New Show Recap: True Blood, 7×02, “I Found You”

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fan service dream porn, sookie stackhouse, southern vampire, southern vampire mysteries, true blood, true blood recap, True Blood season 7, vampires, vamps

“So that dog turned into our mayor… There’s a bigger picture here you all are missing. This town is full of vampers, has a dog for a mayor, being preached out by a telepath!”

Last week, Mini, my daughter, pinch hit for me in recapping the premier of the new season of True Blood. Coming into a show as over the top ridiculous as True Blood in the final and trying to make sense of the generally illogical plotlines proved to be unexpectedly hilarious. So this week, we watched the show together.

Given that the episode kicked off with a Jason and Eric porn-y seduction scene, I think we both were wondering what we had agreed to do:

Slay Belle: That’s Eric. He’s the hot one.

Mini: I can tell. They sort of emphasize the chest thing

Slay Belle: Jason, the shorter blonde, is Sookie’s brother. He’s also a hot one. In the first season, one of his girlfriend’s described him as dumber than a bag of hair.

Mini: I know Jason. I heard all about his blueballs last week. Is he really short or is the other hot one like Wilt from Foster’s Home? WHAT IS GOING ON?

You’re welcome.

Slay Belle: (Dear reader, you’re missing the “what, what” cries Mini is calling out.) Also, she said Jason is hotter than Eric, so you can just tell her your feelings on that in the comments.

Mini: I thought he had a thing with Violet or whatever

Slay Belle: He does.

Mini: If I knew this was a part of the show, I would have canoodled my way into watching it a while ago

Slay Belle: So, if you drink a vampire’s blood, you become linked to the vampire, and that usually means you have sexy sex dreams about them. So this was a bit of sexy fan service. They had a Bill-Sam dream a couple of seasons before.

Mini: So it basically takes all the subtext that’s surrounded vampires for years and is like, “Fuck it, there will be fanfictions anyway.”

Slay Belle: Yes, sort of. In the Southern Vampire series, which this is based on, vampires are canonically bi-sexual.

“Oh, hey, I found a dead girl in the woods last night.” I had other things to do, like fight with my boyfriend and mysteriously rediscover my psychic powers so that I could be positioned as a victim in this church scene.

Mini: She’s not even indignant that everyone’s thinking about her on behalf of her dead friend, she just continues perpetuating herself as the hapless victim. It comes across as very “special white girl we must protect and sympathize with by virtue of her being pretty, white, and blonde.”

Slay Belle: Yes, you’ve basically summed up Sookie’s character arc.

Lettie-Mae is Tara’s mom, and is a horrible, manipulative person. If she’s checking on Lafayette, she wants something.

Hey, that dude! (That dude is Eugene Byrd, who has appeared in Bones, Heroes, Chris Cross, and Ghostwriter, among other things, and is here playing Jerome, the leader of the Hep-V pack.)

Mini: Oh man but I like Lafayette. I mean, like the only part of True Blood I had seen before last week was the AIDs burger sceene.

Slay Belle: Yes, the black veins are the signs of the infection. It’s interesting that the vampires know that they don’t have enough control to let themselves around all the victims without losing control.

Mini: They making lingering eye contact with that green-dressed brunette and then leave. Is something wrong with her?

Slay Belle: Holly, the blonde that didn’t get reaped, is a witch. One might think that she’d have some resources to help them out in this situation.

Arlene’s monologue is pretty righteous.

I did not survive 4 lousy husbands, a serial killer boyfriend, and the sorta suicide of my love, Terry, to die in the dingy basement of a fucking vampire club. I am getting us out of here.

Mini: It’s the Smallville problem. Power someone up too much, and eventually you just have to forget aspects of them to allow for drama

Also the “Dawn is a cognizant magical energy unconsciously manipulating the world around her but the monks can’t save Buffy’s mom” anomaly. Same idea.

Slay Belle: “The brutal indifference of life.”

Mini: Is Sookie just really indifferent to death or just desensitized?

Slay Belle: She’s not indifferent. She’s selectively different.

I just noticed La-La’s blinds are purple.

So, yes, Lettie Mae wasn’t just checking up on La-La (who is her nephew). She was looking for “V”, vampire blood, which humans can use to get high.

Mini: You know the theme sequence prepared me for lots of Bump-Its, but everyone’s just really sad and flat-haired

Slay Belle: Sam Merlot was rooting through her trash?

Mini: “Hound dog” starts playing over everyone’s shock.

Slay Belle: I do appreciate all the meta commentary this episode is giving us on the show. You do live in a town full of vampires, and run by a dog, and are being preached at by a telepath. Given how quick they are to mob up, I can’t say they deserve any better.

