Even the Title Mentions Vomiting Now?
Well, I really screwed myself over with that break I took last week. I have another post for True Blood here, and another one for SVM almost ready. But I hate doing the update at the same time. I tend to write a lot, so that means that there's like a 8,000 word essay to finish all at once. I want to break it up, and this is, as I've said before, easier - nothing to figure out. So I'm going to go with True Blood first, and then tighten up the one on the books and post that in a day or two. I definitely do not want my journal just to become rants about True Blood. Even though I could probably rant about it, nitpick everything.
I've watched the drama this week over the Alcide kiss scene with great interest. There's been calls of rape and such, because Sookie was drunk and Alcide was - according to some interpretations - not as drunk, or not drunk at all. I'm not quite sure if you would be able to tell with Joe "Wooden" Manganiello whether his character was drunk or not. And I kinda think it's waaaaay too late to start calling rape now. I mean, how many seasons now has vampire blood been the supernatural equivalent of roofies? I certainly don't feel any kind of connection or see any genuine kind of desire between Eric and Sookie - he gave her blood when she hated him, and then suddenly, she liked him and started having sex dreams about him. This show is not the books. Those who see a great connection seem to me to be inferring book content onto the television show.
In the show, Eric previously fed Sookie to Russell Edgington, with nary an apology or an explanation. It certainly wasn't for Sookie's own good to get bitten - it furthered Eric's plan. It did not protect her in any way. Mainly because Eric had Russell's full attention, not Sookie. Nebulous future inferred threats aside, Eric was not protecting Sookie - he was using her. Book Eric may be a royal dick, but Show Eric is a trash-flavoured cockhead. And he was one who gave her blood, and then used it to form a connection with Dream Eric who isn't fucking real. Dream Eric is all sensual touches, and loving words. Reality Eric is all "I don't love" and "You belong to me" and "I could take her and own her if I wanted". They're not synonymous - as made clear by the Sam/Bill dream - Bill has no interest in Sam, and wouldn't want a slashy dream with him - which shows that whatever Bill Sam dreamed of is one that Sam made up - one that appealed to his psyche. Not real Bill, who was off dreaming of the munitions he would buy if he was King.
So to my mind, Alcide is no more or less bad than Eric or Bill by using alcohol instead of vampire blood - and that's the way True Blood rolls. Not only does Alan Ball not like women all that much, but the writers are ABSOLUTELY MONKEY BALLS at building relationships...or tension.....or strong female characters. They skip it by using an outside mechanism as to why the characters are screwing now. They hope like hell you'll build the rest of it yourself.
The Variable Powers of the Authority
The Authority can't track a cellphone, or find the Sanguinistas if they were less obvious, but they know what Eric and Bill bought at the corner shop? And while they have these iStakes on the two fuckups, they're like Pam and have decided to give them a whole two days to find Russell? Not only that, but as cute as Molly is, she didn't tell the two chauvinist fuckups they have until dawn to find Russell. She just said "Nice knowing ya". I don't know why they're searching. But we know that there is no tension. They'll be saved. I mean, the original deal Bill made was under the premise "We die anyway" so I don't know why Eric and Bill are jumping to solve this issue. Under the logic of the real world, this is just an extended death sentence, so I'm not sure why they're doing all this busy work crap. They should be partying it up by sneering at strippers and calling them sluts.
It's good to see that a legendary badass such as Salome is basically Stabler's Pam. She follows him round and listens to his bullshit. She's willing to do anything for him, including give up Nora, currently praying her little heart out. Of course, Nora would never ever do anything bad or be a bad person. Eric knows because they share everything. So natch, she's not his betrayer. Yet, he's willing to believe Pam would do it? And I notice Eric didn't say the easy out which is "Well Nora doesn't know because I never told her about where we buried Russell". So he no doubt told her - and they're fucking - but I'm supposed to believe his sad looks that he's angsting over Sookie? Oh, but he's so eager to call her names and disbelieve everyone's loyalty but Nora's. I'm still angry with him and Bill and their fucking near constant "Russell is bad, we'll get him. Meanwhile let's do some slut shaming. Look at that whore who screwed me and now has no rights to screw men because I've had her. What a slut. When I fuck it's for reasons, when she fucks, it's for sluttiness. Unless she's fucking me. But how bout that Russell huh?" fucking infinite loop their dialogue is.
