I sat down with a fair degree of trepidation last night to watch what he calls Too Much Blood — we're still recovering from Eddie's sticky demise last week. But at the end of the hour, he turned to me and said, "Well, that was pretty good." Which, for My E-P Mister, is akin to opening the back door and hollering, "True Blood rocks!" for all the neighbors to hear. What made the difference? Well, it wasn't the various retarded adolescents. I don't mean 'retarded' as in 'developmentally disabled,' I mean 'retarded' as in 'lagging behind.' Sookie Stackhouse, with her "love the one you're with" mentality? Such a teenage thing to do. Jason and Amy, with their on-again, off-again, hide-the-evidence-down-the-disposal approach to life? Tara driving drunk and to hell with the consequences? None of them act like grownups. Jessica, the ultimate (and now eternal) adolescent, at least has a good excuse for her teenage rebellion, what with being newly undead, ravenous, and stuck with a Goody Two Shoes like Bill Compton for a vamp!daddy. Fortunately, the real grown-ups — Pam, Eric, Kenya, and even Bill, sourpuss that he is, saved the night from turning into Bon Temps 90210.

"I'M COMMITTED TO SALVATION, BUT YOU'RE ON THE ROAD TO HELL" — Tara's midnight encounter with a dirty naked woman and a hog does not go unnoticed by the law in Bon Temps, specifically the totally awesome Kenya, one of my favorite characters from the books, who gets to wear a slimmed-down meat suit for the show. Were there no women of A Certain Size auditioning that day? Or was this one just that awesome? I like her, don't get me wrong; it just seems like a place where they could've stuck to canon and shored up the bank account of an actor who doesn't have to buy her jeans in the juniors department to keep them from falling off her bony hips. When Tara fails to even understand the instructions for the on-the-spot sobriety test, and Kenya raises her eyebrows at the "bigass, mother-fucking Paul Bunyan pig" story, Tara gets her drunk hiney hauled off to jail. She stays there until Lettie Mae arrives and renounces her, throwing her out of the house and leaving her homeless (wait, I thought Tara had an apartment? WTF?) and tells her she's no damn good. Tara reacts predictably to that, with good reason, giving Lettie Mae a highlights reel of the trauma she's inflicted on Tara over the years, then saying, "Get out of my sight, you evil bitch." Lettie Mae says, "I love you," but Tara's having none of it. "No, you don't," she says. "You never did." Salvation comes in the unlikely form of a "social worker" named Maryann Forrester, who takes Tara home to her "informal halfway house" — a big old antebellum mansion — in her snazzy red convertible. Maryann laughs off Tara's worry about getting the upholstery dirty: "Don't worry about that; I get dirty, too." Yes, that's right, Maryann is the Naked Hog Woman, all cleaned up! Okay, that can't be good.

You know what else can't be good? Lafayette deciding to call the state senator on his bullshit. While painting his toenails at the bar at Merlotte's, Lafayette hears the senator give a powerful anti-vampire message as his campaign stump speech on TV, saying "Their very blood turns our children into addicts, drug dealers and homosexuals." If they're really lucky, they're all three at once, like our dear Lafayette! But hey, at least he's not a hypocrite. So Lafayette takes off his do-rag, puts on a tie, and walks his sexy ass right up to that senator at a fund-raiser and puts the fear of  God into him: "So many things can happen to bring down a fine person such as yourself. You might want to be careful, you hear?" Why do I think Lafayette is the one who might want to start looking over his shoulder?

"I'M SICK AND TIRED OF WAITING AROUND TO GET STRANGLED" — While Tara's in the hoosegaw and Bill's off defending himself for murdering a higher life form while protecting his "pet," Sam and Sookie take a stab at playing amateur detective to try to solve the ever-growing string of strangulations before Sookie's the next victim. Sookie's vision takes them to Big Patty's Pie Shop in Bunkie, where an old geezer points them in the direction of Cindy Marshall and her brother Drew. Cindy's dead, of course, we knew that from the vision, but we didn't know that her brother had been implicated but never charged…and then disappeared. Our intrepid detectives then head over to the Bunkie police station, where Sookie uses some information she gleaned telepathically to blackmail a cop into faxing over a headshot of Drew Marshall to the Bon Temps Parish Sheriff's Department. It turns out that Drew Marshall is none other than our dear, darling, vamp-defending, Arlene-loving Rene Lenoir. Well, SHIT. Of course, the receptionist who grabs the fax is gossiping on the phone at the time, and just tosses the fax onto a desk and promptly covers it with a bunch of files. Because there wasn't already enough drama on this show, they have to manufacture it with the "files covering the fax" maneuver. *scoff*

