Where are all the bodies buried?

Bring out your dead: True Blood unearths vamps, werewolves & intrigue in season5 opener

Supernatural television shows are almost always populated with lots of dead characters. But usually those dead people slink around as sexy, shirtless ghosts and vampires or at least lurch around as mindless rotting zombies. However, for the season 5 premiere of HBO’s supernatural, southern gothic satire True Blood Sunday night, the episode was all about actually burying the dead. Or digging them up and eating them, whichever.

So who died, and where are all the bodies buried?

In fact, Anna Paquin’s Sookie Stackhouse, the part-faerie, telepathic hero of the series, spent so much time cleaning crime scenes and digging graves, it felt like True Blood had turned into a PBS anthropology documentary on the burial rituals and practices of the indigenous Bon Temps, Louisiana peoples. That is until we got the first, and probably contractually obligated, shot of Alexander Skarsgård’s bare butt. Then, it felt like HBO again.

So who died, and where are all the bodies buried?

Debbie Pelt
At the end of season 4, crazy werewolf and recovering vampire blood drug addict Debbie Pelt, tried to shoot Sookie and ended up killing supernatural-trouble magnet and Sookie’s best friend, Tara instead. Sookie, in turn, killed Debbie with her own shotgun. Yet, somehow, a part-faerie waitress shooting a werewolf-real-housewife is probably the most un-supernatural death in the show’s history.

Tara Thornton
Though Tara ended up with part of her brains splattered over Sookie’s kitchen floor, neither Sookie nor Tara’s cousin Lafayette were ready to let her die. They made a deal with the devilishly awesome Pam, Eric Northman’s vampire daughter of all people, to turn Tara into a vampire, a ritual which requires Tara and Pam to be buried together in Sookie’s backyard for a night.

Technically if this whole vamp Tara project works out, that will make Tara Eric’s vampire granddaughter, because the True Blood writers love their viewers and wants us to die laughing.

Jesus Velasquez
Another body to be counted at the end of last season was Lafayette’s lover Jesus. Jesus was a powerful brujo (witch) but was stabbed by Lafayette when the latent medium was possessed by the even more powerful dead witch Marnie. Yeah I know, how many times have we seen that old plot line? The twist is that now Jesus’ body is missing, but there are so many other bodies to be buried this episode that the mystery of missing Jesus was left unsolved.

Marcus Bozeman
Late last season, werewolf Alcide killed the local wolf pack leader Marcus. Why that is important this season is because the wolf pack and Marcus’s mom blame shapeshifter Sam Merlott who is dating Marcus’s shapeshifting ex-wife Luna. The pack made Sam take them to the Marcus’s unmarked grave, and then they proceeded to dig Marcus up and eat his entrails. It’s a werewolf thing. Don’t impose your closed-minded non-were Western prejudices upon them.

Nan Flanagan
While Sookie and Lafayette were busy mopping and bleaching the Stackhouse kitchen, Vampire King of Louisiana, Bill Compton, and his sheriff, Eric Northman, were at the royal residence sopping up the vampire goo that was the once Vampire Authority representative Nan Flanagan. She was paying Sookie’s ex-lovers a visit to either kill them or make some kind of deal to go against the Authority. Exactly whose side she was on was left rather ambiguous but Nan threatened Sookie, and so she had to go.

True Blood usually alternates between the sexes when designating each season’s top sexy villain. If the pattern holds again this summer, we should be able to smell the testosterone directly from our television screens.

What’s so important about all these dead bodies, especially since some of them aren’t even sexy anymore?

A Pam sired, and possibly mindless, vampire Tara, is certainly going to cause both Sookie and Lafayette heartache and stress. The woman had massive anger-management problems and an uncanny talent for getting kidnapped by supernatural crazy beings when she was human. The human mind can hardly encompass what trouble she’ll get into as a vampire.

The killing of Nan is probably Bill and Eric’s first step down, and it’s a doozy, into the vampire political underworld. Eric and Bill were on the run from and then overrun by minions of Vampire Authority for, well, not respecting the Vampire Authority’s authority.

And while Eric and Bill are busy with vampire infighting, Alcide and Sam look to be about to play werewolf and shapeshifter power politics.

So what can we expect from season 5?

