True Blood 5.1 "Turn! Turn! Turn!"
Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at 10:20PM I had such a good time covering True Blood last year that I decided early on that I'd chime in again this year. Unfortunately those slutty Bon Temps whackjobs and their blaspheming god (Alan Ball) did not reward me with a fine debut. Cliffhangers are rarely the best way to end a TV season -- especially one with a really devout fanbase that's coming back anyway. They invariably make the return feel like less of a drunken celebration and more like the clean up after A Lost Weekend. No one remembers how things got so messy but excuse us while we mop up.
Turn Turn Turn... TARA? The angriest bartender in Bon Temps won't be happy about this.
There's so much clean up. Sookie's house had not one but two dead girls to dispose of (Tara and Debby) and icky leftovers (the tooth!) but to avoid Tara's death being a true one, Sookie bargains with Vampire Pam to turn her. This is a terrible terrible decision but Sookie makes notoriously terrible decisions and almost always for selfish reasons so this is par for the course. More after the jump including the usual NSFW shenanigans of those Bon Temps hookers...
Out damn spot! Still more dead bodies to bury... or unbury. Lafayette's house had only one dead body to--- hey where's dead Jesus go? No clean up required but who made off with the corpse? Meanwhile Luna's ex-husband got unburied by the wolf pack for some midnight snacking recycling (ewww). Even True Bloody's Bossiest, sex god Eric Northam (Alexander Skarsgard) got his hands dirty mopping and sweeping up all the gooey pieces of truly dead Vampire Nan (RIP) in super speed fashion. All this cleaning up but the episode stayed messy either by laboriously wrestling away from point A's various bloodbaths (end of Season 4) to point B (beginning of Season 5...or maybe that happens next week?). It was unable to conjure up a single through line or consistent tone but I suspect this season's storylines will center around the following:
a) Sookie struggles with sleeping around. Alcides first?
b) Jason struggles with Jessica & Hoyt not wanting him and the Reverend doing the opposite
c) Terry struggles with his mysterious past. His ex friends are dying in fires so...something demonic surely.
d) Arlene struggles with Terry struggling
e) Bill & Eric struggle with The Authority
f) The show struggles with the decision to cast a non-Swedish actress as Eric's sister. Weird how she can't speak Swedish back to him when he goes there.
g) Nathaniel struggles with King Russell (I hate "Big Bad" reprises on television shows. Move on!)
h) Pam struggles with new progeny Tara
i) Tara struggles with becoming Vampire Tara
j) Sheriff Andy struggles with shady bosses.
k) Alcides struggles with Sookie's Super Snatch Powers (thanks, Pam! Always telling it like it is)
l) Alcides, Sam and Luna struggle with The Werewolves. Maybe a civil war with a second pack forming?
There are too many characters and not enough new plots. Just a guess. But it's also why I desperately wish that this season could be about... MARTHA
The name's Martha. The drawling merciless voice gives me chills.
But will True Blood make proper use of the great Dale Dickey? Stay tuned.
Draining the Episode Dry...
Body Count: 7 (1 human, 6 vampires) or 10 if you count Human Tara and the two werewolves who all died in the last split seconds of Season 4.
Sex Scenes: 1 Eric & Nora (Skargsård and sibling)
Five Reasons People Watch True Blood:
1. 2. 
3.
4.5.
Fresh Meat: Martha (Dale Dickey), Nora (Lucy Griffiths), Zander (Ken Luckey) aka Future Frat Boy Dinner for Jessica, Cammy (Cherilyn Wilson) aka the first girl that Jason has ever turned down... and Vampire Tara in a poorly edited final shock clip.
Line Reading Hall of Fame: How does Dickey make mundane lines like "Give us a minute" and "the name is Martha" so filled with drawling hard-life deadened-empathy dread
Best Sookie Moment: Sook' admits that she shot Debbie on purpose "Does that sound like self defense to you?"
Funniest Moment: Sookie would like Pam to at least try.
I am wearing a Wal Mart sweat suit for y'all. If that's not a demonstration of team spirit, I don't know what is."
