Spoiler Alert!: Certain surprises within the episode are revealed in this review.
"Bad Blood," the first episode of this season of True Blood, picks up where the last episode left off, with Tara still reeling over the death of Eggs, Sookie looking for a kidnapped Bill, Eric trying to sell V (vampire blood used as a drug) to fund the Queen of Louisiana, and Sam out looking for his family. Although the episode was fascinating and moved all these storylines forward, like most episodes of the show, there wasn't much tying these things together.
It's good also to see some of the book's most interesting characters, including Kendra Jones. Kendra is always in the background of the early books, and in this episode she gets a brief cameo. Also seeing the Bellefleur cousins bonding over their mutual killer status was nice. No other character manages to both be badass and sensitive like Terry Bellefleur. That badass might be rubbing off on Andy, since he went through Jason's window. (Also: can someone make a techno song of Andy and Jason's mantra?) The only thing that's sad is to see Eric at his trashiest and horndoggediness. As a fan of the books, I want to see Eric like he is in the fourth or later books. Tara was also hard to watch. Tara's a great character, but seeing her act like a stereotypical black woman (crazy and violent) was disappointing, since this show is supposed to be all about subverting stereotypes, though the show has always struggled to do so with non-white, non-male characters.
The show, at this point, is espousing an atheist point of view, which would be fine, if this was a simplistic show. It would be nice to see the show to work to show an complicated answer to God. It's also sad that the characters often interested in God are stupid or African American. In the latter case, it's racist, but in the former, it's simple unimaginative. Also, in the case of race, is it necessary to make one of the few African American characters to be made a slave to white people and sell drugs, as they have with Lafayette? Aren't there enough of those stereotypes on tv? The only thing that was good about it was the interesting commentary about blood and drug use. The magistrate mentions that using vampire blood for drug use was "blasphemy," a word associated with this simplistic evangelist model. (The magistrate also mentioned that this situation was "moral anarchy.") Maybe the show will depict drug use as not so bad or terrible in the same way that sexuality is depicted by fundamentalist Christians.
Overall, a decent episode, one that was funny in its now-standard way and allowed all the characters the chance to naturally grow.
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