Mini: I actually don’t understand why people don’t leave. Vampires are everywhere, but I can’t imagine the H-Vamps are.

Slay Belle: WELLLL. What you’ve missed so far: the vampire authority, the former rulers of the vampires, went mad with power and blew up their own True Blood factories. So the vamps were starving.

Mini: They’re using the suck-up-to-teacher skills that everyone learns by third grade. Glad it’s universal.

Slay Belle: The Louisiana governor started up a new True Blood factory, but he laced all the True Blood with Hep-V (the black veins all these vamps are infected with). So any vampire who tried to “do the right thing” and subsist on synthetic blood got infected. So it’s all over the world, apparently.

Mini: Was the idea to kill off the vampires? Why would fucking them over and making them mad help the situation at all?

Slay Belle: Who knows what the end game was? Not the writers!

No, yes, the idea was that all the vamps would die. Eventually.

The town-destroying wandering vampire packs was not a predicted result, I think.

Mini: This graffiti is all in the same handwriting centered around the same place. Convenient. Or they just totally ignored all the foreboding taggers as they drove up.

Slay Belle: Ok, so, we’ve gotten to St. Alice, a town that appears completely destroyed. But they survived long enough to call out for FEMA’s help? And no one in any of the neighboring towns knew they’d been murderiddly-urdered?

Mini: “We’re here for the guns that are part of our second amendment rights to not be fucked over by our government.” I don’t like human Slenderman, but he makes a compelling argument

Slay Belle: See? His human daughter that was a newborn the last time I checked?

Mini: I like that Jessica got a new non-flipphone. I wonder if Adilyn made fun of her

Slay Belle: Maybe the reason Sookie is so self-centered is because she grew up in a town full of people who are so self-centered that they don’t even notice a couple of hundred people a few miles away disappearing.

Oh, look, its mirror-Sookie.

Jason is walking around the house eating crime scene evidence.

Mini: Are there only three police officers in this town? This town where people are routinely eaten by vampires?

Slay Belle: There were four! Kevin was the guy eaten in the last episode. Oh, five, because their last Sheriff had to retire over all the damn vampire murders. And then he joined a KKK-like cult and murdered people.

Mini: Excuse you mom according to the neighborhood watch gun in Philadelphia, the KKK doesn’t murder people anymore. That’s a false equivalency

Slay Belle: Everything about this show is a false equivalency.

Wait, its 2011?

Mini:You know the mayor’s like, “I want to eat this lamb so much.”

“Because I’m a dog.”

She was at the last page of the diary. How could the rest of them be blank?

Slay Belle: Oh, Lettie Mae! I told you. Lettie Mae is a manipulative addict — she purposefully burned her hand to force Willa to give her some blood to heal herself.

And now we’re getting Jesus Christ pose Tara. I’m not entirely convinced she’s really dead. Though killing a major character off offscreen and then using it for a character arc for an entirely different character, who hasn’t been relevant in years, seems about par for the course.

Mini: Jesus the sexual imagery in this show isn’t even trying to be subtle.

Slay Belle: I think they’re going the full-crazy-monty this season.

Mini: “How dare you! I only almost ate her!”

Slay Belle: It’s the last season. Might as well just surrender to the ridiculousness.

Mini: The victim card players in this show really don’t deserve it. Clearly she feels bad for eating your daughter, so why don’t you just forgive her? I’ve watched this show twice and I’m already tired of the expectation to forgive white girls as though their default is angle. (I say this as a white girl, I guess the record should state.)

Slay Belle: It’s dark out and our town is being attacked by infected vamps, so I’m gonna saunter across the graveyard in the dark.

It’s Pam!

Mini: Hey it’s Go Fuck Yourself

Oh. Alright I guess. We can call her that.

Slay Belle: NOOOO. ERIC!

Mini: Is that who she was looking for? She played Russian Roulette for that guy? He looks sallow.

Slay Belle: Yes. Eric is her sire, and they have a very close relationship. He went missing at the end of the last season. He’s infected and hanging out at a brothel, because of course he is.

Mini: He wasn’t missing very long, then,

Slay Belle: About six months have passed between seasons six and seven. When we last saw him, he was burning to death in the sunlight, because the sunlight immunity the vampires had gained from drinking the blood of Bill, who was actually the living embodiment of their vampire god, Lilith, and had gained special powers by in turn drinking the blood of a half-fae, half-vampire demi god, had disappeared when Warlow, said half-fae, half-vampire, was staked in Sookie’s bathroom after he tried to kidnap her and force her to become his half-fae, half-vampire mate.

I swear,  if you had been watching the show, that sentence would have made perfect sense.

All images are courtesy of HBO.