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True Blood Review: “F*** The Pain Away” (Season 6, Episode 5)

OK, True Blood, I'll play your game. We're at the literal halfway point of the season, and now you decide to air the most exciting episode you can? Fair enough. For every plodding storyline and redundant "revelation," F*** The Pain Away is full to bursting with actual developments, and it's entertaining as sin. Plus, keeping last week's trend going, the show is finally sexy again.
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Sarah Newlin, turned away by Burrell, heads to Jason’s house and hooks up with him again. Later that night, Jess comes to his house looking for solace after she feels remorse for feeding so ruthlessly. Once there, Sarah interrupts and has Jess arrested by the forces, meaning she’s at the camp as well. It’s starting to look like Billith was on to something with that premonition he had at the beginning of the season. Jason, hoping to free her, heads to the headquarters to “sign up,” but whatever plot he has in mind is a total mystery to me.

Sookie, holding Warlow hostage with her vampire-busting ball of light, finds out that he doesn’t want to kill her. Quite the opposite, really: he claims he’s loved her his whole life. Strange, right? Before we can find out what’s going on, Bill shows up and commands Warlow to leave, AS HIS MAKER. Is your mind blown yet? Try to keep it together, there’s a lot more coming.

We’re treated to a few flashbacks explaining this revelation, as Lilith is shown turning Warlow back when he was still with his faerie clan. She claims he will one day be the salvation of the vampire race, which we’ll get to in a second. He tries to return home, but he ends up eating his whole clan because of their faerie blood. However, he does spare Niall, as we already know. What we didn’t know? Niall is Warlow’s son. I’ll give you a second to process it.

Anyhow, Warlow hates Lilith for what she turned him into, so he kills her in her sleep. Now that she’s returned through Bill, she plans on using his blood to create this New Blood (if you will) to allow fangers to walk in the sun. However, the Warlow revelations don’t end there. We all know that Warlow is responsible for murdering Sookie’s parents, right? Well, Sookie uses Lafayette to contact her dead parents and get the truth. Corbett and Michelle reveal that Warlow approached them about marrying Sookie and turning her into a vampire when she was of age so he could make her a faerie princess. I guess he really does love her.

The Stackhouses won’t have any of that, though, and they shove Sookie in the trunk and leave to kill her so Warlow can never have her. Therefore, Warlow was saving her life. This makes me question whether Warlow is actually the bad guy or not then, even though he’s been built that way. Or is any of that story true? Who knows? Well, Papa Corbett does, because he takes over Lafayette’s body, throws Sookie in the trunk once more and then proceeds to try and drown her. Yup, family gets a bit weird in Bon Temps.

Needless to say, F*** The Pain Away was full of brand new information, revelations and twists that change how we look at certain characters. True Blood has always been known for its twists, but this episode had about half of a season’s worth of surprises within the space of an hour. Now we have most of our cast in a hostile camp, Warlow might not be the big baddie we expected him to be, and Sookie’s parents would rather kill her than let her be a faerie princess.

Maybe this episode was packed just a tad too densely, but it’s the kick in the pants that True Blood needed to keep the momentum going. If next week gives us more of the camp and more history on Warlow, then this season could just be the best in recent memory.


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Christian Law
An avid gamer, moviegoer and music lover, he can be found giving his opinion on entertainment to anybody who will listen, and especially to those who won't. Otherwise, he's busy writing film and music reviews over at the Speakeasy Online Magazine.