"You'll glamour me!" (Jason isn't always dumb!)Trashiest Moment: Honorable Mention - "on the couch mama. Where I sleep!"; Runner up - The werewolf funeral. 'Don't do it, Dale! Don't d.... eeeWWWwwwwwwwww!'; The Winner - Eric and the writing staff's sweaty incestuous pride:
We fight like siblings but we fuck like champions."
Episode MVP: This episode was all over the place but Jason Stackhouse is still a comic treat thanks to Ryan Kwanten's impeccable timing particularly when dealing with unwanted "I'm a Gay American Vampire!"'s advances. It's not exactly measurable but I'd bet my neck that even Meryl Streep and Daniel Day Lewis couldn't out-act him in the 'dim wit sliding in and out of vampiric hypnosis' Olympics. For your consideration...
Grade: C
Your turn. What did you make of the premiere? Which moment thrilled you / disgusted you most?
Dale Dickey, Reviews, TV, True Blood, nudity, vampires, werewolves
Reader Comments (14)
Hello, Nat .. just to clarify ... there is no need for Nora to be of Swedish origin, since it is only "sister" of Eric because both were transformed by Godric, there is no relationship, and she may have been changed including the United States and be an American.
I can't wait for Denis O'Hare to come back! He was the best villain the show's ever had, and that spark is desperately needed in this mess of a show. Hope he doesn't meet the "true death" by the end of the season.
And what they've done with Tara is deplorable. Does that happen in Charlaine Harris's novels? B/c I hope she would have avoided a huge blunder like that.
Daniel -- nah. doesn't make sense to me. The other people who've been so connected to him have been regionally specific. And why would NOra understand his Swedish only to respond in English? seems like lazy casting to me.
Paulie -- but why repeat? i have this problem with so many tv shows. The strength of the medium should be the long evolving narrative and too many shows just wanna give you what you had last time like movie sequels. I don't really get the point of repeating a villain. But then I wasn't a fan of Russell the first time around. The Maynad was my favorite villain so far (though that storyline was crazy repetitive)
I'm fine with Jason and his fiiine body of work being MVP, but Pam was the episode highlight for me. Other than those two, the episode was pretty meh.
Thanks for doing this Nat, I must be in the minority because yes, it was all over the place, but unlike the past seasons, I'm really enjoying each of the storylines this season.
Pam, Jason and Jessica stole the episode, Jessica was bad-ass, Pam rocked it and Jason and Steve Newlin got the biggest laughs of the episode for me. I'm really interested in where this vampire politics is going and loving Eric and Bill's bromance.
Should be interesting to see Rutina Wesley stretch herself this season, always believed she was underrated and LOVE LOVE LOVE Dale Dickey plus Alfre's coming back this season - super excite!
Despite the flaws, its an hour of trashy pure escapism with laughter, gasps, ewmg's and Alexander's ass thrown in. i cannot complain =)
Just to clarify, in her defense, turning Tara wasn't Sookie's decision - it was Lafayette's and Sookie was even the one to point out that Tara hated vampires. I felt more that she gave in for guilt (and to appease Lafayette) than for selfish reasoning.
I get your point about being sceptic about bringing back an old-big bad, but I don't think bringing him back necessarily points to not moving on. I rather suspect that this is Ball and Co's attempt to not fly in a new villain each season and then have them magically disappear at the season's end. An old foe might (well theoretically) have more weight behind it.
Pam is the new Lafayette...she's the best thing about this show now.
Terrible episode, though TB's season premieres and finales usually are. Hopefully they weed out the more terrible storylines (vampire Tara sounds like a disaster) over the next couple weeks, as they did last year (werepanthers, anyone).
The sister thing didn't bother me in the slightest. As Daniel points out, they're connected through Godric, not blood. Maybe she, you know, chose not to respond in Swedish, eh?
Thought the episode had it's moments, but was still all over the place. It's hard to go from an exciting scene with Eric/bill to one about Terry and weird fires and still stay intrigued. The sibling thing didn't bother me either, since they aren't actually related. The people closest to Eric aren't regionally specific, godric is from ancient Rome, Pam is from America, and I guess Nora is british. Basically they all speak Swedish bc skarsgard is a free translator.
