True Blood review – 6×06: ‘Don’t You Feel Me’

Courtesy of HBO

This week’s True Blood has everything: decapitations, shots to the head, near-drowning, Faerie light, and gratuitous amounts of female nudity. So why am I so freaking bored?

Let’s bitch it out…Ugh. So that was tortorous, wasn’t it? Perhaps it’s the usual mid-season cull of boring storylines, but ‘Don’t You Feel Me’ is a chore and a half of an episode to get through. It doesn’t help that last week’s episode was so much fun, while this is a mostly humour-free outing, focusing far too much on a bunch of plotlines that we frankly can’t give two sh*ts about.

• Alcide (Joe Maganiello): still a dick. Next!
• Sam (Sam Trammell): haulin’ ass outta town. Next!
• Terry (Todd Lowe): dead. Awww…Terry. I will confess that I rarely ever liked you, but it’s still sad to see Arlene (Carrie Preston) crying over your body…kinda (I mean, you did sorta bring it on yourself). I can’t say that I’ve wanted the character dead this season (last season is a different story), but this feels like the extermination of loose-ends rather than a legitimate storyline. RIP Mr. Bellefleur
• Sookie (Anna Paquin): bumpin’ Faerie parts with Warlow (Rob Kazinsky), a development that no one saw coming <sarcasm>. The only shocking thing about this development is that it took them so freaking long to doff their clothes and get down to business. Gotta say, though, I’m still not comfortable seeing Anna Paquin’s boobs. There’s just something inherently wrong with the idea. Naked random hooker-werewolf eating a box of KFC? Sure. But Rogue/girl from The Piano? Eeeeek! My eyes are burning!

This more or less brings us to the main event, which is the beginning of the end for the Vamp Camp. I’ll admit that while the first forty minutes or so of ‘Don’t You Feel Me’ involved so much eye rolling and sighing that I nearly exhausted myself, the last ten minutes or so are pretty solid. I can’t say that I expected things to come to a head quite so soon, and while our vamps haven’t made their great escape just yet, they’re farther along than I would have expected with four episodes still to go in the season.

Much like what we saw with the Authority last year, a solid 2/3 of our cast has now converged on a single location – aka the old high security prison doing nefarious stuff (Side Note: I sometimes expect Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil protagonist Alice to jump out and kill everyone. It’s probably just the shiny/sterile aesthetics of all of these interiors).

What surprises me is that Billith (Stephen Moyer) makes his move here and not at the end of the season. Did anyone expect that the vision from 6×02 ‘The Sun’ would come to pass around episode 6? The development itself is hardly surprising – we always knew that Billith would save his “friends” (or at least Deborah Ann Woll’s Jessica). Question: Considering he’s basically a god whose only weakness was sunlight, has he just been hanging around in the basement synthesizing Faerie blood because he didn’t think that Governor Burrell (Arliss Howard) wasn’t much of a threat? Because otherwise I’m unsure why he needed to wait until he had Warlow’s blood and attack during the day. Why couldn’t he just attack during the nighttime? Or better yet, why didn’t he do the same thing as Alexander Skarsgard’s Eric and allow himself to get captured and then waste the place from the inside? I realize that he was focusing on “saving the vampire race” and all, but this also just kinda seems like shoddy plotting, no?

Gaping plot holes aside, we finally get some payoff from Eric’s decision to turn Willa (Amelia Rose Blaire) in a baby vamp – she can manipulate stupid guards! We also learn what the end game of all these studies are, though we have to suffer through the usual bloody eyes treatment from Nora’s (Lucy Griffiths) infection by a funky ‘Hepatitis Fever’ cocktail before we learn what the vamp genocide looks like. In what amounts to a complete non-shocker, the big reveal is that the same poison is going into every bottle of hot off the assembly line Tru Blood. SHOCKER! Oh wait…didn’t we figure out that Burrell was going to do real bad things back when he struck the deal to take over Tru Blood manufacture back in episode 1? Or were we meant to forget about that?

In any case, it’s all semi-cliffhangery because now Eric, Nora and Willa need to find the remaining vamps and get the eff out before they get discovered. Why Eric doesn’t just let all the prisoners loose and find his friends in the ensuing chaos is beyond me, but hey – I just review this show, I don’t write it…

Courtesy of HBO

Other Observations:

• Naturally Jason (Ryan Kwanten) would boast his way into the bigoted ranks of the anti-vamp leagues. Just like how he would naturally immediately encounter Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) and they would make sexy blackmail threats at each other. These two are kind of adorable together, are they not?
• Admittedly the resulting “fornication” scene with Jess (Deborah Ann Woll) and generic hottie James is one of the few legitimately emotional moments outside of Terry’s death. The depths of despair that Jess still feels from eating Andy’s (Chris Bauer) girls is pretty obvious in her defeated acceptance of her new humiliating experience. I imagine we’ll see more of James…unless he dies of UV exposure. Vamp cancer is totally a thing, kids. Slather on the Tru Blood sunscreen!
• Last week’s cliffhanger – Eric facing off against Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten) – is anything but. In fact, it’s over almost as soon as it begins. Quite the cop-out, though I’m happy to keep watching them both
• Andy’s lone remaining Faerie daughter is named Adelin-Brayland-Charlane-Dannika. Is the Charlane a shout-out to Sookie Stackhouse author, Charlaine Harris?
• Sooo…seriously with the lack of storylines for Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) and Tara (Rutina Wesley)? At this point it’s like “why are they even in the cast?”
• Speaking of no longer in the cast: way to lose your head there, Governor Burrell! Anyone else wishing that Billith had kicked that melon around like a football?
• Finally, I’m totally sex positive with a dash of judgy prudishness, but holy lady parts! There is a whole ‘lotta T&A on display between the KFC werewolf hooker, the Liliths’ merkins and Anna Paquin’s funbags. It’s like they’re trying to (over)compensate for last week’s scene of Jason doing pull-ups (which I may or may not have a gif of that I play when I have a bad day at work)

Best Lines:

• Sarah (after a long-winded description of copulation): “Part of our jobs is to watch vampires do it.” Points for being succinct

And now your turn: most boring episode in recent memory or am I way off base? Is Sarah Newlin basically propping up this entire season now? Why did Billith need to wait to walk in the sun to embark on the rescue mission? Did anyone else clutch their pearls when they learned – shocker! – that the Tru Blood bottling operation was compromised? (Yes, I just wrote that. My mother would be so proud). And where do you want this whole Vamp Camp affair to go next? Comment away!

True Blood airs Sundays at 9pm EST on HBO