Culture

Everything That Happens in the Final Season of 'True Blood': Dissecting the Supertease

HBO followed the season premiere of its vampire soap opera with a supertease for the entire final season. It's a lot to take in at once, even for the most dedicated fans. If you're, say, a less dedicated fan, what's to make of this frenzied race to a climax in Bon Temps? 

By Joe Reid
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HBO followed the season premiere of its vampire soap opera on Sunday with a supertease for the entire final season. It's a lot to take in at once, even for the most dedicated fans. If you're, say, a less dedicated fan, what's to make of this frenzied race to a climax in Bon Temps?

I was with True Blood for its first few seasons, but at some point around last year, the glowy faerie mythology and the show's flailingly inconsistent ability to find things for its supporting characters to do all became too much and I bailed. Still, True Blood occupies a certain corner of the popular culture — it is an HBO drama, after all — and I have roommates who still watch, so there's a certain amount of keeping up through osmosis that I've done. Best I can gather, by the end of last season, a government-synthesized "Hepatitis V" was ravaging the vampire community (it took them this long to get to an AIDS metaphor?), turning vamps into veiny zombies. They're the new bad guys.

So we have this supertease! Best as I can tell, from a frame-by frame analysis of the video clip, here's what's going down in the final True Blood season:

  • We're getting at least one flashback to Civil War Era Bill, allowing Stephen Moyer to bust out his super sketchy antebellum accent.
  • Jessica experiences an existential crisis about the nature of vampire predation.
  • The do-good gang of Sookie, Alcide, Jason, Sam, and Andy Bellefleur have to find a shitload of humans — like, full towns worth — abducted by the V-zombies. In particular, Holly and Arlene and very-pregnant Nicole, but for Andy's purposes it's mostly Holly.
  • Jessica tries to atone for the thing where she ate all but one of Andy's faerie babies by helping Andy rescue Holly.
  • That dark-haired vampire who looks like she stepped out of an Argento movie and is currently shtupping Jason Stackhouse bares her fangs often and in varied situations.
  • Sookie and Alcide's more-or-less functional romance is doomed to fail when faced with the prospect of Sookie returning to Bill in order to give the series some sense of symmetry.
  • Alcide runs in sweatpants.
  • Alcide growls in sweatpants.
  • Alcide kicks in a door in sweatpants.
  • Arlene is stressing, being chained up in a V-zombie basement. 
  • Lafayette expresses a desire to find a man to love and be happy with (which we can all hope has something to do with him sharing scenes with vampire James (Nathan Parsons) in the season premiere; original actor Luke Grimes quit the role between seasons because of disagreements with the direction James' story was going, which almost always means "I don't wanna play gay stuff")
  • Andy's faerie daughter blasts someone with her faerie juice.
  • Pam stomps all over the globe and burns a path in her wake looking for Eric, who last we saw was burning in the arctic sun.
  • Jessica and Sookie clutch each other and cry, and considering Bill is the one person that bonds the two of them most closely, that doesn't bode well for Bill.
  • Sam comforts a still-crying Sookie (more bad news for Bill?).
  • Argento Vampire wears a bra.
  • Alcide runs through a cemetery in sweatpants.
  • Bill wakes up in a bathtub.
  • Everybody screams.

Happy final season!

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.