Recap: ‘True Blood’ Season 2, Episode 11
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I can’t believe this is it, but we just watched the next-to-last episode of ‘True Blood’ for this season. After last week’s all-out mayhem, this week’s adventures felt like a walk in the park.
Things kick off as Bill walks into Sophie-Anne’s house -- also known as the Vampire Queen of Louisiana -- in search of advice on how to kill a maenad (i.e., Mary Ann). She’s sucking blood from the inner thigh of a delicious-looking young woman.
Meanwhile a much less appealing kind of sucking is happening at Bill’s mansion, where Jessica, driven to fang-fueled anger by Hoyt’s mother’s insulting behavior, is sucking on Hoyt’s mom’s neck. Hoyt angrily tears her away but not in time. His mom liked it. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ he accuses the poor little vampire as he storms off. She slams the door, screaming with heartbroken anguish.
Back at Sophie-Anne’s place Sophie-Anne tells Bill that Mary Ann can’t be killed because she has convinced herself of her own immortality. ‘Everything that exists willed itself into existence.’ (So can I will something into extinction? Like, say, those text messages from that one guy I don’t like? You know who you are, or at least my friends know who you are.)
Darker things are being willed at Lafayette’s house, where Tara has been handcuffed by Lafayette to keep her from going back to Sookie’s house in search of Eggs. Lafayette holds a gun on her but gives it to her mother while he and Sookie take a break on the porch. Tara takes the opportunity to guilt trip her mother into letting her free. Lettie Mae turns the gun on Sookie and Lafayette while Tara jumps in the car. Lafayette, still suffering from post-traumatic stress, cowers in a corner of the porch, hallucinating that Lettie Mae is Eric. Sookie throws a door stop at Lettie Mae, and she and Lafayette run off to find Tara.
Things are a mess at Merlotte’s, where Sam, Andy and Jason clean up and Jason talks about how he has to save his town. Sam catches a glimpse of Arlene’s kids outside of the window. They are hungry and dirty. He feeds them while Jason and Andy go to raid the arsenal at the sheriff station. The children suggest that Sam ask a vampire for advice.
On the way to the sheriff’s office Jason waxes philosophical about Sam’s abilities (earlier Sam revealed to Jason and Andy that he is a shape shifter). ‘What if Sam turns into a dog and has sex with a lady dog?’ Jason asks. Crazy townspeople dance and writhe all around the sheriff’s office. One offers to go down on Jason while Bud dances around in his boxers shooting his guns in the air. Another (a deputy) shoots Andy in the chest but fortunately he is wearing a bulletproof jacket.
When Tara arrives at Sookie’s house Eggs is sitting forlorn at the kitchen table with big black eyes. Mary Ann appears and tells Tara that it was Tara who summoned her in the first place -- during her exorcism in the woods. But that was a fake, Tara pleads. Again, Mary Ann says that belief is a powerful thing and that Tara believed enough to pique her interest in Bon Temps, which is why she came and why she found Tara in particular. She flutters, but it doesn’t affect Tara, so she punches Tara in the face and Tara’s eyes go black again.
As Eggs and Tara dance off to break glass and furniture and generally behave like a couple of drunk frat boys on spring break, the crazed townspeople arrive in the kitchen to tell Mary Ann that God appeared to them and ‘smote’ Sam. He disappeared and all that was left of him was a pile of his clothes. Mary Ann knows that Sam simply shape-shifted and tricked them. She calls them fools and emits some kind of high-pitched shrieking noise (kind of like the one I make when my credit card gets rejected) and they run away.
When Hoyt gets back to his house with his irrational, newly sinful mother she gets busy making a potato chip-candy bar casserole with hot sauce for Mary Ann’s coming-of-God party. She says horrible things to Hoyt and she reveals that although she told him that his father died protecting the family from a burglar, he actually killed himself. Hoyt is devastated.
Meanwhile, Lafayette and Sookie arrive at her house and watch from a distance as fat naked people dance around the totem pole in the yard. Sookie says that although she was almost raped in Dallas, watching this happen to Gran’s house is so much worse. When Terry and Arlene show up and threaten them, Lafayette distracts them by throwing large quantities of pills at them. (That always works! Especially when you really need to skip the bathroom line at a Hollywood nightclub.)
Hoping to save his own life and the town, Sam goes to Fangtasia with Arlene’s kids to ask help from Eric. Eric pays a lot of attention to the children, whom he affectionately (too affectionately, maybe) refers to as tiny humans before blasting off like Superman to visit Sophie-Anne.
Bill is still at Sophie-Anne’s, trying to get her to give him secrets about the maenad. She is flip with him as they lounge in swimsuits under simulated sunlight by a pool. She has a line of half-naked men and women standing by the pool, waiting to serve as snacks. Bill says he feeds only on Sookie, but gives in and sucks the neck of a handsome young man, much to Sophie-Anne’s delight. ‘I love watching two men,’ she says. Later, while they play Yahtzee, she finally gives him what he’s looking for.
‘Maenads keep waiting for gods to come, but they never do,’ she says. ‘She needs to think that she’s successfully summoned Dionysus and that he will ravage her, devour her, literally. When she thinks she’s found him she can be killed.’ Bingo! When Bill leaves he runs into Eric at the door and again tells him to stay away from Sookie, and if he doesn’t he will tell the queen that Eric is forcing humans to sell vampire blood for him.
Back in town, Jason and Andy sit in a truck preparing for the all-out war that is about to take place. Andy tells Jason that he has always been resentful of how easy Jason has had it, especially with the ladies. Jason points out that everyone he loves has been killed and that when it comes to the ladies, ‘I work out like a mother... and I watch a lot of porn and learn stuff.’ That is hard work; you tell him, Jason! They decide to leave the past behind them and focus on the task ahead.
When Bill shows up in Bon Temps he goes to Merlotte’s, but that’s not where Sookie is. She’s at her house navigating her way through a maniacal scene of gross decay and all-out fiendishness. The town drunk cuts off her own ring finger and giggles, a naked man bathes in the sink with what looks to be intestines, and one of the crazies forces Sookie to lay on the floor with him where she found her Gran murdered. When he tries to get her to have sex with him, she hits him over the head with a frying pan and flees upstairs.
There she finds Tara and Eggs breaking all of Gran’s things and preparing a nest in the bed for a giant egg. Could it be the result of Tara and Eggs freakish tantric union on Tara’s birthday? Is this the god that is to come? Sookie stands at the foot of the bed, shocked, until someone grabs her shoulders. She turns to see that it is Lafayette, his eyes as big and black as coal.
Roll credits.
-- Jessica Gelt
