This week's
True Blood was definitely a vast improvement from last week's. If you saw "9 Crimes," but haven't yet had the chance to see this week's, simply named "Trouble," I pity you. Seriously.
In "Trouble," the burner turns up, the heat rises, and the cherry tomatoes start to sweat; things are starting to get urgent, and conflict is bringing out an intriguing array of new emotions in characters. With Pam at the mercy of the Magister and time running out, Eric's game face is starting to budge. After a brief face-off with an uncharacteristically sharp Bill (sharp, perhaps, because he's been so well-fed lately), Eric appears to be running out of steam. And then he shows up with this baby-blue... sweater. It looks good on him, but what the hell? Does Eric actually have the potential to be... sensitive?
Then again, when he rebuffs flirtatious jabs from Talbot as coolly as he does, his smooth ice king personality returns, and our suspicion that Eric might actually have feelings is averted... for the time being.
The other character who starts to unravel this episode is Franklin Mott. Now you knew he was a psycho from the beginning, right? Hello?! He's into Tara. She's a nut-magnet, and not in the good way. When Franklin first swept onto the True Blood stage, he was reserved, calm, and of a steel will. Then his snoopy private eye side was revealed in episode three, "It Hurts Me Too," in which he started glamouring and threatening and saying things like "TellmeeverythingyouknowaboutBillCompton." And THEN he decided to tie Tara up to a toilet seat, at which point his horribly unhealthy attraction to her is made obvious.
James Frain, who plays Franklin, could play this role differently; he could make Franklin creepier, and make him the sneaky slips-in-through-your-window kind of creepy, but he doesn't, and that is where the uniqueness of this character comes into play. We have enough in the way of calculating, fork-tongued creeps from the other vamp characters, and so the obsessive histrionic who waves his hands in the air and stamps his feet when things don't go his way really appeals in terms of its uniqueness. I love what Frain has done with this character, and since, on TV, abusive and emotionally unstable characters tend to have short shelf lives (for a number of obvious reasons), I'm going to savour every scene with him in it.
As characters unravel emotionally, the sexual tension winds up. Jason follows his latest interest, the mysterious Crystal Norris, into a romantic moonlit scene. What set this moonlit scene apart from others though? Well, the fact that, for what might be the first time, Jason takes an interest in something or someone that doesn't lead him to any of the following:
1) recreational drug use
2) religious fanaticism
3) priapism, or any other form of sexual dysfunction
4) witnessing, or becoming the suspect of, a murder that may or may not have been based on a slight degree of racial profiling
5) generally, inadvertent degradation of self or others
Also, Tommy Mickens takes an interest in Jessica, and refers to Hoyt as a mutant overgrown sixth-grader. Lorena takes the sidelines again. Sookie and Alcide? Nooo. Sookie and Alcide? ...Hmmm.... Noooo. Lafayette meets Jesus. No, not the one you're thinking of. Not a Jesus-Lafayette relationship his mom would approve of.
And finally, worthy of mention this episode, Sookie gives someone--I won't tell you who--a well-deserved electric slap in the face. No, it isn't Bill. But I wish it was. Still, it was such a brilliant slap in the face it had Russell proclaiming, "FANTASTIC!"