On the other hand, I think a job with the Authority would do my head in. Dieter and some nameless cannon fodder vamp are sitting there needing to listen to the rambling bullshit of prisoners for all the live long night, and burn them when they say the wrong thing. Firstly, they're prisoners that are consigned to death - they actually have no reason to co-operate, and there's no need to rehabilitate them. They're not supposed to be released at any stage. Secondly, this makes for lacklustre guards - this constant watch of one person. That's how real life prison breaks work - waiting for a bored guard who stops looking at the monitor because it's always the same shit. I have two words - shift rotation, dudes.
You woke your own baby
In my world, when you whisper-scream at someone coming down the hall, that's what wakes your baby up. Not the relatively quiet phone, but the mother talking loudly all about how the phone will wake her baby up.
Never has there been more crappy police work than done by Andy, in the dark. And how the hell could he read tiretracks, in the dark, let alone tell what kinds of tyres they were? I don't know why Andy is stuck in some little crappy station, since he's as good all by himself as one big lab. He knows the shooter stood right there and shot those people? Lol - fucking HOW? You don't get to sniper shoot someone without the second person noticing, dipshit. If someone got shot beside me, I would not sit there calmly eating grapes, waiting for the sniper to get a bead on me. And both of them apparently "Never knew what hit them". Well that involves thinking there's two shooters you knucklehead. Otherwise one of the victims would have reacted.
As it turns out, it was a group of people, driving around in the back of a pickup. I'm not quite sure why they know about shifters, or why they're shooting them. I'm sure the storyline will die in the arse though, with a resolution that makes no sense. It's such a pity there's only like two of the two-natured in the story, or they'd be able to thin the cast quite a bit. I'm sure now that Luna got shot, her kid turned and ran away, that they will forget all about her daughter, and the fact that she will soon be found naked somewhere. Time for Bon Temps: Special Victims Unit. I wonder if Stabler will get in there and counsel the girl in between fanatical ravings and pointless stuff. Oh...no...that's right, we'll probably just forget that Emma exists.
The whole wooden bullets thing has bothered me for a while. Wooden bullets are useless for penetrating skin - particularly vampire skin. I know they've been using them for a while on the show, but they don't make any sense. Wooden bullets used to be used for training and crowd control. They break up too badly to actually kill anyone. How they kill vampires, I don't know. I often flash back to Sex Machine in From Dusk till Dawn who pointed out that vampires were "mushy, you could push it right through them" as to why vampires are staked easily. But shifters are like regular humans. Wooden bullets shouldn't do any more than sting and bounce off, even with a silver core. Not to mention, I don't know what kind of fucking hardened wood you get that it can dig into a tree, and still be there to be pried out by Jason Stackhouse. Wood the size of a watch battery - in a tree - in the dark. Yeah, that would have been noticeable straight away.
The Cure for What Ails Ya
I had a little moment of shock at Jason's mother offering him a blowjob, and my mind blanked out. And more shit about the hole in Jason. I wish they'd call the road crew to fix said hole and then shut up about it. Pity Hoyt's angry at him, since he is the road crew at this stage. It's nice to see too that while Yvetta is just a stupid slut, and Ginger is just a stupid slut, we've had four years of focusing on what's wrong with Jason and how sorry we can feel for him that he needs to fuck all the time. Let's not have any insight into the women, and why the use of the word "slut" doesn't do wonders for the self-esteems of girls who are already damaged - no - let's treat them as the laughable backdrop for how sorry we feel for Jason and his angst.
