True Blood’ season 7, episodes 1-2: Fang finale

Season seven pits characters against more universal and timeless themes such as guilt and innocence. Except, no one’s really an innocent anymore...

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Annnd we’re back. Back for the final season of “True Blood” and back in Bon Temps, the dinky Louisiana town from whence we first met faerie halfling Sookie and the rag-tag band of supes and humans that follow her wherever she goes. Recent plotlines have largely kept us away from Bon Temps - stuck in an underground lair with power-hungry vampire fundamentalists, hiding out on alternate planes of existence with the faerie/vampire psychopath Warlow, and confined in the late Governor Burell’s freaky Vamp Camp prison. The end of season six, however, finds Sookie and (most of) the gang back in Bon Temps, where they belong, just trying to get their lives back to normal.

The major threat posed at the end of season six is roving gangs of savage, Hepatitis V-infected vamps (Hep-Vs or H-vamps for short) who are devouring little towns like Bon Temps because they’re hungry, dying, and have nothing to lose. Bill and Sam have devised a plan to pair every human in town with a vampire - the vamps to protect the humans from Hep-Vs and the humans to feed the vamps in exchange for protection. If only they’d gotten their shit together sooner.

As you may recall, Sam is weirdly the mayor of Bon Temps. Sookie and Alcide are together and appear to be settled, if not in a restless, forced kind of way. Jessica still feels really bad about eating three of Andy’s half-faerie daughters, but at least she has her boyfriend from Camp, James, to get her through it. Jason and Violet, the 800-year-old vampire who made him forget he hates fangers, are still together, too. Pam took off to find Eric who, unable to deal with the loss of his sister Nora, took off post-Vamp Camp and was last seen burning on a mountain in Sweden.

The June 22 season seven premiere “Jesus Gonna Be Here” harks back to early seasons, pitting characters against more universal and timeless themes such as life and death, love and hate, guilt and innocence. Except, no one’s really an innocent anymore. Instead of warring amongst themselves, a default plotline throughout the series, it seems the folks of Bon Temps will have to band together in unexpected and often painful ways to make it out alive.

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The first episode opens with an impeccably choreographed bloodbath where everyone is either being kidnapped, staked, or massacred by the onslaught of splotchy, drooling Hep-Vs. Town drunk Jane Bodehouse, Mayor Sam’s prego girlfriend Nicole, Holly, and Arlene are all carried off into the night. According to the pool of guts and goo Lettie Mae is kneeling in, Tara is dead. Like the True Death-style dead. But it’s an off-screen death, so we’ll see if it sticks. Pam’s search for Eric first brings her to Morocco where we find her playing Russian roulette in exchange for information on Eric’s whereabouts.

In the second episode, “I Found You,” Pam, (you guessed it!) finds Eric chillin’ in a basement in France. But (say it ain’t so!), he’s been infected with Hepatits V and appears to be on his way to a slow True Death. Back in Louisiana, Sookie and her posse take a trip to investigate the nearby town of Saint Alice. The scene where they roll into the deserted town could have almost been plucked straight from “The Walking Dead” - boarded up storefronts, a haunting message scrawled on the exterior of a church, and a mass grave filled with hundreds of dead bodies.

While the themes of death and mortality seem to have refreshingly regained some of their former weightiness, few conflicts left outstanding at the end of the first two episodes are new: Lafayette is dealing with the loss of a loved one, again. Lettie Mae’s inner-addict is reawakened after she’s healed by a swig of intoxicating vampire blood. This time it’s Arlene and Co. who are the ones locked up, freaked out, and waiting to be eaten in Fangtasia’s all-too-familiar torture dungeon, so they’ll be needing a rescue. Even good guy Bill is back, once again pining for Sookie from afar while she shacks up with another formidable supe who isn’t him.

Sookie herself is knee-deep in throwback turmoil, too, struggling with that pesky mind reading thing of hers and unable to tune out the mean shit everyone in Bon Temps is thinking about her all the time. As usual, anyone who isn’t family or a supe hates her guts and blames her freaky, vamp-loving ways for the town’s misfortune. Speaking of vamp-loving, in episode two Sookie has a warm and fuzzy flashback about the time Bill agreed to take her to Fangtasia so she raced home to primp and change into sexy red lingerie. The stroll down memory lane would have been way less awkward had Alcide not been standing in the doorway watching her get all emo for Bill. Apparently the last 75 Sookie-related love triangles were not enough.

Even so, it’s nice that season seven has abandoned much of the over-the-top supernatural shit and replaced it with a sense of hyperreality that made “True Blood” so interesting to begin with. The enemy isn’t a necromansing witch or yet another, even older, more vicious vampire from another dimension to slay, or an Obama mask wearing hate group that wishes it was the Ku Klux Klan. It’s (kind of) a lot simpler this time around. The enemies who emerge in the first two episodes are really old ones that have more or less been threats all along: murdery vampires that prey on innocent humans, the hate-filled and scared shitless masses, and hyperbolic vigilante-types trying to capitalize on fear and catastrophe for their own political gains.