‘True Blood’ Recap: Finale Says Farewell to Bad Things

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Anna Camp and Alexander Skarsgard.Credit John P. Johnson/HBO

Season 7, Episode 10 , “Thank You”

A wedding, a death, a banquet — “True Blood” ended its seven-season run on HBO on Sunday night in traditional style. Of course, the death in these cases usually doesn’t involve the heroine kneeling in a puddle of steaming blood that used to be her true love.

No, there was no last-minute reprieve for Sookie and Bill — in the episode’s genuinely moving centerpiece scene, the show’s No. 1 couple said their goodbyes at opposite ends of a stake. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.

Toward the end of this final run, there was an awkward dissonance between the Bon Temps narrative, in which many of the long-term characters found some degree of happiness, and the New Blood subplot involving Eric, Pam and Sarah Newlin. The Bon Temps scenes were sober, autumnal, slightly sentimental; the Sarah Newlin scenes were broad and a little unfeeling, like the show’s latter seasons in general.

In the finale, the Sarah plot was kept to a minimum and almost entirely segregated from the rest of the story. Eric (Alexander Skarsgard), suddenly deciding he was tired of Gus Jr. (Will Yun Lee) and the yakuza — it was arbitrary and plot-convenient, but everything about this part of the show has felt that way — freed Sarah (Anna Camp), tagging her with Pam’s blood and sending her down the tunnel that leads out of the Fangtasia basement. When greedy Gus chased her, Eric set the tunnel on fire, incinerating Gus and wrapping up a threatening story line awfully easily.

Last week Gus had dispatched a carload of his yakuza henchmen to kill Sookie, since she knew about Sarah’s special blood. They reached her house, but Eric used his vampire speed to head them off, dropping out of a tree and preemptively offering his condolences in Japanese. In keeping with the general restraint of the episode (no nudity!), he killed them off-screen — the scene cut to Sookie’s bedroom, where she heard some yelling and got to her window in time to see a car leaving, but couldn’t see the dead gangsters piled in the back seat. Eric, his groove entirely back, drove away doing a little seat dance to the radio. Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten), meanwhile, tracked Sarah to an amusement park carousel. Scheming to the end, Sarah tried a final gambit: offering to be Pam’s vampire lover if Pam would turn her. Pam didn’t go for it, and instead fed on Sarah, thereby inoculating herself against hepatitis-V. Over a long shot of the carousel, we heard Sarah screaming in the night.

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Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer in the first season of "True Blood."Credit HBO

And then back to Bon Temps and the two houses, Bill’s and Sookie’s, on the opposite sides of the cemetery, from where they’ve played out their story of the rebellious nice girl who likes bad boys. Bill (Stephen Moyer) tried once again to explain to Sookie (Anna Paquin) why he refused to take the Sarah cure and instead was choosing to die of Hep-V, and this time it got through — when he told her that a life with him would deny her “the best parts of life,” which is to say children, she tearfully agreed. But he can’t just break up with her and take the cure, because he loves her too much. Did that make any sense at all? Well, there was also the part about how he should be in the cemetery with the rest of his family, which fit into the whole metaphor of how dying was making him more human.

It wasn’t enough for Bill to die, though. He had a special favor to ask: he wanted Sookie to offer him the “ultimate kindness” of killing him with one of her fairy lightballs. As Bill sees it, it’s a win-win: if Sookie uses her lightball to kill a vampire, it will consume so much energy that she’ll lose her fairy powers (as was explained in a previous season) and therefore she’ll no longer be catnip to vampires, allowing her to have a normal, no-bad-boy life.

While Sookie went home to ponder this, events at Bill’s house took a happier turn. The newly reunited Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) and Hoyt (Jim Parrack) paid a visit so that Jess could tell Bill, her vampire maker/surrogate father, that it was O.K. with her if he chose to die. (When they hugged, she remarked that he was warm. Human!) Bill, feeling fatherly and knowing he had little time left, presumptuously asked Hoyt if he planned to propose to Jess. That started a chain of embarrassment and emotion that led to a sudden decision by Jess to get married that day.

Sookie, meanwhile, was home with her thoughts, which turned to her Gran, which meant a cameo appearance by Lois Smith, not seen since Season 4. Having been lectured by Gran (in a flashback) about not putting limits on herself despite her strange fairy abilities, Sookie took the somewhat unusual step of seeking counsel from her brother, Jason (Ryan Kwanten). He was his typical idea-free self but told her he would love her whether she killed Bill or not. Along the way Sookie met Brigette (Ashley Hinshaw), who had spent a sex-free night with Jason and was now cleaning the kitchen. Sookie liked her.

