Push the Trigger and Pull the Thread
In which everyone becomes a victim. In some ways a state of mind, in some ways a state of being.
If there’s one thing this show does best, it’s to feed you something and then turn it on its end in the most spectacular way. And, as it seems, inversion/duality is the name of the game this season.
The flip side, of course, of fighting over nothing is waging war on two fronts at once: ownership is, in some ways, a state of being but also, in some ways, a state of mind. Sookie’s predicament takes the concept of Bella and redresses it in a way that is simultaneously more real and more powerful: if you’re not somebody’s, you won’t be anybody. Ownership is not just about identity or relationships, it’s about your very existence. It’s what every vampire in Bon Temps gets and Sookie does not.
The flip side is Bill, who’s in deeper than we could have ever imagined: as if being at war with himself wasn’t enough, Bill is playing the Authority against the AVL (against whatever feelings he still has left for Sookie). War is a series of ever-shifting alliances that causes you to forget where you end and where the ideology begins.
The flip side is Jason, struggling to escape Hotshot, literally and figuratively. It’s about extracting ourselves from the consequences of bad decisions (made worse by good intentions!) and the bondage that results.
The flip side is Jess and Hoyt, fighting to maintain the veneer of domestic life as it cracks and fades. The opposite of Sookie and Eric, their fight is the fight that everyone has when you’re not speaking the same language, fighting two entirely different wars. Or worse, it’s being Sophie Anne and fighting in a war whose factions you can’t even comprehend.
All of this seems to be introducing the idea that ultimately, in some way, we are at war with ourselves as we fight the war abroad and the war at home.
