True Blood 3x10

So, Bill explains to Sookie that she is a fairy, as if we had not figured that out by now. But he also tells her that vampires think that fairies are extinct – after they had sucked every last drop of their intoxicating blood. Eric, too, knows that Sookie is a fairy and warns her not to trust Bill. In a dream she continues the conversation, intuitively knowing Eric is right. She visits Fangtasia to learn what Eric means. Instead, he takes her prisoner in his dungeonesque basement! He is planning on using Sookie and her fairy powers to defeat Russell. The vampire King has set off a serious backlash by murdering the news anchor on live television. Now he is mourning the death of his lover Talbot by hiring a male prostitute, saying his goodbyes and then staking him.

Instead of driving twenty miles to the nearest emergency room, meanwhile, Lafayette takes Crystal’s father Calvin to his porch and administers him a drop of vampire blood to heal his wounds. Enraged that two gay men gave him “vamper juice,” he disowns his daughter – telling her she should have married her half-brother Felton. “Them fuckers is a whole new dimension of trash,” Lafayette sighs. That same night, Jesus wants to try some V with Lafayette – and together they go on a psychedelic trip into their past watching their ancestors perform rites of witchcraft and black magic. One thing that has always puzzled me is how it can be that people go on a powerful hallucinogenic trip taking just a few drops of vampire blood, but when they gulp blood straight from a vampire, all it does is heal them.

Sam tries to calm his nerves with a bottle of Jack, which induces an interesting flashback to his past when he was a jewelry thief. His partner-in-crime, Charlene, was unaware, of courses, that he is a shifter. She double-crosses him with her boyfriend Jon, and in retaliation he killed them both. Not that I know what to make of the story. I get the impression the writers did not really know what to do with his character this season. Holly, the new waitress at Merlotte’s, we learn is a Wiccan – a practitioner of witchcraft, though not a witch herself. She offers Sam some herbs for his stress, but he refuses. But Arlene hopes Holly can help end her pregnancy of Rene’s child. For his part, Jason withdraws his invitation to Bill, because Bill chides him for not looking after Sookie. Then he hears someone breaking into his bedroom, only to find a beautiful black panther – that shifts into Crystal. Exciting as it is that he now finally knows she is a were, the transformation was disappointingly silly again.

Still, this was perhaps the best episode of the season thus far. And that is fascinating, because True Blood has created something almost entirely unrelated to Charlaine Harris’ source material. Some elements are, actually, preliminaries to the next season, Holly the Wiccan and Crystal the were-panther. In the Southern Vampire Mysteries, King Russell does not meet his true death, so we have to wait what will happen between him and Eric. The story arc this season seems to require that Eric will avenge his human father’s death. Apart from that I am curious what is going to happen with Tara, Lafayette and Jesus, Hoyt and Jessica, and if we are going to hear from Hadley and Queen Sophie-Ann. Well, there only two more episodes left, so we will find out soon.