Then it was time for the episode’s first pay-off, the wedding of Hoyt and Jessica. Calls were made, Jason was enlisted as best man, Sookie was assigned to rustle up a dress for Jess, Sheriff Andy was called on to officiate. Before the ceremony, Bill informed Andy that as his closest living relative, he would inherit the Compton house. Andy, already a prosperous Bellefleur, didn’t want it, but Bill had a request: take the house and rent it to Jess and Hoyt for $1 a month. “Copy that, Vampire Bill,” the redoubtable Andy said.

The wedding was funny and sweet, with Jessica hidden from our view until the last possible moment and Andy demonstrating unexpected grace and spontaneity in conducting the ceremony. Sookie discovered she could hear Bill’s thoughts, something she isn’t supposed to be able to do with a vampire. (Human!) Andy put in an obligatory plug for non-traditional marriages and said, “You may kiss your vampire bride.”

(Two nagging long-term questions about the show were raised one last time by the wedding. First, why do vampires cry red blood in the scary scenes and colorless blood in the happy scenes? Second, when and where does Sookie buy all those cute girly dresses?)

Still uncertain what to do post-wedding, Sookie sought out the Rev. Daniels at the church. He told her that God wouldn’t mind if she un-fairy-ed herself (who knew she was worried about that?). The scene was also an opportunity for Sookie — who knew about the Sarah Newlin cure — to tell him that “help is on its way.”

And finally it was time for the big event. Sookie summoned Bill that night to the cemetery, where she had (impressively) dug up the grave where he was supposedly buried all these years. It held an empty coffin, which Bill surmised was an attempt to make things easier for families whose Confederate sons went missing. Bill climbed into the coffin, where he found a photo of him and his daughter — on which he shed red tears — and Sookie summoned up a lightball. She held it in her hands, staring at it, but couldn’t use it. In a twist that was a little out of left field but just plausible enough, she had decided that she couldn’t give up her fairy nature: “This is who I am. It’s part of my truth.”

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Stephen MoyerCredit John P. Johnson/HBO

Bill understood. But he still wanted to die. So the always practical Sookie, tough to the end, broke off the handle of her shovel and climbed down into the grave. She put her impromptu stake over his heart but hesitated. Bill reached up and put his hands over hers, and the stake was driven home, though it was unclear who was doing the driving. It was the truest “True Blood” moment: Sookie crying, covered in Bill’s blood, then gamely climbing back out of the hole and — because she’d broken her shovel — beginning to push the dirt back into the grave by hand.

That was the climax of the series proper, with Sookie walking out of the cemetery, pausing before turning toward her own house. Then came the grace notes. A year in the future, Eric and Pam filmed an infomercial for New Blood, apparently having followed Gus Jr.’s sleazy plan to market a partial cure. (“Combats Hep-V” said the label, which also featured an image of Sarah Newlin.) As the camera pulled back on the scene, revealing the crew shooting the infomercial, a woman sitting at a sound board was prominent in the foreground — Charlaine Harris, author of the novels on which “True Blood” was based.

Another glimpse into the future showed that Pam and Eric were playing both ends of the game, keeping Sarah chained in the basement of Fangtasia, where wealthy vampires could feed on her for $100,000 a minute. Left alone, the now fully crazy Sarah saw a vision of her dead ex-husband Steve (Michael McMillian) taunting her. It was Thanksgiving Day, and what was she thankful for? “Nothing,” she cried, in an oddly sadistic goodbye that felt like it was determined more by a political agenda than by the show’s dramatic needs.

It was also Thanksgiving Day in Bon Temps, where we saw that Jason and Brigette were now the parents of three children and that Sookie was, indeed, pregnant, presumably by the unseen man who was deep-frying a turkey. (Unless he was a vampire — she’s still half fairy, and her refrigerator was full of New Blood.) In an impressive final crane shot, the camera panned across Sookie’s yard as she and Jason walked around seeing to their guests, and then it went up and down a long table where we saw all the Bon Temps survivors: Hoyt and Jessica, Willa, Arlene and her vampire boyfriend Keith, the Reverend and Lettie Mae, Rocky Cleary, Jane Bodehouse and a vampire date, Andy and Holly, Lafayette and James, Sam and Nicole, Jason and Brigette and Adilyn and Wade. Ten full humans, five vampires, a Wiccan, a clairvoyant, a shape shifter and a couple of half-fairies. And at the head of the table: Sookie and her new — whatever, his face still turned away from us so as not to interfere with the memory of Bill. The camera pulled back on this sweet scene as the show’s last soundtrack song, Led Zeppelin’s “Thank You” (the episode’s title), played: “Happiness, no more be said, happiness — I’m glad.”

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