Welcome to Sucker Punch, the only blog post that ranks the gaudiest moments on this week’s episode of True Blood.
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This week, we’ve got a big plate of awesome to enjoy. There are surprising character developments, whiz-bang action, and a tree full of meat.
For all the Sucker Punch-y goodness, join me here at The Huffington Post.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Roommate Joe // Aug 24, 2009 at 11:16 am
Great choice for the Sucker Punch this week, Mark. I’ve been saying all season long that some of my favorite moments are when Jason was at the Fellowship, seeming for all the world like a little boy — in a Greek god’s body — playing at being a soldier. And this week, that paid off huge.
And I loved how Toy Soldier Jason was pitted against Terry, who, under the black-eyes influence, has let HIS soldier persona (long since left in tatters on the battlefields in Iraq) come through. Despite it being in service of something dark, I liked how we saw Terry being a really great soldier, capable of negotiation and leadership — you really see a lot of what’s been lost to his PTSD. Terry’s long been one of my favorite side characters, and Todd Lowe’s performance this week was really fantastic.
2 Michael // Aug 25, 2009 at 12:49 am
Another thing to note: for what has to be the first time this season, Bill got active, possibly making something happen!; the whole Texas story left him with nothing to do but fume and make worried kissy-face and lose wrestling matches with his maker–the actor must have been bored out of his mind. In fact, a lot of characters who have been in hapless reactive mode (Sookie, Lafayette, Sam) are finally mobilizing in their opposition to Maryann. It’s too late for me not to have ben irritated, but it’s a relief, too.
Seeing Jason trying–trying so pathetically hard!–to do what Sookie said and use his brain in that cockamamie appearance as Bacchus: priceless.
Regarding Maryann–um, Mark? The “Maryann is a bringer of ambivalent release” stuff?–this is ALAN BALL. It’s his theme: sexual repression and sexual release and ambivalent regret that never really resolves. An angry gay boy from Marietta (and I have some sympathy for somebody in that position), he always indulges in mocking conventional sexual morality, sometimes with an empty-headed elegiac overlay (American Beauty, which explodes at the first whiff of an unbidden, resistant thought); more often with a moral back-and-forth that leads nowhere: in Six Feet Under, the first season was “Dad died–everybody have sex!” and then the next season was sexual addiction and a life-threatening sexual pickup; now, after a first season that was about vampires as a super-cool sexual minority, now we’ve got Maryann driving everybody is a Southern backwater out of their heads into human sacrifice and–and to your eyes we’re supposed to feel this is some ambivalent gift? Where do you see the ambivalence? This is slavery. The self-confidence induced is impersonal group adrenaline, and the loss of sexual shame (who in Bon Temps is all that sexually ashamed anyway?) lasts until the next morning when you cry and fret and tweeze slivers out of your private parts. Maryann could be a metaphor of crystal meth (a bane of both gay and poor rural communities, which leads to all kinds of acting-out, including appalling violence). Where you see moral complexity I see predictable. if confused, authorial themes. He always does this.
3 Mark Blankenship // Aug 25, 2009 at 10:02 pm
I don’t know, Michael… I think we have to agree to disagree on this one.
Because while I do see that Maryann’s influence is ultimately destructive—and I have no doubt that she will be destroyed by the white light of Sookie’s pure and magic hands—I don’t think she’s entirely evil… for all the reasons I stated in my post.
Another point that a friend of mine made: Maryann’s influence has pulled Terry Bellfleur out of his PTSD and awakened his leadership ability. Sure, he’s leading the evil team, but for the first time in the entire series, he’s also behaving like something other than a basket case. The loss of inhibition is freeing him to take action.
And to be fair… I think if you go back and read my original post more closely, you’ll see that I don’t quite call Maryann’s presence an “ambivalent gift.” I say that it’s a metaphor for liberation gone too far. As in, the dark side of the Dionysian influence, just as the Fellowship of the Sun, with its obsessive need to control what people do, is the Apollonian influence gone mad.
And to continue the Nietzsche-talk… The “Apollonian” church also offers some positive things at the beginning: It gives Jason and the other students a sense of purpose and belonging. But when that spirit of ordered, controlled, restricted living gets out of proportion, the Fellowship becomes destructive, just like Maryann.
But again… with balance comes the potential for happiness. The characters who exhibit a little bit of Maryann and a little bit of Steve Newlin are surviving quite well.
And I know that Nietzsche thing is not a perfect corollary, but I find that a loose application of those terms is very helpful in absorbing this season.
I must admit that I see WHY you read the show the way that you do, but I find my reading just as valid… and my reading resonates more with me. So yeah… agree to disagree.
4 Laura Mc. // Aug 27, 2009 at 11:39 am
@Michael: Just briefly, I have to ask if Ball’s predictability is necessarily a bad thing? It’s just a brand, right? Do we have to hold him up to a mythic standard of artistry in which he challenges us in new and unexpected ways at every turn?
Sure, that would be exciting, but that is not what Television is really about. It seems to me more than ever that the episodic format requires dragging out something familiar (like myth) over 20 some-odd segments and letting the love stories wriggle in and out where they may. I rarely find myself frustrated with the lack of novelty in True Blood, though I am 100% behind what you are saying about passive characters.
And besides, I still stick to my guns about Alan Ball being a modern-day Tennessee Williams. They take their questions about society in very similar directions with the main difference being Ball gets to include raunchy-as-hell sex scenes in his storytelling. TW frequently went in familiar directions, and he was asking important questions using sex, unfulfilled desire, and homoerotica to do it. Ball isn’t so different, and hello! he opts for sexually charged, murderous vampires.. so it’s hard to claim he lacks entertainment value on the whole.
Beyond this entertainment, I’m not sure what else we can ask of him as he continues this dialogue with HBO viewers and TV watchers at large. Maybe he too will write a play and win a Pulitzer? In the meantime, I remain pretty satisfied with his material and his intentions for the small screen.
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