Article first published as TRUE BLOOD Review Season 7 on Seat42F.
Don’t worry; spoilers will be very light.
HBO’s TRUE BLOOD ended its penultimate
season last summer on quite a cliffhanger. After a time jump, most of
the main characters are gathered at a vampire-human alliance rally when
some bad dudes show up. It’s quite a shocker, and one that left many
fans quite tormented over the long hiatus.
This weekend, TRUE BLOOD returns for its
final season, and it picks up right where it ended, during that same
scene. It’s an action-packed, exciting opening that doesn’t give viewers
a chance to breathe as they are dumped back into the world. It’s
actually a really cool way to start things off, providing an immediate
hook, something that will have the audience talking and pumped for the
rest of the season.
The rest of the premiere hour, “Jesus
Gonna Be Here,” takes place during that same night, and it’s dark. Very,
very dark, and I’m not just saying that because the sun is on the other
side of the earth. This is one of the scariest, most nerve-racking
episodes of TRUE BLOOD yet. If they want to go out as a memorable
series, not soon forgotten, this is the way to do it. Most of the
players are in mortal danger, and not everyone survives. It immediately
sets a new tone to the often humorous show, and while I can’t imagine
this year will be laugh-free, the first episode back almost completely
is.
I admire TRUE BLOOD for going in this
direction. I like my drama dark and dangerous, and “Jesus Gonna Be Here”
fits the bill. In a show about vampires and other monsters, people
should die periodically, especially as a war between the sick vamps and
everyone else is going down. This is an extremely serious situation, and
one will feel the weight of that when viewing this episode.
I wonder, at this point, if anyone is
considered non-expendable. After all, there are only ten episodes left
to go, and then it’s over forever. With the number of individuals in
harm’s way, it seems quite likely that not all of them will get to
return home alive. Will TRUE BLOOD allow a blood bath, with a
significant number of casualties, or will it sparingly take out a couple
of key people at opportune moments?
Thankfully, the newest installment is
not all action. I absolutely love seeing the fight scenes, but there are
some good characters here, and they deserve to get development, too. As
soapy as the series can be, romance and betrayal, lust and murder, all
verging on over-the-top, it does not shy away from some occasional
authentic pathos. Given the set up here, I believe we’ll get more of
that than we’re used to in season seven.
One example of this comes courtesy of
Ms. Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin). Sookie has a gift or a curse,
depending on how you look at it, where she can read people’s thoughts.
This is dealt with a bit in the beginning of TRUE BLOOD, but is mainly a
plot device in recent years. “Jesus Gonna Be Here” brings the emotional
toll this takes on the waitress front and center, forcing her to deal
with the burden she carries and how people treat her because of it. One
person most might not suspect of getting on her bad side does so this
week because of this, but Sookie is hurt even more than the person with
the ill-timed musings. I hope we continue to see more of Sookie’s
struggle, exploring the internal pain she lives with every day, because
it makes her so much more interesting.
Sookie is far from the only one who gets
such focus. At least two pairs with beef between them have the chance
to talk a little bit of it out, and more than one couple faces a rocky
go of things. There may be some love blossoming in an unexpected place
as two characters reveal their backgrounds to one another, and another
tries to reign themselves in, resisting their base urges.
Plus, we get terrific scenes of Pam
(Kristin Bauer van Straten) as she searches for her maker, Eric
(Alexander Skarsgard), last seen by fans burning in the sun.
All in all, “Jesus Gonna Be Here” just
may be the best season opener TRUE BLOOD has done yet, giving me great
hope that the writers will take the program out in a satisfying way.
TRUE BLOOD airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
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