Alcide hangs around after Terry's funeral, looking for more attention from Sookie for both his muscles and the intriguingly wig-like wig he has donned. They run into the orgy of fae-drunk vampires finally reaching Castle Compton, where Sookie is warmly greeted by Pam and Tara, and eventually gets Frenched by Violet once Jason introduces them, which is awful, but also... Violet's kind of a junk drawer of various very shitty things, but she's okay every now and then too: Jason compares his blood-bond situation to Sookie's with Bill in Season One, which is valid enough that she can't really question him about it, which is a really neat touch. Pam takes off to find Eric, leaving Tara in charge of Willa.

Now that she's reconnected with her humanity, community, friends and family, etc. -- thanks again for dying, Terry, it really helped her work through some shit -- Sookie's rethinking her deal with Warlow: If we're talking about eternity, maybe they could just spend some time dating and integrating their lives, he could get to know Arlene and so forth. That's when Warlow loses his temper, goes the full Ike, and decides that he's just going to beat Sookie for a while, and turn her the old-fashioned way. It's unfortunate, but dramatically so, what with those million red flags she's been overlooking the entire time.

Bill mopes for a while because he isn't God anymore, but Jessica gets very Braveheart with him about safeguarding Sookie from becoming a Faerie Vampyr Bride (drink!) and so they recruit Jason and Violet to help convince Andy to let them borrow his faerie daughter. ABCD sneaks this crew into the Warlow Dimension, where the crew rescues Sookie so that Bill and Ben can fight and fight and fight, and eventually Bill gets his ass kicked, because he is Bill Compton and obviously he gets his ass kicked at this time.

Ben storms the house, where a regularized and uninvited Bill can no longer follow, knocks out and locks everybody who is around down in Bill's old hidey-hole, and then... Gets himself grabbed by a deus ex machine King Niall, who comes out of the bathroom portal at just the right time to help with Jason staking, and exploding, good old Ben. What a tidy little storyline that was, in the end.

Eric is sunbathing on a mountain in Sweden when the daywalking leaves his system, and he bursts into flame, but we'll see. That's the half-way mark. It's really more like two episodes, with Eric's floppy dick exploding in the exact middle.

Six months later, there are new situations. Bill has written a book about his time as God, and as usual his messaging is completely confused and only makes sense to him, because what does that have to do with vampire-human relations, but whatever. Bill is great, and his book is called And God Bled, which is so Bill I can't even handle it. Sookie and Alcide are together-together, adorable together, and it turns out his wig was to hide how hot he was going to go back to being in six months.

Violet has Jason on a V-reinforced sexual slavery thing where he's chaste, but forced to go down on her -- for like, the majority of the episode -- which from here looks like one more of those lame storylines about what Jason's penis is up to, but maybe it could turn into something next year. Looking at their arrangement through the lens of what happens later (as well as through having experienced it through Sookie's eyes), I am guessing at some kind of dumb-ass Gen X Dan Savage thing like, "How dare you judge someone else's unhealthy relationship! All that really matters is that they're honest with each other!" or whatever bullshit, but who knows.

Arlene has bought out Merlotte's, and Sam has become the Mayor of Bon Temps, which has kind of declared independence from the United States in certain key ways, due to how there are roving packs of Hep V-stricken zombie vampires now roaming the Earth. But that's not the only shitty thing that happens to your town when you make Sam the Mayor: A huge interfaith gathering reveals his (and Bill's plan) to... Hook every human household up with a healthy vampire protector, in return for healthy blood.

Which Sam unnecessarily calls "monogamous," which just brings in extra serosorting shades to the Hep V thing that really didn't need to be part of it -- but is otherwise amazing, and it's so cool how they tease you with what the idea is (which is B-A-N-A-N-A-S and you probably wouldn't just intuit it until he says it) and it's very suspenseful and you're like, "What is the terrible idea? Tell me the terrible idea!" It's pretty great. (Not so great: Sam's missing scruff, which makes him look like a monster made of baby's butts. Grow that shit out, tell Alcide to keep his hair short, and for God's sake somebody find Eric and toss some clothes on him, or even just like a towel.)

A night mixer is held at what's now Bellefleur's Bar & Grille, so vampires and non-carriers can match themselves up. The metaphor is so bizarre that you just kind of go with it as a gonzo form of worldbuilding at first, but then you start seeing how it actually plays out, and it's beautiful: Jessica declaring herself the house vamp of Bellefleur Mansion regardless of whether Andy accepts or feeds her. Bill promising Sookie that her werewolf boyfriend won't be enough for the coming storm, and she needs a vampire bodyguard.

And most Steinbeckianly: Lettie Mae Reynolds Thornton Daniels, having achieved new heights of both enlightenment and crazy -- and fashion! -- offers herself to her daughter in a secluded barn, after thirty-some years of emotional and sometimes literal starvation, as a final act of apology. Assuming she lives through the experience, I think it might be one of the most moving ideas the show has ever offered us. Definitely the weirdest, but also the most unexpectedly beautiful reversals of the show's central dynamics they've come up with yet.

...Or, alternately, she just poisoned her child for the last time. Either way, grab your partner, because the last image of Season Six is a massive and quickly growing army of sick and starving vampires descending on Bon Temps. "Every single human needs a vampire and every vampire needs a human" may quite soon become more than just an awkwardly worded Mayor Sam-ism.

Anyway, that was Season Six. A bit ropy in parts, but still I think the best season to date, and what a strange gamechanger there at the end. You know, when you think about this show and how it is weird and how the whole idea of the Great Revelation is like, profoundly world-shaking... But then things basically go on. Nobody really knew about the AVL, or the Authority, or the Kings and Queens, because vampires were just trying to act normal. You know? Shopping for groceries, dating a vampire, blah-dee-blah.

But this bit, with the virus versus the vampires versus the other vampires versus everybody, that is actually demented enough that "everybody grab a vampire partner and make sure it's one you are okay with having intimate dreams about him or her" starts to make more sense than it should. So for that, and for you, I am grateful at least. Have a great summer and I will meet you back here in forty weeks or so.