"I can't help it, Sook, I loved her. And when you love someone you've got to love it all. Otherwise it ain't love." She realizes his point, and she doesn't like it. But if she loves Bill, if she's going to love him as a grown woman, if they're going to be an adult couple instead of the kind content only to go running through graveyards in flowy white dresses, she's got to reconcile the fact that he has killed. A lot. Bartlett and Jessica for starters, but also hundreds of years of humans, as a vampire, and who knows how many fellows, when he was a soldier? When you love someone, you've got to love it all.

And it's not to say you have to approve, or sit idly by. Whoever told you approval and love were the same thing fucked you up real good. We spend so much time creating fictions around ourselves where we're the hero, or the constant victim, in which we have no power at all. And anything that doesn't fit into that world, anything that seems dark because it's unfamiliar, or scary, or comes too close to things we can't accept about ourselves, gets shoved into the dark. Amy wasn't perfect. Nobody is perfect. Whoever told you perfection is what earns you love fucked you up too. Love is not something we do to absolve others of their faults. To love is to do ourselves the favor of growing larger and more compassionate. Choosing not to love Amy because of her faults and her behavior isn't a choice, it's just blindness. Jason is saying that you see the whole person, not an edited-down version. You take the darkness in one hand, and the light in the other, and you pray to God for the strength to reconcile them. That's all compassion is.

Andy approaches drunkenly hitching up his pants and ready to harass Jason, his favorite pastime; Sookie takes off with a kiss on the cheek and heads into the main room, where Bud and his wife are entering, having just won some kind of ugly-costumed dance competition like they used to have on TV all the time in the '90s. (The digital video has trouble with the tracking shot from the door back around to the bar, making it look like Maryann's vibes for a second, but I'd imagine on DVD it won't look that weird.) Tara rolls her eyes at their rich pageantry, and Sookie comes looking for Sam. She wants to go find Bill, the whole person, and hear the stories about Jessica and Bartlett from their lips; if she doesn't, then it's not love. Tara hugs her about Bartlett; Sookie changes the subject immediately.