True Blood: Mine

By Teresa Jusino

Alan Ball, Stephen Moyer, and Anna Paquin on the set of True Blood

After only three aired episodes, HBO has already renewed True Blood for a second season and will be airing new episodes over the summer!  It’s great to know that HBO recognizes quality storytelling when they see it.

If you didn’t catch that third episode of True Blood, entitled “Mine”, here’s what you missed:

* Sookie being toyed with by Diane, Malcolm, and Liam (the bald, tattooed vamp of Maudette Sex Tape fame) and Bill preventing them from feeding on her by letting them know that “Sookie is mine.”  After her experience, and watching them kill another human they had “glamoured” for entertainment, Sookie hastily hands Bill the contractor information she promised him and leaves, severely shaken up.

* Tara and Sam getting extremely cozy after work as they have beer, discuss Sookie, and agree to a one-night, Friends-With-Benefits encounter.

* Jason, having escaped Dawn’s ties, wearing a mask and pretending to be the vampire that bit her coming back for seconds.  After convincing her that he had drained “Jason” and was planning on doing the same to her, he reveals himself, and they begin to engage in violent, crazy sex.  Again.  However, they don’t finish.  Jason loses his “mood” once he thinks about Dawn having sex with a vampire.

* Sookie breaking up with Bill.  She isn’t too sure about the whole “dating a vampire” thing anymore.  However, Bill confronts her with her one insecurity by reminding her that she’ll never be able to completely be herself with any human man.

* Bill confronting Diane, Malcolm and Liam at their nest, warning them to stay away from him and Sookie, or he would take it to a higher vampire authority.

* Tara’s mother, Lettie Mae, beating Tara with a liquor bottle after she comes back from spending the night with Sam.  Tara has had enough of her mother’s abuse and drinking and leaves saying that if it came down to her or her mother, she would always choose herself.

* Tara going to Lafayette’s place and discovering that he is an “entrepreneur” dabbling in everything from servicing male senators, to gay porn, to selling drugs.

* Sookie going to Dawn’s that morning thinking she’d overslept and missed her shift, only to find her dead.

This show keeps getting better and better, doing a wonderful job of blending thrills (so far, every episode has ended with a violent cliffhanger), drama (Tara’s home life, Sookie’s relationship with her Grandmother), sex (see every scene Jason is ever in), and humor.  The opening scene in which Sookie lets the vampires know that she’s not susceptible to being “glamoured” is priceless, as is her misleading dream sequence in which she approaches Bill for sex telling him that she’s a virgin and wanting to “get it over with” so that she can have a good night’s sleep.

The cast continues to win me over.  Rutina Wesley’s Tara continues to be a highlight, and I’m glad that she gets so much solid screen time.  Lois Smith also got to shine as Gram in this episode.  She’s a wonderfully subtle actress who manages to infuse the word “heart” with humor and filth in a respectful, Southern way.

True Blood is also a great blend of “mainstream” and “genre” television.  It’s airing on the same network that brought us The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under, yet it has the vibe of a love child conceived by Angel and The Vampire Lestat.  You wouldn’t think that unholy union could lead to anything good, but in this case it does.  Vampire mythology is being revealed and then expounded upon in interesting ways.  We learn in this episode that vampires choose to either live in nests, or on their own, and the ones who nest lose much more of their humanity.  We learn about the gulf between the vampires who want to mainstream and the ones who don’t; the ones who have no problem hanging a human upside down in their bathroom, catching her blood in a bucket.  We also learn that there is one human pathogen which can infect vampires – Hep D, a rare strain of hepatitis that knocks a vampire out for a month.

There’s been another Jason-related murder in Bon Temps.  Women he sleeps with don’t seem to last very long.  At least they go out with a bang!

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. She has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which beat up her Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man crush in a fight proving once again that writing skill trumps gadget skill even when that gadget skill is attached to bulging biceps.  Teresa is also an aspiring fangbanger.

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