TRUE BLOOD - Season 7

[Wynbish]

Pam's heading back to Once Upon A Time

[FindingNamo]

Is there a good 25-word summary that will catch me up on that show? Is it like "Once" another show I have never seen? (Take note, Headcase)

[Wynbish]

It is like Once in that people are in both. Not the same people, but they definitely are people.

[FindingNamo]

Cool. How likely is THAT?

[BobbyBubbi]

I loved that even though Alcide croaked Sookie is still driving his construction truck around. Klazzy.


I'll miss this most:



. . .and this too, maybe.

[darquegk]

As a straight guy, I can empathize with that- in a weird way, I'll miss craning my neck in all of Deborah Ann Woll's sex scenes to see if she finally nip-slipped, more than I'll miss all the other gratuitous naked women.

But the character I'll miss the most? Jason Stackhouse. Ryan Kwanten may not be the greatest actor in the world, but he somehow managed to make an underwritten, corny Lil' Abner stereotype into a genuinely lovable character. (If someone wanted to reboot "Lil' Abner" today, I don't think you could give them a better pitch than "True Blood without the vampires, plus a pinch of My Name is Earl.")

[Jordan Catalano]

Abner should act like Jason but look like Alcide.

[ErikJ972]

I think it's taken a few days for it to sink in how much this finale sucked.
I've been a fan of the show since day one. And in spite of some pretty bad story telling it's always managed to be entertaining. Except in this final season.
For a show that is a pretty clear metaphor for being gay it drives me crazy how it gave its one gay character absolutely no screen time in the final episode.
That conversation Sookie had with the Reverend in Church. Why couldn't she have had that conversation with Lafayette? It would have been way more moving.
I guess I was over this season after the first few minutes of the first episode when they killed Tara off screen. I mean we don't even get to see her die while she's saving her mother? THE WORST.
I guess in reality this show has been going down hill since Russell Edgington's "We'll eat your children" moment.

[darquegk]

I don't think she could have had that conversation with Lafayette. The Reverend is the bastion of "normal-human-ness" and traditional human spirituality. Lafayette dabbles in magic and traffics vampire blood. He is too "in the supernatural world" to be someone Sookie would go to for advice outside of it. And the relevance of humanity and basic human spirituality (divorced from any particular reason) became a major plot point in the final season, which is why the Reverend became a major character for the first time.

And the gay metaphor really got complicated the longer it went on. It became much more about being "the other" than about being gay as it went on. It's not as cut and dried as Anne Rice, where vampirism tends to induce homosexuality, at least in the earlier books.

[ErikJ972]

I disagree. Especially with the Silence = Death references this season.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

This season was so much about gay people and the HIV crisis, handled with a lack of subtlety that would even make Ryan Murphy blush. I think the more time goes by, the angrier I get about the finale, it was awful!

[ErikJ972]

Yeah the gay references these season were about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head. Yet the one gay character didn't even get a line in the finale!

[darquegk]

I think dramaturgically, if the show was intended to be an overarching metaphor for the gay experience, and not just inspired by LGBT and other subaltern/marginalized groups, it made things muddier when it mixed actual sexuality plotlines in, thus muddying the metaphor. Look at the way X-Men has long been famed for its use of mutants as "othered individuals" to look simultaneously at civil rights (racial or queer) and the fallout of the Holocaust on Israeli identity. They are able to work metaphorically because they rarely if ever muddy the metaphor with the actual issue being discussed at hand. Magneto will never be involved directly as ally or enemy of Israel- that's what Genosha is for.

But True Blood wanted to have its cake and eat it too, dealing with coming out of the closet AND out of the coffin at once. This mixed the metaphor a bit, and this is after already making a HUGE misstep (if we're judging it entirely as queer allegory) by making our central supernatural figures a trio of heteronormative vampires (Bill, Jessica and Erik) and making almost every single vampire other than them queer.

[lovepuppy]

Wyn,

>>Speaking of Charlaine, was that her watching the monitors during the infomercial?

Yes, that was her. Great to see her! I believe it was her 2nd cameo on the show. She was in a scene in Merlotte's in S.1. Also in S.1, the night that Gran waited up for Sookie after she met Bill for the first time, Gran is reading the first book in the series, "Dead Until Dark." Trivia!

I loved that the "big dude sitting with Jane Bodehouse" at the Thanksgiving table was the big dude sitting at the bar the first episode, who Tara made fun of before she officially got hired by Sam at Merlotte's. Nice touch. I didn't like the finale or the final scene at first, but came around once you realize all Sookie ever said she wanted was "a normal life."


Hi, Javero. Nice to see you and others who came around to actually *discuss the show,* again.

[FindingNamo]

Show's over, go home.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

hashtag dumbbitchtotheend

[FindingNamo]

ha ha!

[EricMontreal22]

Alan Ball has repeatedly said that he saw the show as a lark--relief after what he felt was a hard struggle with writing Six Feet Under. He left the show, HBO hired Burckner as writer--the rest writes itself.

[EricMontreal22]

And I am shocked Darque that you are straight.

[darquegk]

Surprised? I know- so am I, I always joke.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

I thought the show really missed an opportunity when they started flashing forward at the end. You'd think they would have gone further into the future to show some of the still living vampires, but I guess that would have prevented us from getting that "We're all a family around a dinner table" ending that we got.

[javero]

Thanks for the shout-out, lovepuppy. The ending could have been better but I wasn't left disappointed. I've moved on to STRAIN on the FX network.