Alan Ball was known for his masterful use of music in Six Feet Under. He's lost none of his touch when it comes to his current HBO series, True Blood -- which happens to be set in the Louisiana swamps, not terribly far from Houston.
It seems so rare that in the world of True Blood we get to feel what the series so often teases that it will give us, namely love. Now, we know as sure as God made trees tall and Yetis reek that everything everyone in the show loves will be taken away, raped, beaten and murdered simply because that's how modern TV works. There's no happy ending on the horizon for the people of Bon Temps.
Still...for this one brief episode it was possible to believe in the awesome power of love, mercy and forgiveness. Sure, we saw two different people get possessed by powerful spirits who are surely going to wreak all kinds of havoc between now and the finale, and the last we see of Tara and her ambiguously Asian girlfriend is a rotting Pam rushing at them with a whole lot of murder on her mind. However, these are the sideshows.
What takes center ring for more of the episode is a series of honest affections, like Hallmark cards set up like dominoes. Bill breaks into Sookie's house to find her writhing in Eric's arms. Eric is arrested and taken away, and Bill uses his authority as King of Louisiana to procure a warrant of death against Eric.
However, Bill is later swayed by the sincerity of the amnesiac Eric in his final moments. Eric doesn't protest his sentence; he even partly embraces it. He urges Bill to seek out Sookie's forgiveness after he is gone and to tell her how much he loved her. Bill is overcome by Eric's desire to see Sookie happy with someone, even if it's with his own executioner, and releases Eric.
The episode closes on Bill, a glass of True Blood in hand, looking up forlornly at the moon before cutting to Eric and Sookie making love under that same celestial sphere while Neko Case's "I Wish I Was the Moon" haunts us throughout the credits.
When this season first started, we knew that we were going to have to explore Ms. Case a little further. It was her tag-team with the one and only Nick Cave on "She's Not There" that opened the season, and we focused exclusively on Cave's contribution because, well, we love him a whole lot. Now we have no choice but to look into the other half of that equation, and we can tell you that there is nothing but breathtaking beauty in what Case does.
