True Blood’ season 2, episode 7

There’s a lot of things I could call this week’s episode: The 28-year-old virgin. The Truth About Maryann. Lies my Preacher Told Me. Mostly, though, I feel inclined to call it My Favorite So Far This Season. Multiple plot threads came to a jaw-dropping head this week. “Release Me” (the episode’s for-real title)  finally answered some of our most burning questions, but did so without really offering any resolutions. All the better, I say. With five episodes left until the season wraps, I’ll take all the tension — sexual, religious and otherwise — I can get. So what made this episode the best so far? Let’s recap and see...

“Piiiigggggg!” hollers Andy facedown in the mud. (I can’t get enough of Andy and these pigs.) Andy, on the heels of shapeshifted Sam and Daphne, inadvertently ends up in Maryann’s circle of sex/death/wtf. The sobering sight of the zombified orgy causes the suspended detective to fire off his gun, disrupting the group trance. Sam takes the opportunity to escape and the bull-headed Maryann pursues him into the woods, grubby pig fingers and all. A glimpse of an owl in a tree gives Sam the out he needs, and he drops trou and flies off.

The next day, Sam returns to Merlotte’s to fish a gun out of the chimney before heading to the dock. There he finds Daphne, chillaxing in the warm Louisiana sun. He threatens her, half furious, half brokenhearted, accusing her of betraying him and saying he trusted her more than anyone in his life. Ever. She laughs it off, belittling his torment and slowly begins to reveal the mystery behind Maryann: “She’s God dum dum!” “She’s not God,” says Sam, incredulous. “She’s as close to God as we’ll ever get,” Daphne replies in her undies from the lake. “People call her all kinds of things: Holly, Lilith, Isis, Gaia but she’s really a maenad — one the handmaidens of Dionysus...Dionysus, Satan, it’s all just a kind of energy. Wild energy.”