It's good to see that they're speeding up Jason's character loop - he's now back to the FotS Jason of Season 2. Soon, Eric will forgive him for some reason and he'll get better, and then along comes some saving grace who turns out to be a betrayer. If the writers work this right, we could see Jason being like the famous Crowded House song - Four Seasons in One Day. In the morning he fucks, midmorning, he goes to stake some vampire somewhere, meets a hot girl over the body, goes on a date with her, she invites him home and then rapes him. The next day, the loop starts again. Like Groundhog Day, but sucks.
The Dogs are Barking
Well, they fucked that line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer good and proper. I checked. True Blood shows on a Sunday here and in the US. So it's not a clever joke - it's a lame copy that doesn't make sense. No snap and wit. There's nothing worse than this show lifting lines from a great show and doing it badly. Buffy would have looked a lot better in Whistler's ribcage as a hat, while Lorena was more of a frilly-girly-girl dresser. Also, Buffy probably would have followed through - Lorena was all talk, and then crying over Bill not loving her.
I don't like Alcide in the show, and I'm not sure I'm seeing strong Sookie from the books. She wouldn't have helped Eric and Bill without good reason. She damn sure wouldn't have forced Doug to go with them so she could get the exact location when they were already at the asylum. And she wouldn't have looked at the meatlocker-cum-human storage room and not batted an eyelid. That's why I like her. She doesn't act like humans are detritus to be discarded in the name of furthering vampire objectives. She doesn't use her telepathy to help vampires indiscriminately - she uses her telepathy to stop vampires needing to kill and torture people instead.
All of that is a moot point, because Sookie in the books wasn't silly enough to think that by no longer dating a vampire, you'd have any illusion of freedom from vampire bullshit. And that wasn't the reason she gave to both the Chauvinist Fuckups when she broke up with them. Spoilers I read ( because I was laughing about coats and didn't hear) said that she loved them both or something. And you can hardly resume your normal life by dating a werewolf whose girlfriend you killed because she's hunting you down due to her vampire master and her boyfriend. I mean, how much Were shit does one have to be involved in to learn that fucking a werewolf will not actually exempt you from their drama. Not only that, but vampires are always popping their heads in giving weres orders, like they are the bosses of them.
While tonight's Sookie was leaping into the action - and using the stellar reference of "horror movies" (because they're just like real life violence, I swear, so if you follow rules from those you should be safe, right?) that doesn't mean that she's like Book Sookie. She was being a good little tool for the vampires, but not there because she genuinely fears for anyone. Book Sookie got involved in all the vampire business in hopes of saving lives - and that's why she ended up saving so many people. From Mary Joe Pickard to Genevieve Thrash to Tara - she was always saving people who would have otherwise been caught up in supernatural bullshit and killed. She doesn't try to just serve vampire needs - and that's what she did tonight - some stupid favour for Bill and Eric, and looked on at the human casualties with cold eyes.
Fire Demon Schmire Demon
I don't hate the idea of the Ifrit. I'm sure that Alan Ball is a multicultural "Ima fuck up mythology" type of guy. He's ruined witches, vampires, maenads - he can screw up the mythology for the Ifrit. I'm not sure why Terry leapt to the conclusion that it was waiting for them all to get together. With no evidence that it was waiting for them to get together. Must run in the Bellefleur blood - just that little bit of nonsensical psychic that makes you know things without proof, or logic.
What I do hate about this is the solely American gaze being given to Terry Bellefleur's deep damage. I hate to break it to my American readers, but shooting innocent people is a fact of life for the American soldier. You don't get to be embedded troops and not accidentally shoot people who shouldn't be shot. Troops fighting in the Middle East - during the Gulf War or the current war - are not fighting armed, uniformed soldiers. They're fighting elements of the population, within the population at large, with few staged battles as of old. There's even terms for it like "friendly fire" and "collateral damage". That sort of thing is so common that it's pre-tidied for you. In fact, most of the US military strategy is just to bomb the shit out of entire cities in the hopes of getting the bad people. Terry claimed to have been at the Fallujah massacre, so this may have been the first civilian he murdered, but she wouldn't be the last. I'm sure Terry has hundreds of victims who could have called down an Ifrit. But what they depicted didn't look like Fallujah to me - it looked like somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not understanding why this storyline is supposed to be about his deep dark past. There's nothing hidden about what went on at Fallujah - it was a massacre of innocent people. Fuck, even Wikipedia knows that. The sorts of symptoms that Terry has always exhibited - well, he should have had an experience of heavy shelling, killing lots of innocent people, being attacked at random. This one incident, out in the middle of the desert, with a small group of attackers - should not cause the understanding of Lafayette's PTSD we saw in Season 2. I call crap on this whole storyline. And I certainly call crap on the idea that shooting civilians is an anomaly that Terry didn't participate in regularly - of sound mind.