Loved Dale dickey as Martha, she really does deliver the simplest lines amazingly. Can't wait to see Russell again! Even the scene with him off camera was more exciting than some of the other storylines
"True Blood is trashy, cheesy escapism"
I hear variations of this statement quite a lot, but come on now. This is ALAN BALL we're dealing with here not Aaron Spelling. This lovely mind-fuck puzzle film extraordinaire will all come together in a fashion that will blow your heads off. Occult conspiracies abound! What fun!
I liked the premiere because it was pretty much what i expected. They usually use the premieres to set up all of the NUMEROUS storylines for the season. I wish they could do like Mad Men though and just focus on one or two plots per episode and like Nat said, i don't see any storyline tying all of these plots together.
Who didn't see vampire Tara and Gay Rev. coming? But i enjoyed both of them anyway. The entire scene with the Rev. was hilarious, plus, it never hit me that Jessica would actually be Queen in Bill's place. Interesting. With Tara, becoming a vampire just seems like a natural evolution (becoming what she hates most), but i just hope it doesn't make her mopey. Tara's already sassy and with PAM as a maker? There's no way that the writers can turn her into a victim again.
In totally shallow observations, Eric nudity always brings a smile to my face and i'm still holding out from something from Jesus since his body decided to go missing.
Chris Meloni next week! the Oz fan in me is completely stoked.
Paulie - At this point, the show bears almost no relationship to Harris' books. Season 1 was pretty faithful, but after that it's been wildly different. Tara is a completely different entity in the books. She's a white girl that owns a clothing store, and is definitely not as close to Sookie as in the show. I actually really enjoy that the two are so different because I like each for different reasons, and I wish that more adaptations would take the risk of straying from the source. The result tends to yield a more interesting product. Oh, hey, There Will Be Blood!
FINALLY got around to watching this last night (DVR, what would I do without you?) and while I didn't exactly love it, it did get me excited about the coming season, which was probably the intent. Unfortunately, that excitement was completely upended by the "THIS SEASON ON TRUE BLOOD" trailer at the end, when I realized that this is True Blood, and these are the storylines and they will meander their way through the season completely unconnected to each other until the very last episodes when everyone will finally be in one place and Sookie will suddenly go all fairy-like and magically save everyone (until next season). The show too often seems to forget that these people are all pretty closely connected with each other and just continues to push them further and further apart, which is frustrating since the actors (and the show) are at their best when they're all together.
I'm holding off judgment on bringing back Russell until we see where they're going with it. Dennis O'Hare was so good that I'm willing to go with it, but only so far. I have the feeling he won't be THE Big Bad so much, but I could be wrong. I also wish they had the balls to actually kill off Tara. The character has gone as far as she can go.
Of course, as long as we get some nice man-flesh each week (my favorite of this episode by far was Jason behind the door), the rest of it doesn't really matter.
I'd agree that all I'm looking forward to is Denis O'Hare. He was the show's best villain yet, and he gets the camp and plays the theatricality of it all and goes for it. Of course if you didn't like O'Hare the first time, you won't like seconds, but I LOVE Russell Edgington, so I can't wait for this. Compare what O'Hare does to Stephen Moyer's humorless take on Bill through the years. It's like night and day really. Maybe the books are like that too, I don't know. But Alexander Skarsgaard gets it as Eric. I don't know why Moyer won't do the same, unless he isn't capable of it. I guess the writing doesn't do him many favors either.
The season premiere was pretty bad. Not in a "so bad, it's good" sort of way. Just cluttered, overcramped, and surprisingly dull. I didn't care at all about what was going on with half of these storylines. Terry and his war buddy, Andy and Holly, Sam, Alcide, the werepack, Tara (oh GOD, why are they going in this direction for her storyline???). Focus on Sookie, Bill, Eric, Jason, Jessica, Lafayette, PAM, and if we must, Tara. The rest of them, toss 'em out. Bring in Russell Edgington and the delicious Christopher Meloni, and this season might be worth something. But as it stands now, I'm going in with reservations. The scenes with Rev. Newlin being a gay vampire were funny though. "I love youuuuu, Jason!" Door slam. LOL!!