Maybe I’m just in a bad mood after that terrible True Blood-themed Snoop Dogg music video, but I’m not feeling terribly positive about the show’s third season. The first episode was okay (not great), but the second episode felt utterly pointless. Sure, there was development throughout the hour, but the hour just seemed to drag — especially with the scenes that involved Bill. I know that we were supposed to be interested by the Vampire King of Mississippi, but his motives were so convoluted and unclear that his passive-agressiveness in the too-long dinner scene felt utterly stretched. I didn’t care about any of it.
In fact, I felt compelled by relatively little of the episode. The melodrama surrounding Sam and his brother didn’t fit in with the overall flow of the episode — I’m not sure how that storyline is exactly supposed to fit in. And Tara’s sadness felt like a little too much. Sure, she was in love with Eggs, but most of her time spent in love with him was spent under the influence of Maryann! Surely her feelings for him weren’t so strong that she felt downing a bottle of pills was necessary!
Now for the positives of the episode — and don’t think that there weren’t positives. The Sookie/Eric dynamic was done really well, and I’m looking forward to seeing the inevitable relationship between them develop as it did in the book series (so I’ve heard). Eric’s starting to show off his more sensitive side, and that’s both welcome and strange after seeing his colder side for the past two years.
It was also good to see Godric back, if only through flashback. The idea of Eric and Godric working under the S.S. is certainly an idea rich with material — perhaps enough to fill an episode, or even a season! I certainly hope that the writers don’t leave that storyline — there needs to be more!
Finally, I particularly enjoyed the entirety of the scenes played out around the bar. Both Bellefleurs were absolutely wonderful, though my favorite performance of the episode was that of Todd Lowe (Terry), whose efforts to follow Sookie’s advice to express his feelings led to a rather humorous list-reading to Arlene. The scene had me grinning the entire time — the only time in this episode I really cracked a smile.
I also enjoyed the introduction of James Frain’s character Franklin. I’ve seen Frain in a few shows, like Fringe and The Tudors, but I have a feeling already that this will be his most memorable role (for me) yet. Don’t go too attached to this vampire, though, because even though he’s got the hots for Tara, Frain is already slated to appear on the new NBC series The Cape in the fall — and that just might mean some scheduling problems for the actor.
Overall, “Beautifully Broken” was a fairly humorless exercise that left me feeling quite indifferent for the most part. While some of my fellow writers have been critical of the maenad storyline of yesteryear, I have to say that it’s that kind of structure that drew me into the show. Unless these various storylines unite and become a more streamlined affair than all these unrelated strands, I’ll have to mark myself extremely disappointed with the way True Blood has gone this year. C+
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