Out of all the insane plot points the writers of HBO's True Blood have been able to come up with over the years — including the likes of meat statues, head-twisting sex scenes, and that godforsaken ifrit — perhaps the most confounding is the writers' continued persistence that their viewers should still be rooting for Sookie & Bill to end up together.
Sure, we'll admit it: we loved them together in the first season as much as anybody. She was light and naive, he was dark and mysterious, they had really great sex in cemeteries. Plus there was the whole matter of Sookie not being able to hear Bill's thoughts, which sounds frustrating to those of us without powers, but to the half-faerie it was something of a blessing. And look, we totally understand the concept that writers want their Big Important Season 1 Romance to also be Endgame. But you can't then continually poison the well season after season and still expect us to want this hyper-dysfunctional couple to skip off into the sunset together.
Just in case you forgot (because who can keep track of the million plots that are occurring simultaneously on any given episode of this show), Bill has one huge flaw (other than being a possessive creep with a literal god complex, that is): He only pretended to be in love with Sookie to spy on her for the Queen of Mississippi.
This means that Bill and Sookie's entire relationship is a lie. He didn't walk into that bar by accident. He was sent there by Sophie-Anne to seduce the telepathic waitress and gain her trust so the Queen could find out more about what gave Sookie her unusual powers. Oh sure, supposedly Bill truly fell in love with her at some point during that charade, but the fact remains that he didn't tell her the truth for three whole seasons, and not until he had no other choice. That's like handing someone a kleenex after you've vomited blood all over their nice white dress. Won't really change the fact that you've ruined their outfit.
So why is showrunner Brian Buckner promising a Sookie-Bill-Alcide love triangle for the final season? Does anyone really want to waste time in the already-overcrowded show's final season with a romantic subplot nobody cares about? Ironically, it's Bill's portrayer Stephen Moyer who offers us the first glimmer of hope that his character may not be destined to end up with Sookie after all. In an interview with TVLine previewing the new season, he was asked whether or not the couple was endgame:
I don’t know whether they can be, given everything that’s happened between them. What Bill did was open up something inside her that she had never had before. He was the key to a new world for her. And maybe that’s all he was supposed to be — a window into that world.
Awesomely, it also doesn't really seem like he cares one way or the other:
I don’t think that there is a right or wrong answer. I think a bunch of people would be happy if that was the story and a bunch of people would be pissed off if that was the story. I don’t read that s–t, so I don’t care, ultimately. All I want to do is do the show and have fun doing it.
But it's Anna Paquin herself who has perhaps the best solution for her character. Moyer stated definitively that his wife's response to the triangle would be: "Sookie should go off and become a barwoman in New York.”
We can't imagine a better ending for our beleaguered faerie waitress than to see her finally extricate herself from the emotional and physical abuse of Bon Temps and start a new life for herself. But out of all the crazy plot twists the writers have executed on True Blood, having Sookie end up without a man is probably the only one they would never even consider.
Hopefully they prove us wrong.
Images: HBO (3)
