"Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being," Baudelaire said. "All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal." As much as Maryann is nutty and funny and scary and kind of a bitch, you have to remember always to look at her also as Madness, and Delight, and Delirium, and Hunger, and Singularity (nature, according to Baudelaire again being "nothing but the inner voice of self-interest"), and Selfishness, and Pleasure. If vampires are the gods of the American shadow, moving through the deep, then Maryann is Crossing State Lines. Some scenes she's more one, some scenes she's more the other, but they are both always true. And what calls to her, and offends her, and excites her, is repression and authority. It's why she wants Sam, on the Maryann level. But on another, Sam's repression calls Her into being.

So with Tara: You take everything scary or sad, all the pettiness and deeper shame, the fears and hatreds and thoughts you can't handle, and put them in that little girl, and then stab her? That's a straight-up evocation of, and an invocation to, Maryann. I believe that it brought her into Bon Temps, and I believe that it called her into Tara's heart. That's what we do when we're too weak to love the little black-eyed girl, or claim her as our own. When we'd rather see her dead than admit we were ever that powerless.

Whether or not it worked -- and Miss Jeanette said this more than once, if Tara could have listened -- that leaves a giant hole for Maryann to come calling. So even as Maryann's façade starts to crack in this episode, I am still really grateful to her. Because the nice thing about science fiction or fantasy, which is to say the advantage of dealing with these energies directly -- as Daphne will explain -- is that you don't have to wait around or pray for God to show up, and fuck you up. Or to pick you up again afterward. It's already happening. Tara needed this, and better to have it happen in a divine setting than just to watch her going fucking Brenda Chenowith on herself, which I guarantee you is what Maryann's saving her from.

Andy tries to keep the peace but nobody can hear him; they mill around, moaning and hurting, splitting off to go home and wake up human. He spots Terry and Arlene, touching each other's faces all tripped out again, and when he tries to get Terry's attention, his cousin breaks his arm, howling triumphantly, and Arlene laughs from her belly, and they run off, hand in hand. And for the third time in twenty minutes, Andy's face-down in the mud and screaming.