True Blood the Season that Wasn't

I like True Blood.  It has had a some good seasons, but after last season I felt like we had covered all the ground we could and maybe the show needed to wind down.  I will say I was looking forward to this season after the cliffhanger ending, but after just a few episodes I was a little confused and before the end ready to stop watching.

True Blood is good because the characters are strong.  I'm not a Sookie fan, or a Tara fan, but their are some many great characters to choose from if you don't like them.  I hated Eric, but he slowly became the best character out of the regulars.  Then Bill became kind of cool too and Russell Edginton stole the show.  Russell was so good that I think they rushed him back way sooner than necessary to appease fans of his.  I thought it should have all ended with him in the final season, but they went for the ratings grab.

So here we were after a pretty decent season where the Vampire Authority had been all but obliterated.  Bill had turned into a super vampire and it looked like he had embraced evil with Eric becoming the hero.  Warlow loomed as a mystery.  Eric was finally the hero and now maybe he would fulfill his destiny with Sookie.

Here is how I thought the season would go. Jason would struggle with his complete hatred of vampires.  Eric and the crew would battle Bill and some vampires would be forced to pick sides.  I wasn't sure if Warlow would be a major story line or an arch that would play out in the next season.  You could make the case that it could with the slow story telling they were using on that angle.  

These were common assumptions, but in the end they played out much differently than I thought.  Logic seemed to have escaped the cast of True Blood in this last season.  While in a fantasy world that is understandable, I think the writers got very lazy in their story telling and it showed.  When you confuse the audience and have people screaming at their TV's for the characters to make logical decisions a show can lose interest quickly.  

The season was marred by confusing situations that just weren't logical even with the history of things that have happened in the past.  Take the case of Bill.  He becomes a super vampire and at first we assume that he is evil, but immediately it is determined that he is not evil.  So forget about the Bill versus the world story line.  Instead he has a vision of a handful of vampires, some he knows, dying in a room.  Bill had become a semi jerk, but after seeing this he becomes obsessed with stopping this vision from coming to life.  

He believes that he must be able to walk in the day in order to do this, something he assumed with his new powers he could do, but he actually cannot.  So he sends Jessica to kidnap a scientist that can synthesize fairy blood so that he can.  Why was this so important for Bill to do?  I believe the angle was for Bill to give all the vampires the blood so they could survive the sun.  Ok, but was all that really necessary?  Wouldn't it have made more sense if the blood really could have cured the hep V virus the humans created?  

Why kill the Governor so early in the season?  He was a great new evil character.  Why would Jessica not be arrested for killing three fairies that also happened to be the Sheriffs daughters?  Andy is really just ok with that?  Why did Eric need to be able to walk in the day to save the vampires?  Couldn't he just have done this at night.  Also, couldn't he have just organized everyone in prison to escape.  How hard was it to do that?  All he did was open the doors and they all went on a killing spree.

The season was cut 2 episodes short because Sookie was pregnant in real life.  You could tell that they had planned for 12 episodes and did a really poor job scaling back to 10.  Everything seemed rushed and out of place half the time.  The entire Warlow thing was such a train wreck and a major let down for us much as they had hyped it.  One second Sookie has sex with him, then she is concerned about marrying him, and then after waiting all this time he has no patience left to try to win her over even though she had sex with him already.  So Warlow goes evil and must be killed, which in turn maybe kills Eric, but probably not.

The last 15 minutes of the season did a lot to spark some interest in next year and get us away from the misgivings of the prior episodes.  Advancing into the future was a good idea.  Yet, they did a very poor job explaining with the Hep V was not just killing all the infected vampires.  Also, the Eric situation was poorly written because if he started on fire he would have immediately buried himself in the snow.  If they are trying to tease his death I think zero percent of people were buying that as real or a just ending to the show's best character.

Hopefully True Blood can right the wrongs of this past season and give us an end we can all be happy with.  They did not set the bar high in this past season so that should not be very difficult, but I would hope they keep it simple and just bring back a few old faces.  What we always want in shows that end is the loose ends to be tied up and with this show there are quite a few.  Let's hope they get to them all.