Jessica Hamby - Bon Temps' Deus Ex Machina
Why is Tara the only vampire who works for a living? Since when did Eric give the bar to Pam? Why does she only care about how the bar is being run now, when she's been happy to leave it in Ginger's hands for the most part? I don't think Pam is a terribly good maker. For a start, she gave Tara that speech such that humans can't touch them - and then tells her to fear the scrutiny of human authorities? The stupid shit that comes out of Pam's mouth...I swear. At least Tara didn't get shot in the face by her friends. What she has instead is the ability to make mistakes and get punished after she breaks the unspoken, unknown rules. Riiiiight. Excellent. Now we have yet another white person beating up on her.
Now Jessica's finally changed her tune. Vampirism isn't freeing - it's lonely. But also wonderful? Jessica wanders around lamenting she can't have any humans to eat...but I'm sure I've seen her eating humans. And last week, Daddy Fuckup gave her a speech about picking the good marijuana. Jessica was a cross between sounding like a cult victim "It's really great, I have discerned with my indoctrination period" to social worker "Let's be friends and deal with our issues".
Is that her job this season - to leap from character to character and insert her "wisdom" to make everything better? I don't know that anyone would listen to Jessica at all - particularly since she can't seem to figure out what vampirism means - if it's a good thing or a bad thing. And how did she know that drinking a human was better than sex? She was a virgin when she was turned, and drank a human way before she fucked Hoyt - there was that big deal about the eternal virginity (that the writers forgot apparently). And not only that, but like one night and Bill had enough of her bullshit and dumped her with Eric. She's apparently forgotten that she was eating humans with Eric and Pam like the second night she was made.
That Outfit. Oh My God.
It seems that Hoyt has decided to use My Chemical Romance for fangbanger inspiration. Oy, is this not the mark of someone well past their prime looking like a fool, dressed like teenagers used to dress last time they paid attention? Yeah, it is. When he came on screen, Mr. Minty said "Why is he dressing like a male stripper?" and then started singing this tune. I don't really understand what's going with Hoyt, apart from the fact that he's permanently pissed off it seems. Apparently he'll be stuck in this loop until the writers can figure out what to do with his character that isn't raging at Jason and Jessica. I'm over it - so over it already.
So let me get the logic straight. Jason is raped over the course of many days, and is fine, and Hoyt gets dumped by his girlfriend, and has to be a raging dick to everyone for fucking weeks now. True Blood - keeping it real.
Not a Theocracy Dipshit
I just don't get this Authority bullshit. Roman is all going on about the sacredness of the blood - but wait...no - he just thinks it's a formless ritual - but wait again why is he looking at the blood with all this reverence? Considering that he regularly gives out a drop of blood to the Chancellors, then the blood in that vial? He should know it's not Lilith's, because he's been refilling it. The vial isn't that big. Really. Or he would know that if they put any thought into the rituals they show, and the fact that while they might have shown this one time, Roman's been giving these little drops out a ceremonies for how many years now? Vial should have been refilled on about a bi-annual basis.
I don't get what they're trying to convey with the Sanguinista bullshit that's going on. Roman is one of the most fanatical characters we've yet to see on the show - he's always going on about the blood, and the right way of doing things, he's in people's business, he has rules up the wazoo. But he doesn't actually believe in God, or rule by what God wants, or have God as the titular head of the whole society. He keeps talking about fanatics, but since he is clearly a fanatic himself - just about mainstreaming instead of drinking blood - then I don't trust his judgement. On top of that, he did turn an ultra-Conservative Christian dude, while his opponents are disorganised and nebulous, yet incredibly vicious. If Alan Ball is trying to show how bad a theocracy is, he is, as usual, doing it wrong. Not only that, but he really should have found out what a fucking oligarchy is. The Authority is an oligarchy, not a theocracy.
