"There's some darkness in this family, Tara. My mama, your mama. But they ain't strong enough to beat it. We are. We've been fucking fighting tooth and nail to survive this bullshit our whole life, and I ain't letting you give up now." She gets it -- and she does get it -- and they get funny and flirty and get out of there, back to the team of two we so rarely get to see because one of them is always high or suicidal or PTSD, because this town is bad luck for them. Lafayette's intake narrative is not so great either:

Being a prostitute/stripper/drug dealer was going okay until one john-slash-draining subject got kidnapped by the town whore and my occasional webcam stripper, who was dating a V-addict witch at the time. At this point I was kidnapped and held captive in a dungeon under a fangbanger bar in Shreveport, where I had to shit in a bucket. After nearly being killed a few times, witnessing a few beheadings, and begging to become undead, I took a short detour into Gotcha Journalism before being forced into a blood-bond with a sexually ambiguous vampire sheriff, who now haunts my dreams and has enslaved me to sell the blood of the Vampire Queen of Louisiana. I did take some time off to become one of the bridesmaids of a demigoddess, and very nearly was implicated in the murder of my boss -- who is occasionally a collie -- but mostly I've just been assisting in various vampire schemes, which beats the hell out of being found dead in Andy Bellefleur's car.

"All right now, let's get the fuck up outta here, it stinks in here. But hooker, if you ever try to pull the shit you pulled last night again, I swear your ass is gonna get a room next to Ruby Jean. And I'm gonna make sure the motherfucker spooning your peas ain't half as hot as Jesus. Is you feeling me?" She is. And are they clear? They are. He does a complicated set of very gay moves, tosses no less than three Jesus-seeking glances over his shoulder, and they head back to Bon Temps.

Sam tries desperately to bond with Tommy, which is clearly the right call, but Tommy is impenetrably trashy, and he can't seem to get in there. He tries the big-brother thing, the abandoned-teenager thing, even the unwitting-shifter thing, but Tommy won't budge. Eventually he realizes Tommy's honestly afraid Sam's there to disrupt his [clearly very grody, scary] lifestyle, and promises he's not there to take anything away from him. Having nothing to give, and a girl-butt to boot, Tommy strips off his clothes and prepares to go running through the forest -- after a snort at Sam's cutie-pie dog form -- in the shape of an adorable/snarly bulldog, revealing in the process some horrific scars all over his body which he will only explain thusly: "I used to get in a lot of fights." (Grody! Scary! Bad things! Arkansas! Avoid the Mickenses!)