Immediately upon waking up with naked Sam in her bed and learning that he is a shapeshifter -- not a werewolf, he's intense about pointing out -- Sookie decides to spend the entire episode waiting to die, feeling abandoned by everyone, and being a giant bitch. As usual, she has more than enough excuses to do so. She feels betrayed by Sam, both romantically and now ontologically, and what with Bill having run off for the nineteenth episode running to go play reindeer games with his vamp friends, she's in no mood. Arlene's engagement party -- a classically understated affair to be sure -- also provides the Killer with a pretext to stalk Sookie around Merlotte's and drive her right back into Sam's arms.

Eddie the Fang and Amy the Loon play a quick game of Cat and Mouse for Jason's soul, which Amy awesomely turns into some kind of fucked up European backpacking adventure where Eddie's their pet vamp, until a masculinity pep talk from Rene Lanier -- and a roughing-up from a very worried Lafayette -- cause Jason to assert himself by letting Eddie go. Amy goes sort of insane and stakes Eddie, causing massive heartbreak on Jason's part and a certain gooiness for Eddie.

Bill watches some guy get his fangs pulled out by the Tribunal, but when it's his turn for judgment, he manages to mouth off just enough that the Magister changes his sentence. Instead of being locked in a coffin for five years -- which is apparently just long enough to wither away to "leather and sticks" and go completely insane -- he's forced to sire a young sheltered Christian girl. Just when you think it's going to be really bad, you remember that you forgot glamouring, and that it's going to be okay... But then the Magister tells him to cut it out, which means the eventual ritual -- which, with everybody around, manages to encapsulate the worst parts of birth, murder, and sexual assault -- is even worse than you originally thought.

Tara spends the dawn doing intense ritual and personal demonology with Miss Jeanette, the morning with Lettie Mae sucking the heads of celebratory post-exorcism crawfish, the afternoon freaking the fuck out after discovering her hedge witch doubles as a stocker at Walgreens and literally snatching her bald, the evening flouncing around dressed like a drunken streetwalker from the '80s, the night getting into yet another horrible and pointless fight with Sam, and ends things by drunk driving her car into a tree to avoid hitting a strange goat-legged woman standing in the middle of the road with a hog as large as a VW Bug. The fact that she's played by an absolutely filthy Helena Cain means that she actually exists, and is in fact dreadfully important, and the smirk on her face as she walks away from the wreck promises us that Tara's about five seconds from finding out how scary real magic can be.

Come back on Friday for the full detailed recap. Until then, see what our vlogger thinks about Bill's accent.