"I wish I had known you before you were made. Before you turned hard. I would've liked to have seen you smile with light in your eyes, instead of darkness. That would have been something." You can't see it, but he's making an autopsy incision, down the center of her chest. Lorena weeps, dark blood, and swears she has no other choice. Russell, and Istvan before him, have put them in this place. She is who she is; it's a tale as old as time. She says his name, torn by this last cruelty, and slashes at his face.

Oh Franklin, you crazy thing. So Tara's like, "Where you been?" all flirty, and he gets very dark and pissy: "Tara, I will not be policed." She tries to backtrack from the weirdness of that -- Ball does very well the awkward feeling of talking to crazy people, riding that shifting equilibrium of expectations and how you're constantly finding yourself in a new conversation with no idea how you got there -- and apologizes, saying that she meant she just couldn't wait to get him back. He t-bones the conversation again, whining that she hasn't even noticed that he shaved so how could she pretend to care at all, and she doesn't even have time to save that one, because then he's all romantic and talking about looking nice for her, their wedding night tomorrow, and the fact that since Sookie's already been kidnapped for Russell -- questions regarding which go flying unnoticed past Franklin's head -- his current contract is ended.

Not great news, the fact that Franklin now has no reason to leave her side ever again, before or after she becomes his VAMPIRE BRIDE, so she flirts masterfully and sort of hypnotically and begs him to untie her so they can have some mutually satisfying sex. She has a brilliant idea, also, which is to get high on V so she can bust up out of there, and puts it into motion, pretending her shudders have nothing to do with terror: "I'm gonna drink your blood tomorrow night? I want it now! I wanna experience being high on you while making love to you. Knowing it's my last act as human, I wanna have the most amazing sex any human can have before I give myself to you... And death!"

(As hard to watch as the Lorena/Bill stuff is, it makes sense in the context of their vibe. This is something we get into a lot with Gossip Girl, actually, where each character has his or her own set of classic romantic (oven specifically Gothic) tropes and images, from Chekov to Byron to Kerouac to Audrey Hepburn -- no, I'm really not making this up -- that inform their storylines and even sometimes the way their stories are directed and filmed. In addition, Alan Ball is all for substance as long as it doesn't interfere with his impressionism. So that stuff gets a pass from me because we're in that stylistic mode, same as all of Sookie running through graveyards in her respective nightgown was a lovable indulgence that took some getting used to.