Batshit in Bon Temps: “True Blood” recap of episode “The Sun”

So apparently Rutger Hauer isn’t Warlow, and Sookie isn’t going to get back with Bill, and Pam isn’t willing to cut Tara out of her life, even if she’s not Eric Northman. Season six of True Blood, what are you doing to my predictions?! Could this season actually be … well, good?

Well, at least it’s unpredictable so far—and, of course, unpredictable in this context means “sometimes pushing the boundaries of logic.” But logic doesn’t exist in Bon Temps! Realism doesn’t apply! Boo, rational thinking!

So in this crazy world, what were the craziest parts of last night’s episode, “The Sun”? Click through for my thoughts! (And, of course, SPOILERS ahead!)

1. “I’m your fucking faerie grandfather!” Rutger Hauer yells, and so we learn that his name is Niall, and he’s Jason and Sookie’s grandfather, coming from a very long line of faeries. Did this development seem very disjointed in connection with last week, when Niall was all intimidating and creepy and picked up Jason and questioned him about his life and we totally thought he was Warlow, digging for information about Sookie? Yup, and I have this feeling that the writers decided right after writing last week’s episode to do something different with Hauer, making up this fairy grandfather angle. But still, he has a good rapport with Jason, and I especially enjoyed him saying of Jason’s teenage years, “You had some juicy porn under your bed,” and that the faerie “gene skipped you.” Of course, Jason comparing Niall to Boba Fett and calling him an “intergalactic bounty hunter” worked too, and I wonder how the Stackhouses will end up facing Warlow, who is now in this dimension and ready to track down Sookie. Anyone else think the still mostly unseen Warlow kind of looks like Rob Zombie? Anyone?

2. “If the humans want war, we’ll give them war,” says Eric, and that’s because he’s sick of taking shit from Gov. Burrell, sick of Pam and Nora fighting, sick of dealing with crap like a SWAT team storming Fangtasia, shutting down the business, and shooting Tara with a silver bullet that emits UV light, killing a vampire from the inside-out. So Eric goes on the offensive, going undercover as a nerdy, lowly government employee to get a meeting with Burrell—but his failure to glamour the Guv introduces to another example of anti-vamp technology: contact lens that reject vampires’ brain-reading abilities. What’s Eric Northman to do? Glamour Burrell’s daughter, of course! Only such ridiculousness would occur in Bon Temps: The beautiful Eric floating outside a girl’s window, convincing her to let him in. What’s going to go on in that bedroom, I wonder? All I can say is, jelly.

3. Oh, you’ve never seen a vampire suck blood out of a human’s body THROUGH ITS MOUTH BEFORE? Well, now you have, and you can thank Bill for that, because he is officially going into Crazytown as Billith. The kind-of-comatose Bill, with bloody tears smeared all over his face, rigid in his armchair, as he killed that escort Jessica called for him, was creepy enough, and then having him chat with Lilith about God was also a little bizarre. According to Lilith, she’s not a god, she’s just the first vampire, like Adam and Eve were the first humans; “There is no god but God.” But still “events have been set in motion” so Bill Compton can no longer be who he is; he’s changed, irreversibly, and we get one of his new powers this week: being able to see the future. And so he sees Eric and Pam and Tara and all their vampire friends locked in a chamber with sunlight burning them up from above—perhaps an allusion to that power Niall was telling Sookie about, or to some torture ritual Gov. Burrell has planned, or whatever else. Lots of possibilities here! And this is the most exciting Bill has been in years.

4. We get a new cast member in the form of Nicole Wright, activist and leader of the Vampire Unity Society, a group who thinks it is “really important to start a dialogue between humans, vampires, and other supernatural groups.” Nicole (played by Jurnee Smollett-Bell, who you may remember being Jess from TV’s very wonderful Friday Night Lights) tries to convince Sam to reveal himself as a shifter in order to get the conversation started—“The movement needs to start somewhere”—but when he refuses, she takes things into her own hands, tracking him home, videotaping his scuffle with Alcide, Martha, and Danielle (who come along to kidnap Emma from Sam, proving once again that the werewolves on this show are duplicitous assholes), and presumably readying to post it online. I’m not sure if I like Nicole yet, but I appreciate that she, like Gov. Burrell, is another example of the True Blood writers being more upfront with the social awareness themes the show will be struggling with this year. “People are dying out there. You can’t just sit this one out” is certainly more direct than a lot of the stuff we’ve gotten from True Blood in the past, no?

5. And lastly, the absolute best part of this episode was Lafayette and Emma hanging out—not only because it meant they fell asleep watching Food Network’s “Chopped,” but because they dressed up like drag queen versions of Jackie Kennedy to do so. So much pink! So much animal print! And why does Lala have those items in little girl sizes? In his own sizes, I understand. But did he purposefully go out to get stuff for Emma, too? Adorbs. The most heart-warming episode of this otherwise emotionally wrought episode, for sure—although yes, Jessica’s prayer in the final few moments of “The Sun” was very good, too.

+ And some of my favorite lines: 

+ “Sookie, it’s more powerful than the sun,” Niall says her faerie power. It may be depleting, but if she focuses, it can grow into a “supernova,” “killing any vampire it touches.” So it’s a “last resort”—especially because it will be the last action she can make as a faerie—and it will very clearly be what ends up killing Warlow, no? It’s frustrating to have such a loophole introduced in only the second episode of the season, but ah, well. At least it’s all out on the table now.

+ “Life is really a shit sandwich sometimes,” Arlene says to Patrick’s pregnant wife, trying to convince her that Patrick ran off with someone else, rather than the truth, which is that Terry killed Patrick last season and the ifrit demon collected his body. Whomp whomp!

+ “No, not today. I have a job!” Sookie finally remembers … and then she plays hooky all day, hanging out with half faerie, very handsome Ben, who Sookie just finds on the side of the road and decides to bring home to nurse back to health. But soon enough they’re flirting, so much so that Sookie remembers, “I shouldn’t be taking walks with handsome strangers. It never ends well.” But this guy has to be a future love interest, right? He just has to be.

+ “Been up all day?” Pam asks Nora, who is poring over the Vampire Bible to find anything that can help Eric in his offensive against the humans. It’s only a throwaway line, but I love little reminders like this that the vampires’ world is the exact opposite of our own.

+ “No problemo,” Eric says when pretending to be the boring government employee meeting with the Guv, and his flat, affectless delivery of the line was fairly hilarious—especially when coupled with that mousy hair and those huge glasses. (Also, his comparison of vampires to whooping cranes: weird, but effective.) Let me love you, Eric Northman.