True Blood: High Stakes

This week, Sookie wakes up to find a naked man on her bed-only it isn’t Bill.  It’s Sam who confesses to a shocked Sookie that he is actually a shape shifter (hmmmm, do we really need another supernatural creature after the show has finally managed to kill of most of its redundant characters?).  He tells her about his confusing childhood, including his adoption, and about the existence of other creatures like werewolves.  Sookie feels betrayed that Sam never told her about being a shape shifter before, because as we all know, that’s such an easy thing to tell someone.  But I guess it isn’t so hard to tell someone who’s dating a vampire.

No surprise, Tara meets Miss Jeanette in an even more remote location in the woods where they proceed with her exorcism.  There, Tara does everything, including drinking snake juice, vomiting,  stabbing her demon which appears as a young Tara, and  collapsing to the ground in tears.  Miss Jeanette assures her she is rid of her demon.  Unfortunately, after a trip with her mother to celebrate, Tara is not so certain she is rid of her demon when she discovers a wig-wearing Miss Jeanette working in a drugstore. Tara pushes her up against a shelf and screams at her in disgust.  Miss Jeanette tries to convince her that if she believes that the demon is truly gone-like her mother does-then it doesn’t matter if Miss Jeanette is just a drug store clerk trying to make ends meet for her family.  In typical pre-exorcism Tara style, she angrily storms off.

Back at Jason’s, Eddie, the kidnapped vampire, cleverly pits Jason against Amy in a battle of the sexes when he tells Amy that Jason actually considers her “the one” and continues telling Jason that Amy is a psychopath.  Amy discovers the Tru Blood Jason has been sneaking to Eddie and realizes she must do damage control by making it appear she is not the psychopath Eddie made her out to be.  She suggests they keep Eddie as their pet so that he comes to love them and voluntarily offer them his V so they can travel all over the world-because that’s exactly what someone who is NOT a psychopath would do.  They go off to Arlene’s engagement party at Merlotte’s where Jason and friends discuss how to keep the upper hand in a relationship.

As Sam takes orders from Arlene about the arrangement of the lanterns for her party, he drifts off to when he was a boy and shape shifts into a dog for the first time in front of his adopted family.  When he returns home, he finds his family has abandoned him.

While others dance and have a good time at the engagement party, Sookie sits by herself, turning down offers to dance.  Lafayette, stumbling into Eddie’s house, realizes he has been kidnapped and goes to confront Jason at the party for having told someone about their arrangement.  Tara, dressed in a little red dress and drunk, wobbles up to the party just in time to rescue Sam from the probing questions of Detective Bellefleur.  But when she drags Sam into his office for a little something more, he pushes her away.  Tara drives off, sees a strange woman in the middle of the road who later disappears, and crashes into a fence.  Later, Sookie goes inside Merlotte’s to grab a bucket of ice when she is chased by the killer.  She plays cat and mouse, trying to hide, then finally runs to the back door where Sam shows up just in time.

Jason and Amy continue to argue at his place about Eddie.  When Jason rushes downstairs to finally set Eddie free, Amy grabs a blunt stake and gouges it in Eddie’s heart, killing him.  Jason stands back, drenched in vampire blood, horrified, and probably realizing he really is in love with a psychopath.

Bill must do some killing himself at his hearing, which looks like a scene out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or Interview with the Vampire.  The hearing occurs in an abandoned, foggy junkyard in the dead of night, and while Bill’s sentence would have been more severe, he manages to get out of it by telling the Magister that he also killed Longshadow for stealing from Eric-not just for attacking his “pet”, Sookie.  Eric reluctantly admits Bill is right.  Bill must still “turn” an innocent, young woman who was kidnapped and dragged to the hearing.  She begs for her life and pleads with Bill who tries to glamour her, but the Magister does not allow it.  While all the other vampires look on, hissing with their protruded fangs, Bill takes a plunge into the woman’s throat.  With the introduction of shape shifters and only two episodes left, the possibilities for what will happen next are endless.

Season 1, Episode 10: I Don’t Wanna Know (originally aired November 9, 2008)

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