True Blood season 3 episode 12: season finale review

3.12 Evil Is Going On

After an excruciating and wholly unnecessary two week wait, True Blood‘s third season came to a close this week in what was perhaps the most twist filled episode of its entire run. 

Bill was exposed as the lying, manipulative and murderous vampire Eric always said he was, Jason lost his girl and his job, but gained something of a new family, and Sam crossed a line that there’s just no coming back from.

With Eric and His Majesty still catching some rays, it takes Sookie’s coming to and using her faerie powers to finally crush Eric’s dream of a noble sacrifice, and not a minute too soon. Clearly, the sun went straight to his head, and stayed there. His visions of a ghostly Godric begging for mercy on Russell’s behalf can’t be a good sign.

Hell bent on making Russell suffer, Eric and Bill devise an ingenious plan to encase the weakened king in cement for the next century or so. Suffice it to say, Godric is not best pleased. Still, the hallucinations provide Bill with the perfect distraction, and before he knows it, our favorite sheriff is face down in his own cement grave. Bill, it seems, is easily as devious as Mr. Northman.

Which is something that Sookie, thankfully, finds out when Eric somehow manages to escape death for the second time that day. He heads straight for the Stackhouse place, where Bill is once again busy filling Sookie’s head with his apparent need to protect her, but with Eric’s arrival, his protestations of love are exposed for the manipulation they are.

Poor Sookie. Unable to use his vampire powers on her, it’s looking increasingly like Bill had to glamour her the old fashioned way. Banishing all vampires from her house, no one can blame her for quite literally being away with the faeries by the end of the episode. Wouldn’t you run if you were essentially Vampire crack?

After all the revelations this season, Sookie’s faerie heritage has been something of an elephant in the room for much of the run. Clearly this storyline still has some way to go, so there’s a better than good chance that season four will be far more faerie-centric.

Sookie’s not the only one doing some running. After a particularly intense conversation with Sam, and some DIY hairdressing, Tara decides that it’s time to go, and leaves Bon Temps without a word to anyone. Wherever she’s going, Bon Temps will be a poorer place without her. And God knows Sam needs someone to have those conversations with. His transformation from mild mannered barman to full blown redneck continued unchecked this week.

Despite starting out with a well deserved apology to Terry, discovering the empty safe at the bar pushes Sam over the edge, and he hunts Tommy down. The poor boy’s conviction that Sam won’t shoot his little brother could well be the last mistake he’ll ever make.

As transformations go, Sam’s is perhaps the most drastic change in the entire ensemble, and as that fantastic scene in the bar showed, having once been the most popular guy in town, Sam’s friends and co-workers now go out of their way to avoid him. Shocking as it is, Sam’s infinitely more interesting this way, so fingers crossed there’s more to come.

In what was perhaps the most interesting twist in the episode, Jason Stackhouse somehow didn’t get the girl. Yup, Crystal left with her brother-fiancé, after he killed their uncle-daddy, leaving Jason to look after the entire redneck village. Now, as we well know, Jason is really only good at protecting one girl at a time. Any more than that and he loses his mind, so if nothing else, watching him attempt to reintegrate Crystal’s family into Bon Temps will make season four essential viewing.

With Evil Is Going On, season three wrapped up very nicely, indeed. The big bad has been taken care of in a superbly open fashion, but it’s the richness of the episode, and, indeed, the season that made the finale so satisfying.

Written by Alan Ball, the show was packed with some amazing touches:  the background announcement that the VRA won’t pass, the aforementioned bar/Sam scene, the return not just of Alcide, but Godric and Rene, and the passing mention that Jesus is a witch, are just some of the seeds that season four will grow out of, and it’s a beautiful thing.

All in all, season three gave us some of the hottest, best written, most interesting TV around, and while the Jason Stackhouse storyline still feels a little off kilter, it’s a very small complaint. The biggest shame, of course, is that we only get 12 episodes, and it’ll be another year before we can go back to Bon Temps. See y’all in June!

Read our review of episode 11 here.