Alan Ball is quoted as saying that the Authority is supposed to show just how damn scary the Republicans are. Having a common religion does not a theocracy make. The UK's official religion is Church of England - but that doesn't mean it's not really a democracy. In fact, the US is more of a theocracy than the UK is - with numerous references to God - even I know that the US Constitution talks about "One nation under God". If Ball had a fucking inkling about politics, he'd know that the "theocracy" he fears is already present - at least the one he visualises. Roman is like any politician - throwing a bone to the fanatics, and really trying to stick to something that will keep the state going. Geez - he even has the nonsensical spin that's going on - words that seem to make sense when they're said, but are a whole heap of puff and buzzwords.
If he wants us to believe that the Authority is bad, what the fuck is the alternative? So, what, we should be rooting for the Sanguinistas to win the right to suck people's blood in a true show of American freedom? Or we should have anarchy wherein there are no checks and balances for say...guys who like to eat babies? We should put the pair of Chauvinist Fuckups in charge of things? Or let vampires as a whole vote in whoever they want? Isn't this what Ball is complaining about in essence - that the American public will vote in nutjobs? And with so many Sanguinistas, then surely the vote would reflect this - and the more fanatical group that believes Lilith is real would be the new face of democracy in the vampire world. This storyline makes no damn sense, since Roman is arguing for mainstreaming - you know, that system which stops massacres like the one Russell Edgington's got going on - and he doesn't believe in Lilith.
The lesson Alan Ball seemingly intends us to learn is that which he said in his article - that theocracies are more scary than vampires. Except. Except. Except the truth is that the Authority poses no threat - to anyone. It hasn't killed the baby eating vamp, it hasn't killed the Sanguinistas. It hasn't killed Russell Edgington, it hasn't killed Eric and Bill. Oh yes - there's wandering around in rooms with some ancient vampiress traipsing after you, and some stirring political speeches. But that's about it. The Authority is a fucking circlejerk of epic proportions. Barring mainstreaming they haven't actually effected anything. In truth, mainstreaming is just a buzzword too. Pigs like Eric pay lip service to it, but don't follow it; while jackasses like Bill - apparently mainstreaming poster boy - don't exactly live Sookie-free diets. And both fuckups participated in the "Tolerance Massacre" as I like to call it.
What lesson are we to learn from this? A theocracy (if it really were one - let's make believe Alan Ball knows what he's talking about) is no threat to how we live our lives and is slow, ponderous and never acts? Ooooh - terrifying. You've convinced me - theocracies are bad, and totally more evil than huge democracies which are slow, ponderous and rarely act. And you know, the theme might have worked if you didn't keep deifying vampires as cool, rich guys, who are so good as to care for tiny babies and save prostitutes at random, only to fuck all night, fall in love and have haunting suitor stares.
Iggy's right through - not just about the vomiting - but you made a mess of the little sister who just wrecked her car.
My Recommendation
My next recommendation is Ginger Snaps. If you like strong female characters, well, you wouldn't watch True Blood, now would you? And this movie shows it can be done.
It's another lycanthrope movie, but the brilliant thing about it is that becoming a werewolf is a metaphor for the trials of puberty. Ginger gets bitten by a werewolf and goes off the rails like wow. If you've ever wondered "Is there anything about getting my period that's like being a werewolf?", then this film will lead you to speculate on it. It explores the relationship with the one sister who hasn't gone through a change, and the one who has. It encapsulates those scary feelings - that women go through that stage both revelling in their new found sexual power, and also being scared of it. I will forever think at those hormonal trip times "Goddamn, I feel like a werewolf".
Plenty of blood, gore and sexuality - which is what True Blood viewers like, except the writer in this has a clue.