'True Blood': 5 Questions That Need Answers

HBO

I miss the days when the blood in True Blood dripped timidly down necks or even pooled elegantly on the floor. Now it's always splattering around like a Jackson Pollock painting, sometimes joined with chunks of flesh for texture. All the gore is distracting, but not enough to keep the audience from noticing a few issues in this week's episode. HBO, we are all looking forward to explanations for the following:

1) Dog-fighting, really? What's wrong with bussing tables? Or if you're shifting, be something more expensive, like a trained tiger, or one of those eagles that delivers wedding rings. How does the human brain confer any advantage once inside a dog-fighting ring? This seems economically all wrong.

2) What is with Crystal sniffing at the air? Is she another shifter, or is she something new? It seems impossible that Jason would manage to get mixed up with something as normal as a mere human love triangle, so we can assume this isn't some weird nervous tic.

3) Speaking of something new: are Lafayette's altar gods going to come to life? If not, there'd better be another reason to keep the romance with Jesus from being a complete waste of plot-time (though, being able to write "romance with Jesus" might be worth it in itself). Something more has to come of this than a huffy end to a first date.

4) Eric's plan for revenge: what is it? For a vampire thousands of years old, surely he's got something with more substance than mild flirtation up his sleeve.

5) And for a vampire even just a couple of months old, surely Jessica can get it together enough to drink some True Blood. Why is she letting herself get so hungry her fangs come out when Arlene cuts her finger? [As a side note, it must be said that Arlene gets some of the best short scenes in the show—from strangely oblivious racist diatribes, to warding off Jessica by forming the cross with lemon-covered bleeding fingers. Her harebrained delivery is just delightful.]

If we get answers to all these, I won't even complain about the heavy-handedness of having Russell speak approvingly of Hitler (OHHH, so Russell's a BAD guy, now we get it). We will gloss right over that. Our lips, they will be sealed.