True Blood, Season 7 Episode 2: I Found You Review

The season premiere of True Blood last week was action packed, but the follow up episode was boring at best, with minor plot developments and a whole lot of foreshadowing.

The episode begins with this week’s installment of Softcore Pornography with Jason Stackhouse. This week, the scene isn’t nearly as raunchy as it usually is, and instead was a pretty tame dream Jason has about Eric. As usual, it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the episode.

After the opening credits, we’re back at the church where last week’s episode ended. The town’s law enforcement is preparing a search party to find the hostages taken by the Hep V vampires, and Sam sends everyone who’s not out searching for the victims back to Bellefleur’s to clean up for Arlene’s return.

Sookie leads Andy, Jason, Sam and Alcide off into the woods to find a body she had stumbled on the night before, hoping the identity of the girl will lead them to the vampire nest. When they check the girl’s ID, they find she has been dragged there from the nearby town St. Alice and head out that way. Once they arrive, they discover an absolute ghost town where all the windows are boarded up, the stores have been looted, and the store fronts are covered in spray-painted messages varying from practical, to religious, to pleading for help from FEMA.

Behind the main street, Sookie and the gang find a mass grave of the bodies the vampires left and they know that everyone in the town has either been killed or taken. They also know that Bon Temps is next.

Back at Fangtasia, Arlene, Holly, Nicole and Jane are trying to remain hopeful, especially Arlene. The vampires upstairs are arguing amongst themselves about food rations and guard duty, and a new vampire has been assigned “reaper” based on the fact that she was a teacher before she turned. She heads downstairs to pick out lunch from the collection of hostages, and Arlene realizes that the woman, Betty, was her kids’ fourth grade teacher, and she taught Holly’s kids as well.

Betty recognizes Arlene and spares her, and the next time she comes down for a body, Arlene and Holly convince her to free them in order to maintain her legacy as a good person and great teacher. Unfortunately, Betty’s rescue efforts are foiled as the Hep V kills her as she’s feeding on Arlene to gain the strength to set them loose.

In Bon Temps, Lettie Mae goes to see Lafayette under the rouse that she needs to check on him, but really she is looking for Vampire blood, and she knows he’s dealing. She believes that the hallucinations she has of Tara when she’s high are Tara reaching out to her for help because she’s trapped between Earth and Heaven. Lafayette dismisses her, calling her an addict and sending her on her way. Lettie Mae is persistent when she needs a fix, and when she gets home and is cooking dinner, she shoves her hand in hot oil in order to have a wound for Willa to heal.

Lettie Mae forces Willa to wake and nearly gets herself killed in the process as no one has ever tried to wake Willa before. Willa tells Lettie Mae that the reverence instructed her not to give anymore blood to Lettie, but she gives in and this time we see Lettie’s hallucination of Tara on a cross in the cemetery, trying to talk to Lettie, but Lettie can’t understand what she’s saying. This is a sad, but predictable turn of events, and it just goes to show that addicts remain addicts, even after they’ve sobered up.

At Bellefleur’s where everyone is doing their best to clean up, Vince arrives and rallies everyone against all of the supers living in Bon Temps, including Sam, whom he’s outed as a shapeshifter, and Sookie. He instructs everyone to create their own stakes out of the rubble at Bon Temps, and Adilyn overhears Rose thinking of raiding the gun storage at the Sheriff’s office and runs off with her crush/potential future step-brother Wade to try and warn Kenya.

Once the mob arrives, Kenya is persuaded to join the mob and they try to grab Adilyn to subdue her, since she must be a super, causing Adilyn to use her light against them to protect herself. Then they get real mad, and miles away Jessica is snapped awake by Adilyn’s fear, but it’s daylight and she can’t leave. As she waits for night to fall, Andy comes home and realizes that Adilyn is missing. Jessica knows she can’t hide from him and reveals herself, and naturally, Andy loses it. She placates him, but we also see that she has what looks like two fang marks on her arm that won’t heal, suggesting that she has been infected with Hep V.

Finally, the episode ends with Pam finding Eric feeding on a handful of women in a boudoir, and when the women walk away we see that Eric is infected with Hep V as well. This is one of the more exciting things that happens in this episode and it lasted a grand total of thirty seconds.

This episode spends a long, long time setting things up for future episodes, and it was almost boring. There’s a lot of exposition happening and a lot of the foreshadowing is overbearing. Clearly, Bon Temps is heading in the direction that St. Alice went, and will be a ghost town sooner than later. Sookie had some really un-exciting flashbacks about the beginning of her relationship with Bill and Alcide essentially “forgives” her for falling for Bill, saying she fell like everyone falls for their first love: hard and fast.

Andy waxes poetic about how he’s going to make an honest woman of Holly as soon as he rescues her, so I am pretty certain he’s going to die before he gets a chance. More than anything, this episode foreshadows that a lot more characters are going to die, including audience favorites Eric and Jessica, unless a cure for Hep V is found. Since that’s not something anyone appears to be working on right now, I am pretty sure this season is just going to be a blood bath for humans, vampires, and other supers alike.