Episode Title: “At Last”
Writer: Alexander Woo
Director: Anthony Hemingway
Previously on “True Blood”:
Oh good, just what we always wanted: an episode where Bill and Jessica seduce and imprison ridiculously underage girls with promises of alcohol, sex and presumably candy. “True Blood” has never shied away from sexual creepiness before, but “At Last” pushes it in an unsettling direction, complete with two predators (literal and figurative) plotting out how to kidnap jailbait lasses – putting aside the fact that they’re only a few days old – and then putting their plan into action, and exploiting their naïveté for the purposes of implied bondage. Oh, and stealing their blood in order to synthesize it, but that’s just a given.
After a few episodes of gormless meandering, the noose finally feels like it’s tightening around the cast of “True Blood.” The werewolves are in dire straits now that Luna has been kidnapped, Sookie & Friends fall prey the newly-revealed Warlow, Eric’s plan to stop Governor Burrell goes into action and Sam appears to get laid. That last part does nothing for the thickening air of suspense, and it’s made creepier by the fact that Luna is in the next room and it’s only days since her mother – Sam’s lover – died in his arms, but that’s hardly the creepiest thing “At Last” has to offer.
Let us for the sake of this review ignore the disappointing plotline of Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) and the newly werewolf-bitten Nicole Wright (Jurnee Smollett-Bell, of the “Seriously, Have You Seen How Bad This Is” Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor), because the showrunners of “True Blood” clearly seem to feel the same way this week. Let us also ignore Alcide and his pack of dickish werewolves, because we don’t want to encourage them any further. Let us also ignore the episode’s tacked-on appearance by Lafayette Reynolds (Nelsan Ellis), who this week got to perform the exciting plot function of driving a car. With this many characters it’s hard to keep them all in play, and sometimes it’s hard to suss out why “True Blood” really bothers.
But in the “real” subplots – at least for now (“True Blood” has a tendency to make a storyline seem meaningless until it’s literally the most important thing in the world) – Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgard) decides to make the most obvious sympathy play imaginable by turning Willa Burrell (Amelia Rose Blaire) into a vampire and confusing Governor Burrell’s (Arliss Howard) priorities. Eric’s transformation sequence is right out of Interview with a Vampire: alluring, sexual and wrong (Willa makes a point of saying she’s a virgin, which didn’t work out very well for Jessica and her permanent hymen). Weirdly, it almost works until Willa freaks out and tries to bite her father, leading the newly returned Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) to shoot her and convince Burrell to send the young vamp to the concentration camps. Maybe Burrell isn’t the Big Bad after all. “True Blood” has a tendency to pull that kind of reversal. Hell, maybe Warlow’s a good guy.
Er… Maybe not. It turns out that the fairy Ben Flynn (Rob Kazinsky) is a half-fairy, half-vampire. Oh, and Warlow. Jason Stackhouse (Ryan Kwanten) starts having homoerotic dreams about Ben after drinking his blood, which only happens with vampires, so Niall Brigant (Rutger Hauer) puts the pieces together and tries to attack him. Warlow glamours Jason, nearly drains Niall dry and shunts him into another dimension before coming over to Sookie’s house to seduce her. Sookie’s onto him though, and puts Warlow through some Lost Boys-style vampire tests. He passes every one, but the episode ends with Sookie trapping him with her sunburst energy blast-thingy anyway. She’s no fool, that Sookie.
And Billith (Stephen Moyer) teams up with Jessica Hamby (Deborah Ann Woll) to kidnap the newly-teenaged fairy progeny of Sheriff Andy Bellefleuer (Chris Bauer), who grew ten years in the night and decided to go out for beers. They grow up so fast. Four episodes ago they were babies, and now – as predicted – they’re four jailbait hotties. Billith needs their blood to synthesize a new form of True Blood that will turn vampires into daywalkers and save his species, but now that we’ve seen how Warlow turned out, we have to wonder if that’s such a good idea after all. The seduction scenes in the Billith storyline are eerily pornographic, the blood can’t be synthesized anyway, and it all ends with Jessica freaking out and apparently murdering all of the Bellefleuer children.
Gross.
“True Blood’s” greatest strength has often been its uncompromising portrayal of sexual deviancy, but there’s usually an element of sympathy for all the sexual beings involved. “At Last” presents the main cast as if they were monsters – which, technically, they are – but the result is mostly discomfort and ugliness, and the not sort of lurid fringe erotica we usually come for. “At Last” ratchets up the tension, but it veers too far into Max Hardcore territory for its own good (or anyone else’s for that matter). The season is picking up; the episode is disquieting.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
