After a very, very long montage of Jason playing with paperclips and generally being adorable and bored, Jason had had it. "I can't work a desk no more, Andy. It's sucking the life out of me!" He's covered in fingerprinting stuff, all over his face and shirt and looking like the insane ADD toddler he is, but he's willing to work a cold case, a special assignment or anything that involves doing and not sitting: "I need some fucking thing to do right fucking now or I'll blow up like a M80 and take this whole place with me!" Comparisons to W aside -- which I don't really find compelling at all, simply because the similarities between Jason and our former president are the good things about both, and the actual bad W things (dynastic privilege, mindless capitalist cronyism) aren't at issue -- I have sympathy for this moment in Jason's life, because he is a time bomb. He wants to be a superhero cop because A) He is still trying to figure out manhood and B) He killed a guy. It's not about boredom or shortcuts, it's about atonement and actualization. Where he will never actually get, because of the boredom and shortcuts, but he can see from here, which makes him itchier.

Tara, still trailing tie-backs and shoeless in her high-necked, gathered-sleeve nightgown, pulls a Scarlett O'Hara, running off across the grounds of the Compound. The wolves, who don't sleep like the vampires do, obviously, give chase. Coot drops her with a sickening, back-bending jump, and then shifts back to his beautiful self, howling to the others. Oh, Tara. It was a good plan but not a great one.

Lafayette has, of course, taken to Tommy like a new puppy, which is what he is. Pairing any character with Lafayette, even for a single scene, is pretty much giving that character a pass, because extratextually Lafayette is our favorite but also because in-story, Lafayette is a cagey motherfucker with good instincts about people. And then there's some innocence we need to buy back for Tommy, so he can play a teenage boy in the Jessica stuff, which means putting him into the younger-brother role with Lafayette sort of draws a line under the sexualized hints that may or may not exist with Joe Lee. Lafayette's sex-free affection for Tommy in this scene -- where he tries to teach him to smoke cigarillos -- not only does the work of placing him in the Merlotte's milieu, but makes it easier to swallow Sam's own big-brother conversion -- forgiving attempted murder and robbery -- that actually powers this storyline. It's small and cute and all, but actually it's doing a lot of narrative heavy lifting, in context.