When Sookie Stackhouse stops getting laid she turns into a murderer. Her single-girl Sunday-night meal of Chinese takeout in pajamas is interrupted by a rude late knock from Mike the coroner, who turned into a vampire sometime during the season he spent offscreen. Sookie unsuccessfully shoots him, and then stabs him with a chopstick so that he collapses into a pile of carmine goo. Sure, it's self-defense — but it's also second nature to the increasingly criminal Sook, who ought to head southwest and give Walter White a run for his meth money (or at least a competitive rate on fairy blood).
Continuing our hopes of a True Blood/The Newsroom crossover (first order of business: Pam drains and enslaves Will McAvoy), the show jumps ahead slightly for the first time this season. It would be amazing if the writers permanently freed themselves from the gimmick of every episode picking up where the last one ended. The cliffhangers have become laughable, resolving within the first minute of the next episode. It's impossible to wring much tension out of it that way.
So we begin with news footage of a fire at a Tru Blood factory in Houston that resulted in six casualties. Great timing for a flippant plotline about terrorist acts. (NOT!) This means some time must have elapsed since Bill hatched that idea at the end of the last episode and they followed through with its execution. Unless vampires can just light psychic fires in the outside world with their minds? I don't know, I don't expect this shit to make sense.
Sam watches as the burly bearded guy who helped orchestrate the anti-shifters hate crime is escorted off the hospital premises in cuffs. Frank Sobotka calls beardo a butt plug, which you'd think would be a compliment of the highest order in the usually kinky world of True Blood. A still-bedridden Luna is mad as hell and looking for a fight.
Sam reassures her that there's nothing to fear and that he will wreak enough vengeance for the both of them (FORESHADOWING). Luna has some kind of attack and drags herself to the bathroom, but rather than shift into a wild animal, she becomes Sam, and then passes out from the shock of turning into her own boyfriend.
Welcome back to the Sunday night fangball post-show. After slaying Christopher Meloni (good night, sweet ripped prince of SVU, humping frosty-cold fridges in a mellow-tone afterworld), a blood-freckled Russell Edgington is swiftly taken down and netted by The Authority's own laser tag militia. Bill looks up to see that Eric has been staple-gunned to a post.
At the horrible fairy burlesque club/hookah bar/pop-up shop/vegan bakery/weed dispensary/live-work space, some pixies are attempting to determine the luminescence pH of Sookie's fairy cave. Jason Stackhouse "ain't been to fairy school or nothin'," but even he knows this plotline is wack.
As always, True Blood picks up right where last season left off. Bill Compton is the vampire king of Louisiana and he is still the Betty to Eric Northman's pouty Veronica. Lafayette and Sookie's attempt to resuscitate the bleeding-out Tara is interrupted by Queen Bitch Pam. Lafayette has the brilliant idea for Pam to turn Tara, which a salty Pam agrees to do if Sookie will get Eric to forgive her. As a season opener this episode sets out to resolve last season's cliffhangers, sweeping away the old supernatural spiders to make way for new characters and plotlines.
Last week, in anticipation of tonight's premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1, fans of the franchise erected a tent city outside of Los Angeles' Nokia Theatre, just across the street from Grantland HQ. Who would give up a week's worth of work or school, sleep, and indoor plumbing just to watch a few pale actors walk a red carpet? Yesterday, armed with a camera and a tape recorder, we decided to find out. Unfortunately, Twilight stars Peter Facinelli and Jackson Rathbone were visiting at the same time, so many of the female fans were preoccupied. Luckily, there were plenty of men around to answer our questions.
You know, despite our advancing age we like to think of ourselves as marginally “with it.” We knew what Jay-Z was talking about when he resurrected “snapbacks” in “Otis” — mainly because we still had them in the back of our closets from the first time they were cool — and we know that LMFAO stands for something you shouldn’t say aloud in polite company or at least during an NPR pledge drive. But lord almighty does this trailer for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (!) make us feel a thousand years old — and not in a hip, Cullen sort of way, either.
Lafayette and Jesus are having a porch talk about feelings, except Lafayette doesn't talk too much because if he did Jesus would realize he's been POSESSED. Jesus kisses his boyfriend goodbye on the mouth and suddenly realizes that Lafayette is no longer Lafayette, just in time to get stabbed in the hand with a fork.
Sookie makes herself some coffee because hey didn't this bitch used to be a waitress? She leans down and sees the ghost corpse of her sweet Gran. Tara comes downstairs just in time to be a sounding board for Sookie's fears. Tara is not like, "Hey, remember how my hand is screwed up, and that time I got repeatedly raped by a crazy vampire who was great at texting super fast, and oh yeah I just discovered my bisexuality and learned mixed martial arts." No, instead they're still discussing Sookie's memories of Gran. Sookie Sookie Sookie!
Don't you hate when you're screwing around on the couch in the freshman lounge with your ex-boyfriend's best frenemy and the Vampire RA walks in? Bill is such a fangblocker, stopping Eric and Sookie from getting to second base. Bill cuffs Eric and tells Sookie it's strictly vampire business, because he is a vampire businessman.
Eric gets locked in vampire jail with Pam, whose face is rotting off like a golem Real Housewife. Pam says King Bill is a pompous dork, which he totally is. Nothing like a little bit of artificial power to turn an angry nerd into an overconfident entitled Zuckerberg.
When we last saw our heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, she was deciding whether to let a brainwashed blond 6-foot-plus-tall vampire hitchhiker into her car. Good-hearted pushover that she is, she can't help but take pity on the naked GQ model and lets him come over and into her house. Sookie sets some boundaries in place (no touching, no biting) while she and Eric reenact the greatest hits of the Clothed Female Naked Male porn subgenre (CFNM/NSFW).
The werepanther children still holding Sookie's brother, Jason, hostage speak in a hilarious Southern patois that involves a lot of "I reckon." In the land of the panther people, Jason Stackhouse is the smartest person around, but it doesn't help any when he's tied up and can't reach his cell phone in his jeans.
