Tuesday 15 June 2021

True Blood, Season 5 (2012)



As Sookie and Lafayette go to extreme lengths to avoid losing Tara, her vampire former lovers scramble to flee from the shadowy but lethally powerful Authority (spoiler: they immediately get captured).  Meanwhile her employer Sam finds his quiet community of shapeshifters become to target of hate crimes, her brother Jason stumbles across an invisible nightclub of fairies while trying to deal with his feelings for young vampire Jessica, and Sookie's possible next love interest Alcide finds himself facing a power struggle within his werewolf pack.

All of these storylines do eventually converge, drawn together by the season's main arc, but they take an awfully long time to do so.  This leads to much of the season feeling very disjointed and scattered, with the plots moving in parallel but without much interaction for many episode.

Perhaps more problematic is that that main arc that does eventually tie together all these threads?  It's dumb as rocks.  I mean, sure, in principle I can see how this whole 'vampire liberals vs vampire fundamentalists' storyline was probably intended as a mirror of the human liberals vs fundamentalists conflict that has run through every season thus far.  Unfortunately, the execution of an idea matters much more than the idea itself, and the execution here is long on tiresome, pompous vampires being tiresome and pompous while acting in wildly inconsistent manner as they do so.

True Blood has always been sudsy, sexy and somewhat silly, but nonetheless entertaining.  Alas, adding a fourth 'S' for 'stupid' does considerable harm to said entertainment.

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