True Blood 303: Another rug ruined

Ok, you might be taller than me, and VERY cute, but... my damn rug!

Even before the credits, Eric violently savaged a werewolf in Sookie’s house. What IS it with that house? Makes Amityville look like a retirement home for gentlefolk. Sookie ought to just redecorate in red, it’d save so much on Mr Muscle. Eric was unrepentant that he’d added to the mess. ‘I got your rug all wet,’ he growled, through a faceful of werewolf blood.

The credits provided brief respite before we were plunged into the King of Louisiana’s palace, silver-lined doors and burning ex-girlfriends a speciality. Talbot was most displeased that a valuable tapestry was used to put Lorena out, but the King dismissed him with a camply-arched eyebrow, and settled down to give Bill a little homily on love and humans, leaving the usually opinionated Bill quite speechless.

We got quite a bit more Bill back-story: how he tried to return to his wife after becoming a vampire (doh! Bad idea, Bill), and how Lorena came after him with her infuriating belief that there’s no such thing as too much make-up. It shows how evil Lorena is that I was amazed she merely glamoured Bill’s wife, rather than biting a hole in her neck and ruining yet another perfectly good rug. Poor old Bill just cannot shake off Lorena; she is the thick-skinned sort who considers mere stalking a tame way to court love. Her cunning plan was that Bill would turn down the King and thus get Sookie killed, but Bill thwartingly renounced his allegiance to Louisiana. Then he started shagging Lorena violently – and when I say violently, I mean he twisted her head all the way round to the opposite side of her neck so he wouldn’t have to look at her – with all of us yelling, ‘No, Bill! NO!’ It was the most disturbing sex scene in TB by far, and that includes all those other ones that you can think of.

True Blood 212: I swear I’d wear him like a scrunchie

So, after all that. All that scheming and manipulating and sorcery – showing up at the jail to befriend Tara, wandering round naked with Daphne/Piiiig, turning people black-eyed and crazy – all that wild dancing, all those orgies, all those fruit platters and candles and meat sculptures, all that removing hearts from people and feeding them to other people, all that enormous effort. And at the end of the day it’s just so Maryann can get married? What is this? Bridget Jones: The Southern Years?

Oh look! We're something old, something borrowed, and something blue

I’m afraid there was a definite ‘is that all?’ feeling this week, but how could there not be, after the frenzied peaks of episodes 9 and 10? Lafayette forced Sookie into a bridesmaid outfit – we knew he was definitely under Maryann’s influence when he told a woman to take off her clothes – and Maryann named her ‘matron of honour’. Sookie somehow allowed herself to be tied to a chair (when did that happen?), which coincidentally is the only way I too have ever allowed myself to be designated a bridesmaid. In fact, the black-eyed black-out thing might explain why I can remember little about any nuptials I have attended.

Once we knew the ‘wedding’ was a-coming, there was a certain inevitability to proceedings. We knew Sam would be delivered as a sacrifice, though admittedly we didn’t know how he’d get out of it; we knew the townsfolk would stand around smiling dopily, going, ‘Wooh, Dionysus’; and we knew Bill would have to save the day. So while I wasn’t exactly yawning, I wasn’t digging my nails into my cheeks with tension either.