True Blood: Review: Season 5 Ep 8

HBO, 29 July 2012

The fairies take Sookie back to the site of her parents’ deaths and allow her to connect with this pivotal moment in the past. Hoyt vacillates between being bad guy or good guy when offered an opportunity for revenge. Arlene and Holly approach Lafayette with a view to conducting a fake séance in the hope Terry will snap out of his ‘delusion’. After their night on the town, Russell flirts with Steve Newlin. 

This episode is still watchable, but is often so far off-beam in terms of temporal continuity it occasionally jars. Director duties fell to Stephen Moyer, though it isn’t exactly clear whether the faults are his lack of control over the production, or perhaps the writer’s or even the editor’s. Whatever… At several points it’s not clear how much time has passed and day suddenly jumps to night or even the next day without much sense of time passing. In one scene, Eric speaks of “tonight’s” events and not two or three lines later Nora refers to the same events taking place “last night”. And I know Hoyt seems a bit untogether of late, but in this episode he goes off to get help during the day and is next seen still wandering around after nightfall. This just doesn’t sit right.

As for Luna taking Sam’s form, perhaps it was supposed to be funny, but it was more funny peculiar (if not downright “yuck”) than funny “ha ha”. On top of all that, overall pacing across the season still seems fragile. Throwing in a mysterious big bad vampire might just be too much on top of everything else, and too late in the season for a major development.

Verdict: Not the series that I used to know!

Episode 8 ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’: 5/10

Brigid Cherry