Wednesday, July 2, 2014

True Blood episode recap "Authority Always Wins" S5E2

The newly-arisen Tara attacks Sookie and Lafayette as Pam looks on, amused.  Before she leaves to get to Fangtasia, Pam orders the new vamp not to kill the two humans.  She tosses Tara into the house, wishes Sookie and Lafayette good luck and takes off.  Sookie and Lafayette stare at each other, unsure of their next step, as a crazed Tara starts smashing up the windows.  I can tell right now that Vampire Tara is going to get old very quickly.

Bill, Eric and Nora are brought to the Authority stronghold in New Orleans; housed in what looks like an abandoned warehouse, there are multiple levels below ground, many seeming quite bureaucratic.  A swanky vampire named Salome meets them and brings them downstairs, tossing them in adjoining cells.  Before long, UV light starts shining down on them, sending them to their knees, screaming and sizzling.  There is nowhere to hide in the cells.  The UV exposure is brief but enough to blister and burn the captive vampires.

Back in Bon Temps, the pack is disgusted when Alcide refuses to feed upon Marcus's body and take over as pack leader.  Being the bigger dog, Alcide refuses to rise to the bait when they call him a coward.  The bad CGI cold air breath smoke is distracting.  Also distracting: when my DVD player freaks out and skips around - but I don't think we'll miss anything important, not with this show.  When Pam gets to work, she is dismayed that Eric has not called in, and then we get a flashback to Olden Days when Pam was a human.  She was a madam (some time in the 1800s, I guess) and we get to see the first time she meets Eric: when he saves her from a would-be murderer out on the street.  Whatever.  I like bitchy, powerful, vampire Pam better.

Luna has taken Sam home to tend to his wounds.  When she goes to check on Emma, there's a knock on the door.  It's Martha, wanting to see her granddaughter.  Luna screams at her and tosses her out, ignoring Martha's protests that the little girl may be a werewolf and not a shifter.  When Sam tries to calm Luna down, she screams at him too, tells him to fuck off and throws him out.  Sam's head is spinning but he goes.

Blah blah blah.  The sun is about to come up and Sookie and Lafayette manage to trap Tara, wrapping her in silver chains and putting her in Eric's basement vampire bunker for safety.  Oh christ.  Andy Bellefleur and Jason Stackhouse talking about the fact that Andy had sex.  They also find dead Debbie the werewolf's car, abandoned in the middle of nowhere.  Andy finds a vial of V [vampire blood, in case you don't remember] and he is tempted [because he used to be a V addict, in case you don't remember] but gives the V to Jason, who dumps it out.

At Merlotte's, Terry has a flashback to Iraq and nearly knocks Arlene's head off when she approaches him.  Then he runs out, leaving her shaken.  At Sookie's, she is installing colloidal silver misters over the doorways when she hears Lafayette thinking about staking Tara.  She runs to the vampire bunker and talks him down, even though they both know that Tara hated vampires more than anything - they both want her in their lives more than they want her to be at peace.

Back at the Authority HQ, Bill and Eric are interrogated separately.  Each of them is hooked up to an IV with [science] liquid silver.  When they don't give the answers their interrogators want, the IV lines are opened.  It hurts a lot but neither of them squeals.  We do get to hear about a Vampire Bible, blah blah blah, Lilith, blah blah blah, vampires are supposed to eat humans - contradictory to the official co-existence/main-streaming party line of the Authority.  The Authority is trying to root out the fundamentalists who believe in the literal interpretation of the Vampire Bible - the "sanguinistas."  Heh.

Reverend Steve invites himself over to Jessica's latest keg party.  He is a massive dork.  But what he wants is a private conversation with Jessica: he offers to buy Jason from her for $10,000 cash.  She leads him on for a while, getting him to up the offer to $20,000, before snarling that Jason is her friend and she doesn't sell her friends and throwing him the fuck out of her house.  Then she kicks all the college kids out too: "Humans, you're boring me.  Get out of here before I eat you."

Arlene goes to see Patrick to find out WTF is going on with Terry.  Patrick won't tell her anything, though, and then Terry shows up.  She leaves, telling the two men to fix whatever is wrong here.  Terry tells Patrick that the guy he's looking for (the purported firestarter) is still alive, just off the grid.  Patrick is all, then let's go see him.  Across town, Luna hears Emma banging around in her bedroom, long after bedtime.  When she opens the door to scold her daughter, there's the cutest wolf puppy sitting there, draped in Emma's pajamas.  "Holy fuck," breathes Luna.  At nightfall, Tara wakes up and comes out of the vampire bunker.  She tells Lafayette and Sookie that she will never forgive either of them for what they've done to her, then she bolts out of the house, getting painfully sprayed by the silver mister in the process.

Over at the Authority HQ, we meet Chris Meloni, some high-up vampire muckety-muck.  While a demonic choir sings on the soundtrack, he administers some of his blood to a council in a very church-ish ceremony, before getting down to business with Bill, Eric and Nora.  Also, it appears that Oenemaus from Spartacus is on the council.  This is supposed to be serious and imposing and all but holy shit is it BORING.  In fact, I fell asleep the first time I watched this.  Chris Meloni lists all Bill and Eric's fuckups, including rocket launchers in town and that disastrous Festival of Tolerance, plus the whole killing Nan Flanagan thing.  He asks them if they belong to the sanguinistas: Bill's like, I don't know what that is; Eric says he tries to stay away from politics.  Chris Meloni [WTF is his character's name? this is annoying] drives home the point that mainstreaming is vital and he will not stand for any fundamentalism in his vampires.  He is about to pronounce the sentence on them when Bill pipes up: he offers an exchange of their lives for that of Russell Edgington, who is in fact alive and is now broken free.  Chris Meloni is skeptical but intrigued, since Russell could bring down the whole mainstreaming agenda.  Of course, he also almost stakes Bill in a moment of extreme crankiness.  In the end, the Guardian (Chris Meloni) lets them live and we close with a particularly nasty close-up of a burned but healing Russell, sated on the blood of many recent victims.

Previously on True Blood / next time on True Blood

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