True Blood's made a pretty strong stance against organized religion (vampire and human) and against guns and similar firearms, but one area seemed to be safe from the HBO series' judgement once Arlene and Terry happily tied the knot: holy matrimony. However, on Sunday's darkly titled "Dead Meat," it certainly appears as if True Blood has a pretty bleak stance on marriage, too.
While a lack of monogamy certainly helps fuel the show's ever-changing lineup of romantic entanglements (including Sam falling in love with a 23-year-old mere weeks after his true love Luna died), the narrative never seemed so hard-lined against it until midway through Season 6.
True, in the superficial circumstances of Sookie's plot, marriage to Warlow is an actual death of sorts. In order for him to marry her without accidentally killing her when night falls, she must become a fae-vampire as well. She literally has to die and then live as an undead creature in order to marry him. To boot, she's not marrying Warlow because she's hopelessly in love and can't live without him (our girl was just getting her faerie-glow freak on in that cemetery). Sookie is marrying the fae-vamp because Bill needs his blood to save every vampire we like from meeting the sun in LAVTF jail, and the only way Warlow will agree to it is if Sookie marries him. Essentially, it's her freedom for her friends' lives. And the result is a pretty unforgiving pall over the idea of matrimony.
Before donning her funeral-ready black dress and austere, low-bun hairdo, Sookie first visits boyfriends of the past. She brings Warlow's ultimatum to Bill, hoping that despite being possessed by Lilith, he still holds a tiny candle for her. When he coolly tells her he's indifferent, she seeks similar validation from Sam. Unfortunately for Sookie, when she arrives to tell Sam she always thought they'd end up together, he has moved on with Nicole, the 23-year-old who's unknowingly carrying his shifter baby and who Sam has fallen "in love" with after just two nights of silver fox sex.
Finally, Sookie visits her parents' graves, fully bereft of the love she thought Bill and Sam would hold for her forever, and comes to terms with the fact that her parents' supposedly unconditional love was just destroyed with the knowledge that they wanted to kill her. She's left with the knowledge that the painfully old fashioned British fae-vamp, who once terrified her in her bathroom by appearing as a floating plasma threatening to find her and own her, might be the only person whose world actively revolves around her. Love's a bitch, says True Blood.
So off Sookie marches, into the graveyard, not to have hot, dirty sex with a dangerous vampire suitor, but to end her life. She's ready to die: become a wife and a vampire, and end her sexy adventures forever. There's no trace of joy, conflicted or otherwise, on her pretty, little face. This is the end of Sookie Stackhouse as she knows herself, until her other great past love, Eric, gets in the way by draining Warlow and (we'll have to wait until next week to know for sure) possibly killing the vamp who wants to drag her away in marriage chains.
Combine all that with the vampire inmate who makes Jason her prison bitch and then compares it to Catholic marriage and it's pretty clear that according to True Blood, marriage sucks.
Image: HBO