Season 4 was about girl power. Wronged female witches, ghosts, and ghost witches stuck it to the Man who was usually a vampire. Even Sookie had an "I-choose-me" moment when she dumped both her former vamp lovers Bill and Eric and gave werewolf Alcide the let’s-be-friends speech.

Though he hasn’t made an appearance yet, season three’s vampire king of Mississippi, Russell Edgington, has been rescued from his cement prison and is sure to wreck havoc upon the world.

The Reverend Steve Newlin, who hasn’t been seen except for cameos since season 2, is back. Newlin once commanded an army of faithful vampire-hating followers, but is now a vampire himself and is openly declaring his love for Sookie’s brother Jason.

Being dumped by Sookie, while they were wearing cute matching robes, seems to have pushed Bill and Eric on the road to an epic vampire bromance and perhaps right in the middle of a real war between philosophies on the nature of government. Sure Russell Edgington might represent the dying vampire monarchy system but he’s a powerful 3000 years old and kind of nuts. Meanwhile, the city council cabal, or whatever the Vampire Authority is, seems to hold ultimate political power, but if they can’t even keep the Sookie-whipped comedy duo of Bill and Eric in line how do they expect to rule the vampire world?

Finally, just a reminder. The dead character with magical powers whose body is still missing is named Jesus. Hopefully hell will be fun if Nan is there to welcome us.

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Movie Review

Heartfelt animal adventure Hoppers is another Pixar classic

Photo courtesy of Disney/Pixar

Mabel (Piper Kurda) and King George (Bobby Moynihan) in Hoppers.

For the first 15 years of their history, animation studio Pixar delivered one classic film after another, an astonishing streak that included their first 11 movies. Things got bumpy starting with Cars 2 in 2011, and even though the majority of their output has been good-to-great ever since, their releases are no longer considered slam dunks like they once were.

They’re back with an original film, Hoppers, trying to return to form by going back to the animal world. The film centers on Mabel (Piper Kurda), a 19-year-old environmentalist who’s trying to stop a new highway being built by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) in the fictional city of Beaverton. Her activism has as much to do with helping displaced local animals as it does with being nostalgic for her youth, in which she spent years observing nature with her Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie).

She finds an unlikely possible solution when she discovers that her college professors have created a system that allows them to transfer — or hop — their consciousness into animal-like robots. Hijacking a beaver robot, Mabel joins up with the local wildlife, including beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan) to try to convince them to help her execute her plan. But with the highway almost complete and Mayor Jerry willing to do anything to make it happen, Mabel might be too late.

Directed by Daniel Chong and written by Jesse Andrews from a story by Chong, the film cycles through a variety of genres in its 105-minute running time, including comedy, drama, thriller, and even a touch of Pixar-style horror. When Pixar has been at its best, it seamlessly goes back and forth between genres, trusting that audiences will go along with them for the ride, and Hoppers feels like a return to form in that respect.

Humor rules the day as Mabel adjusts to being part of the animal world while her professors desperately try to get her and their robot back. Mabel encounters not only wildly confusing things like “pond rules” (if a predator catches you, you don’t fight it), but also the existence of a hierarchy within the world that involves kings or queens from various animal classes like reptiles, birds, amphibians, fish, and insects. Her one-track mind and the way of the world she is invading clash in a variety of funny ways.

As the film goes along, Chong, Andrews, and the rest of the filmmaking team also find a way to burrow into the audience’s heart. There are many elements that threaten to tip into eye-rolling territory, but the filmmakers consistently pull back before that happens. The number of fun characters on both the human and animal side helps in that regard, as does the simple yet profound message they’re trying to convey.

Pixar has assembled one of the best voice casts in recent memory for this film, including such big names as Meryl Streep, Dave Franco, Melissa Villaseñor, Vanessa Bayer, and the late Isiah Whitlock, Jr. However, due to the sheer number of characters, only Kurda, Moynihan, and Hamm truly stand out. Still, they all fit together well and give the always-stellar animation even more life.

Since the pandemic, Pixar has only released one truly great film (Inside Out 2), but with Hoppers and the seemingly bulletproof Toy Story 5 coming within a few months of each other, they might go back-to-back on that front. Like the classic films from the studio, it has goofy, heartfelt, and exciting parts, mixing together for an enthralling time at the theater.

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Hoppers opens in theaters on March 6.

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