True Blood: Travesty

When you have seasons of television available, do the seasons get titles? Individual episodes do, but when you see these on shelves, it's always boring "season six" or "volume two." They should get on that.

The third season of True Blood has wrapped up and, being generally "excited" for each episode, I watched them on a weekly basis. I was only a few in when I first wrote about the third season, but now that the whole debacle is over, I can easily say this was a massive disappointment. There are a number of things wrong with this season, but the most offensive is how characters have entire story arcs that go nowhere and don't cross paths with other stories. Even in season two things came together, but here, you have a situation where, for example, Sam's story is completely irrelevant to the interests of the series. Not once does his new found family of shifters and dog-fighting matches cross paths with Sookie, Jason, or any bit characters. The whole arc is there just to fill time.

So that sort of thing goes on, then there is the terribleness of the characters themselves: Jason goes from absolute idiot to courageous protector randomly and unevenly. There are too many meta-humans? The werewolves are presented as weak, stupid and trailer trash. It's unfortunate such a magnificent beast is treated like garbage, although we should keep in mind the show's headliner are still vampires. And now they are introducing witches and wizards? Fairies? Spoiler: they should have left "what is Sookie" alone.

About the only good thing, looking back, is Eric. Just give this guy his own show. Skaarsgard is fantastic and I'm keen to see more of what he's done [watch Generation Kill] and will be doing. You know he's the star: at the very end of the last episode, he is buried alive, but instead of making us wait a year hanging onto the cliff, we wait about two minutes before he shows up again.

Many of these shows make it hard to wait for the next season, but I am definitely not awaiting the next now.

True Blood

I'm now five episodes into the third season of True Blood, and I get that slight inkling that I'm going to watch this show for as long as it's on simply because it is what it is. This is to say, the first season was tremendous. The second season was great, but the characters were uneven. The third season is having a difficult time grasping me the way the previous two did. I can't quite put my finger on it; perhaps there are too many vampires in pop culture now; perhaps it's the general lack of Sookie nudity. We'll never know.

So they've introduced werewolves into the series now, which sounds great but I find lacking. Perhaps they will take on a bigger role and become more involved. But then again, I know they can't take the center stage because this show is all about vampires, after all. It's great that they have other mythical creatures roaming about and I always hope they expand on them. Werewolves seem to have the ability to change at any time, which seems odd, right?

But what's really going on are the flashbacks with Northman. The show has featured flashbacks, obviously to go into details of how a vampire was turned, but we keep going back to a wide variety of time periods with Northman and they are great. By far, this character will be the most fleshed out, involved and quite simply interesting one in the series. Which is a problem, because Sookie, and some of her friends, are just getting terrible. Essentially, the unevenness introduced in the second season continues with this one, but we can always hold out hope that it gets tied together in the end. A part of me knows the best way to watch these shows is one after another within a short period, not once per week.

All that being said, the quality of the show is still quite high and I don't want to give you the wrong impression: I look forward to it every week