CASTLE COMPTON

Waiting around for the shit to start, already getting the Bleeds, Jess and Bill talk about life like it's their last stand at the Alamo, because maybe it is. Bill weeps for all the horrors he unleashed on her, and how much he's come to love her, and Jessica weeps for his guilt in turn, because she's the first person on this show who has been allowed to fully accept her compromises and love herself as she is today, for always. She thanks him many times for bringing her to this life, as though she can talk the guilt out of him for killing her, and then talk turns to Hoyt.

Jessica: "I don't know if I can go back to him... Bill, he loves me so much, it hurts to even think about it. But I don't love him the same. I think if I was still human, I would... But I don't have a human heart anymore."

Which is exactly what Bill said to Portia, by the way. And which he now, because he loves Jessica, must refute: "If you've fallen out of love with him, it doesn't mean that you've lost your humanity. We are, at our core, human."

Bill's shining new pragmatism has given him such a Zen high that he can even look at this new threat as a sort of cosmic justice for the bad actions of bad vampires, and how if Antonia is justified, that means they have to hold onto their human hearts even more strongly. When you compare this mature and complex response to Bill's self-hating vampirephobia of years past, it's striking how much the year without Sookie, the year of his monarchy, has changed him: Same words, opposite meaning. He's closer to Godric than you would've thought possible; it's funny sometimes just by riding the whole merry-go-round all the way around you end up where you started but also in a whole new world.

But Jessica just hears the guilt and the powerlessness in what he's saying, his dramatic laments that he hasn't done enough good before they die today, because it's what you'd expect him to say. It pisses her off: "But you have done good. You made me. And when we survive the day, I am going to eat that fuckin' witch. Startin' with her face."