With Faerielande vulnerable and Jason out of commission, Sookie and the Fae fight Russell and Steve. Or rather, they shoot Russell full of fairyfarts and Steve zooms off into the night, and then Eric and Nora show up just in time for Russell to die the True Death.

With Nora obsessing on Sookie-as-snack, Jason wakes up with a giant knot on his brain and ongoing hallucinations of his parents yelling at him to kill all vampires. Luckily, that's what Eric wants him to do: Tara, Sookie and Jason accompany the Godric Twins for a full-on assault on the Authority to save Jessica and Pam -- as well as Bill, of course, from his Lilith craziness.

But you know who's just fine with the Lilith stuff? Old Bill Compton, who takes all episode manipulating Salome into accidentally killing herself so that he can become vampire Jesus once and for all. After an entirely sympathetic speech about his entire character arc over five seasons leading directly here... He does. The season's last image is a blood-drenched Bill, reborn as something feral, with Eric and Sookie in flight.

...Which is the only real conclusion you get, from any of the storylines. After a lot of plotty sneakiness, Luna skinwalks into the form of absent Steve Newlin -- only to be shanghaied into a mea culpa for the frat house massacre on live TV. Of course, she breaks down and flips back into herself (and possibly death) just long enough to put both the Vampire Apocalypse and maybe Shifters on shout.

Along with Sam, another possible Season Six single dad debuts, when Andy Bellefleur finds himself the father of faerie quadruplets and Maurella totally disinterested in co-parenting. While the birth scene was, frankly, amazing -- weird in every possible way, with Jane Bodhouse, Arlene and Lafayette as the three Wise Men -- it's even more exciting to see what midwife Holly plans to do, now that her boyfriend's magic babies mean a possible Brady Bunch-sized blended family.

Eric, Nora, Pam and Tara form a little family of their own -- although, in family fashion, not without some steamy incestuous makeouts. Much to orphaned Jessica's glee, Pam and Tara clench in a liplock that feels much more earned than it should; even Sookie seems impressed. And over on the werewolf side of things, Jackson supplies his son Alcide with the primo V necessary to take out JD for good, leaving him Packmaster of a broken band of drug addicts -- the image of Rikki, ODing on V and sweating blood, was indelible -- with only Momma Martha as his second in command.

So that's how we leave Bon Temps: With the Authority completely murdered (even Chelsea and Roslyn end up dead) and a new vampire God ascendant, Sookie still "promised" to the ever-unpresent Warlow, Jason nursing some kind of brain injury, faeries safe for now and a whole new global situation ready to unfold next summer. While some stories petered out (the ifrit) or basically never mattered (Lala; those fucking werewolves), it's funny that many of the seemingly aimless ones -- Luna and the Obama shootings, for a huge example; Jason's Warlow-and-Jessica centered vendetta for another -- ended up tying the season together (such as it was) in some vastly unexpected ways.

While it might be preferable to have had the season complete unto itself -- and it bears reflecting whether, thematically, that isn't exactly what we got -- this definitely made for a raucously jumbled, exciting prelude to Season Six. Frankly, the real majesty of Bill Compton's life and death, and horrific rebirth, ended up being powerful enough to make up for a lot of it. There's no telling where the show's heading from here -- and when compared with the light-tight box of nonsense that snapped closed around the Magick Box this time last year, that's a pretty good feeling on its own.