It's so much easier to assign one-to-one correspondences to everything and everyone on earth, like last week: Amy is a psychopath, therefore retroactively and proactively nothing she does is worth anything. When she tells you she loves you, she's playing you. How do we know this? Because on an unrelated note she's talked herself into believing that Eddie is not a real person. The irony couldn't be clearer: we do to Amy what Amy does to Eddie, and assume that everything she says is a lie. We fall prey to binary thinking and say, "Because X, we must always assume Y." Which is a fine way to go through life -- most of us do, a lot of the time -- but I think it cheapens our experience of both life and other people, not to mention this story. Which takes pains to offer contradictory input that we must nevertheless accept, acknowledge and transcend.

Jason spends the entire episode bouncing back and forth between Amy World, in which everything but vampires is sacred, and Jason World, in which the evidence of his eyeballs, and the grace of Eddie, his love of Eddie, rub up against Amy World like sandpaper on skin. The first colors in alchemy are black and white. Jason and Sookie especially are doing a pretty good job of jumping back and forth across the line, and I feel that Sam of all people is helping Tara get it, but the endpoint isn't bouncing back and forth: it's holding the contradiction in your hands, both at once, on fire, and being able to see the world as big enough to have them both. That's the endpoint of alchemy: a world big enough to contain even gold. And a huge part of this is recognizing the infinite number of rooms in our little houses: just because some birds are blackbirds doesn't necessarily mean all birds are irrefutably black, but by the same token it's irrefutably true that most of us fall prey to fatigue when faced with the idea of looking at every single bird as we encounter it.