True Blood, Season 6: Episode 6 – “Don’t You Feel Me?”
Directed by Howard Deutch
Written by Daniel Kenneth
Airs Sunday nights at 9 on HBO
Continuing from last week’s episode of True Blood, “Don’t You Feel Me?” keeps the entertainment level comparatively high. We left last week on two cliffhangers, both of which had characters’ lives at risk and neither of which followed through in killing any of those characters. But fans got two deaths in this episode to mull over – one relatively triumphant and one surprisingly devastating.
The “surprisingly” doesn’t come from the fact that the way Terry’s death played out was unexpected (and it really was, which is a huge compliment for a show that is usually entirely predictable) but from the fact that Terry – like Hoyt last season – hasn’t had interesting material to work with in years and that it was still emotionally affecting. The repetition of the shock-waves his war experience has had on him has been something that’s defined Terry for so long, and people familiar with how True Blood operates were probably expecting that whole situation to be dragged out for the rest of the season. But instead we got a horrifying sequence in which Terry gets glamoured and is actually momentarily happy without the demons of his past only to be shot off-screen and cradled by Arlene, who sings to him as he takes his last breaths. It might have been because the Hoyt/Jessica relationship was a more central part of the show once upon a time that that departure had a bigger impact, but Todd Lowe got the “best” send-off he could have hoped for and it would be surprising if that isn’t the thing that fans remember most about season six.
The other death in “Don’t You Feel Me?” was a more viscerally satisfying one as Billith just rips the fucking head off Truman, the consequences of which are probably more wide-reaching than the rest of the episode suggests. In fact, the rest of the episode is rather interesting in a way that True Blood hasn’t been for the last couple seasons. Vampire politics were always something that interested me more than a one-season villain, so to have Eric come across the more sinister elements of what’s been going on at the concentration camp – the production of a new True Blood that is contaminated with Hepatitis V – helps make the second half of this season more interesting in a way that a single big baddie wouldn’t, since the conclusion to the latter is a predictable endpoint.
New showrunner Brian Buckner talked at Comic-Con this past weekend about the future of show saying that he wants to bring it back to its roots, which can only be a good thing at this point. Even though the narrative flaws in the show are still hovering around, this season seems to be taking more risks by thinning out its supporting cast and tackling new and bigger issues. A seventh season that’s as condensed as True Blood‘s first season is probably out of the question, but if Buckner is referring to putting a higher focus on character beats, then True Blood has a much brighter future than the first episodes of this season would have suggested.