And what's up with Sookie using her powers like that? That was kind of sleazy. The ends justifying the means? Showing off her special talent in front of her shape-shifting boss? I don't know, but next time she gets up on her high moral horse, I might have to give her a little shove. Not to mention that she's all high and mighty over Bill not being there for her, when surely he knows her pain, and therefore vampire politics must be more important to him than she is, so he obviously isn't ever coming back, ever, and so it's just fine if she macks on Sam, because, you know, he's there. *smacks forehead* Sookie's many things in the books, but she's not a slut, and this backing and forthing between Sam and Bill isn't attractive. With the possible exception of Eric (and really, who wouldn't make an exception for Eric?), Book!Sookie always seemed like a one-man kind of gal. We'll get to why Bill didn't hightail it over as soon as he got the cosmic message that Sookie had once again found herself in a peck of trouble, but once he finally shows up, he has the poor timing to come in just as tongues are getting involved between Sookie and Sam. It's the final indignity in a long, rough night for Bill, so he pounces on Sam and tries to beat the crap out of him, but Sam's not your basic bartender, so his supe-super strength allows him to battle Bill with relative equality until Sookie screams at them both to stop. Wait a second, she's got to climb an extra-long ladder to get to the top of that high horse. Okay, you up there, Sookie? Oh, yeah, she's there. She gives Bill an earful about how he claims to be protecting her but then doesn't bother showing up when she needs him, so, "I revoke your invitation." That's right, she tosses his butt out of her house and slams the door. Damn, girl. How about we break you out of that snow globe you're living in and let you spend five minutes in Bill's world.

"MAN UP, MY FRIEND, SHE'S ONLY ONE NIGHT OLD" — So what took Bill so long to get back to Sookie? One word: Jessica. Or, as Pam calls her, "That pathetic lump of temporary flesh." First, Bill has to deal with Pam watching over him to make sure he didn't do something stupid, like stake Jessica before she could even live the undead life. She oversees Bill digging the grave where they'll both spend the night, so Bill can share his "essence" with her –ew– allowing her to rise the next night as a full-fledged vampire. Once planted in the ground, apparently, the transformation can be completed. Pam and Bill see things very differently. She says, "You're a maker, a hero." She considers turning to be freeing while he's sick with guilt and shame. How did Bill ever live this long?

The newly vamped Jessica who rises the next night is, hands down, my favorite character on the show after Eric. Once she understands what's happened to her, she's jubilant. "No more homeschool? No more rules? WOO HOO!!!!" She swears like a sailor, just because she can. She dismisses Bill's protests about vampire rules as "crap" and the bottle of Tru Blood he foists on her as "shit." She says she'll report him if he doesn't let her go kill someone, saying, "I'll find a real vampire and he'll kick your ass. You're the worst maker ever. Heee! Oh, Jessica, aren't you a breath of fresh air! Bill's so strung out over Jessica's immediate, prolonged and vehement disobedience that he ends up taking her to Fangtasia, where Eric proceeds to offer new dimensions of hotassery as he takes her in hand and shows Bill how it's done. YUM. I'm not sure why Eric has to strip off his black leather jacket to reveal his buff biceps in that black muscle shirt, but I approve whole-heartedly, as does Jessica, who asks if she can sit on his lap. Amen, sister! Eric tells her to sit down and shut up, and…she does! Go Eric!

Eric also takes a minute to remind Bill who's boss. Bill has the audacity to gripe about being away from Sookie because of this whole Jessica mess, and says, "If any harm were to come to her because of my absence, you would be–" but that's as far as he gets before Eric blue-steels him and reminds him with one subtle movement and a glare that as far as Eric's concerned, Bill's a useful tool to him, but not much more. Heh, I said 'tool'. Bill corrects himself on the fly, finishing his charged sentence with, "you would be…without her helpful skills." Now you're getting it, Bill. Eric is older, wiser, and more politically savvy than you, and it would behoove you to stop arguing and start listening to him. And if Alan Ball starts listening to me, Alex Skarsgard will spend a significant portion of next season showing me why he's the boss. Preferably naked. And speaking Swedish.

"THIS IS THE LAST FUCKING TIME" — Maybe I should have saved the Eric!Yum for last, since the Jason/Amy storyline is such a massive bummer, and it would have been nice to end on a better note. Oh, well! Eddie turns out to be just as much trouble to get rid of as he was as a houseguest. Jason and Amy end up shoving his goopy remains down the garbage disposal. BLECH. Jason's had it to here with Amy and her deranged perspective (she's the opposite of Pam — she thinks vamps are the worthless beings, while Pam thinks the same of humans). He breaks all the remaining vials of V and tells her if she doesn't like that, she can pack her goddamn bags and go. The fight doesn't last for long, though. Jason comes home from work to find Amy's cooked a nice dinner for him and wants to apologize and make it right. Then, of course, because she's an addict, she tells him she saved one last drop on V for them to share, to "close the circle" and bring "symmetry, beauty and balance." What a whackjob. Jason, weak man that he is, agrees, and they have a lovely out-of-body experience where they run in the rain in a meadow. It's quite beautiful, except that as they lie together on Jason's slippery black sheets, a man we now assume to be Rene given his road crew work boots (and the faxed picture of his face we see at the end of the episode) comes in, takes off his belt, and strangles Amy to death. Yeah. Bummer. Nobody deserves that. Jason awakes from a dream to a nightmare and calls 911, telling the operator that somebody needs to come over. Once Jason has been taken to the sheriff's department in handcuffs, Andy and Sheriff Dearborn try to get him to confess, but Jason's mostly confused. "I don't know what would've made me do it." Andy's furious with him, saying, "This is the worst confession ever!" I'm not sure Sheriff Dearborn is convinced of Jason's guilt, but when Jason says he doesn't want to hurt anybody else, and to please lock him up, the sheriff agrees. Meanwhile, of course, that fax copy of Rene's headshot is buried under a pile of papers while the receptionist gossips to a friend about Jason being the killer.

*sigh*

Don't forget — next week is the season finale!