True Blood S05E11: Sunset

Hey, it’s the penultimate episode of True Blood Season 5! What an excellent time to introduce new characters and story arcs! Jeez Louise. This episode was a shitstorm of a hot mess, and lo and behold, there was exactly one line of dialogue for Lafayette. COINCIDENCE? Je ne pense pas.

Anyway, the good stuff this week was pretty thin on the ground, as we get to the pointy end and life boils down essentially to faerie/vampire shenanigans and happy fun times are kept to a minimum. Plenty of Pam, but aside from her amazing dresses the sass was tame and a little forced, some pretty lame attempts to be allegorical/topical regarding The Authority’s jurisdiction over a woman’s body, some pretty friggin heavy implications that we’re gunna be shipping Pamara/Tam through season 6, and one bloody excellent bit of Pam’s own-brand meta-commentary:

So turns out that unless we get some goshdarned spectacular u-turning that Bill is a true Lilith believer and we will never be happy again. He sees Lilith, believes he is the Chosen One (gah) outright chumpkills Doctoré (boy the true death isn’t as mysterious as it used to be. It’s like Vampires are made of silly putty) and forces Jessica to turn Jason, but doesn’t use Vampire Command (Level 3) because of reasons. It’s another good excuse to have a scene where Jason and Jess talk about their spectacularly odd r’ship, which is always a treat, and gets Councillor Rosalyn out of the house for a bit, which is wonderful because she is wonderful, and actually does a decent job of making elder vampires seem menacing again.

So we’re afraid for Jason for maybe two minutes before they pull the ol’ switcheroo and Jason is back of Faerie plotline duty with Sookie. Suspect I’d be a lot more sympathetic towards the faeries if they weren’t such ineffectual ninnies. The bones are this: Sookie is worried about a vampire called Warlow who might well do the decent thing and wait til next season to do his wretched nonsense, but lo! Russell Edgington and Steve Newlin have tricked Jason into leading them right to the faerie hideout, but that’s okay because it was the faeries’ plan all along!(?!??!!!) So I guess we can forget about Warlow, unless he is still part of this mess somehow and played by some awesome guest actor or somecrap, in which case we cannot.

This is also a perfect moment to introduce the Elder Faerie, who is given a little intro before she rocks up so you know whatever’s coming is going to be dumb as a box!rocks. In a spectacularly wasted opportunity the Elder Ferry is just another dancer who expresses her aethereality and endless transdimensional exploration by asking asinine questions about Ke$ha and John Cougar Mellencamp, and boy howdy could you just get any more relevant, TB. The conclusion of the faerie master plan is that the elder one goes out and fires faerie magic at a 3000 y/o vampire, who uses Dodge, which is super effective. He then drinks the dumb ass faerie queene. Goodnight sweet wasted, unnecessary redshirt princess. And now he has faerie powers! Yaay.

Elsewhere, Alcide is hanging out with the T-1000, meeting his new packmaster and fending off baby vampires in a crude attempt to create some kind of a bond between him and his father, Agent Doggett. He does so shirtless.

So back in vampire central Abysmal Nora is apparently a little turned off by the whole Lilith business after she killed their ghost maker in a hallucinodream. She expresses this by being a willing participant in Eric’s Worst Sex Scene in which she whines ‘what are we going to do?’ like a more irritating Scarlett O’Hara, and kudos to Eric for persevering with this mess. When they manage to escape Eric chumps their drivers/bodyguards and they both fly away (vampires can fly, remember?) to somewhere someone cares about this pairing, but not before he makes this face:

which I hope to never see again. True death please, table one.

In brief:

• Andy’s faerie lady is pregnant with his presumably halfling faerie child, and I’m gunna go out on a limb here and say that next week it is born, becomes the halfling heir Warlow has a hankerin’ for and saves Sookie. Heard it here first. Anyway, Holly/Andy is pretty good and any excuse to show Terry/Arlene looking happy is fine by me.
• New character/chumpdeath #2 is a General type who makes the fatal error of showing some common sense in the hit television programme True Blood. He threatens to release footage of Russell and Steve murdering 22 frat boys from last week (I was wrong, woohoo), and Eric decides to kill him, because of Considered Reasons Regarding the Aforementioned Terrible Face.
• Sam and Luna have not worn clothes in two episodes, Luna is in Vampire Jail with Emma, Sam is being taken to see Bill by the astonishing blonde creature from last week.
• This:

So we’re finally down to the wire and things are looking pretty dumb. It was always likely to be a rude awakening after the quality of the last two episodes, but god we could dream. Anyway, see you next week for the last True Blood of 2012. Sheesh.