Spoiler alert

A bloody good, bad & WTF mess: Mopping up True Blood's explosive finale

In the season finale, Stephen Moyer goes all Carrie on us.
Season five of True Blood was a bloody mess for stars, from left, Stephen Moyer,Anna Pacquin and Alexander Skarsgard
Photo courtesy of HBO

As season five of HBO’s gothic southern soap opera, True Blood, drew to a close Sunday night, I was reminded of the old adage about storytelling: Content must dictate form. So perhaps it’s appropriate that True Blood’s fifth season was filled with so much bloody goo, staining the rugs and furniture in every episode, that the plots became such a formless mess.

When it’s good, True Blood works on several levels: as satisfying soap opera, as cultural satire, and as dark comedy. To achieve this balance the show always has several different plots running but usually manages to weave the majority together by the end of the season. This year the overabundance of supernatural beings, characters and themes seemed to reach a critical mass that exploded and left everyone, pretty much literally, with bloody gunk on their faces.

Was the season about faith, fanaticism, group hierarchies, assimilation, or supernatural niche bars and nightclubs? The True Blood writers never seemed able to decide.

Was the season about faith, fanaticism, group hierarchies, assimilation, or supernatural niche bars and nightclubs? The True Blood writers never seemed able to decide. There were many incomprehensible storylines, yet there were also moments of very funny black comedy.

So as Bill, Eric, Sookie and Lafayette did in the first episode, let’s get our mops out and try to clean up this mess of a season.

The Good

Baby Vamps

Vampire youth culture had its day, or night in their cases, as Jessica, Tara, and Reverend Steve brought the fun and poignancy this season so desperately needed.

After years of feisty victimhood, Tara Thornton came into her own as a vampire. Once she went through some tough love therapy from maker Pam, Tara settled into vampire life with surly grace. With the exception of the slutty wardrobe, her personality has not changed much at all.

Yes, Rev. Newlin is a vicious killer, but he has such enthusiasm for his new undead life and such a sporty sweater collection, it’s hard to stay mad at him.

Jessica grew up on her own while her vampire daddy (Bill Compton) was stuck in the Byzantine and sometimes Bore-antine Vampire Authority plot. She started off as a party girl, was kidnapped by a vigilante hate group, and late in the season she managed to find some peace by letting her first love Hoyt go.

Rev. Steve Newlin came out of the closet and coffin and became a cable news star for the Vampire Authority. Yes, he’s a vicious killer, but he has such enthusiasm for his new undead life and such a sporty sweater collection, it’s hard to stay mad at him. His May/December (times a thousand) romance with the 3000-year-old Russell Edgington was strangely sweet and innocent.

Bon Temp’s new cultural critic Lafayette Reynolds

After playing a pivotal role in several major plots in season four, Lafayette got shoved to the background this summer. Yet whether he was making Ghost jokes while cashing in on his medium skills or providing running commentary to a live faerie birth, Lafayette somehow always managed to bring some much needed snarky sanity to a crazy season.

Jason and Sookie Stackhouse

Since the siblings Stackhouse usually spend seasons getting into or out of romantic entanglements, it was refreshing for the two to band together to search for meaning in their faerie ancestry. However, when Jason is the voice of reason and intellect throughout the season, which he was, we know Bon Temps is in trouble.

Russell Edgington

The former king of Mississippi, and forever king of bad puns, got back in the game after being dug from his cement tomb. He stacked up some impressive kills and never fell under the thrall of the big villain of the season, whatever the hell the bloody apparition Lilith was supposed to be.

While it was fitting Russell finally met the true death at Eric’s stake, I am disappointed I’ll never get to see a Russell and Steve HBO comedy spin off where Russell owes 3,000 years of back taxes, has to get a real job, and Steve stays home to raise their adopted werewolf/shapeshifter daughter. I would have totally watched that instead of Girls.

The Bad

The Iraqi Ifrit Plot

Terry Bellefleur, who has been struggling with PTSD since the beginning of the show, was cursed with his own big plot line this year. Long backstory short, after Terry’s army unit killed unarmed Iraqi civilians during the war they were killed one by one by an ancient fire jinn. Not even bringing Lafayette in for an episode could save this monster of a tonal misstep they should have staked in the writers’ room.

Too Many Naked People

Unlike some HBO shows (looking at you Game of Thrones), True Blood is is an equal opportunity depicter of naked people, but after a while even naked people become redundant, especially if said naked people are about to be eaten by vampires or are covered in buckets of blood.

Lame Faeries

Back in season three Sookie came to the realization that she’s part faerie and faeries are lame. This still holds true today. Sure they shoot a kind of taser light from their fingertips, can read minds and they throw a decent rave, but when it comes to dancing and strategizing they fail miserably. Obviously the only way they’ve survived this long is their amazing ability to give birth to litters of faerie/human babies on pool tables.

The WTF Did I Just Watch

For many years, the show has given hints about vampire culture’s secret ruling body, so season five seemed to hold much promise that we would finally get to see the inner sanctum of the mysterious Vampire Authority.

Unfortunately, that government storyline turned into a religion plot turned into some commentary about cults, ambition, and mindless faith before finally becoming a kind of slasher movie where one by one all the nubile vamps get offed by the crazy serial killer, who turned out to be Bill.

Perhaps the worse aspect of this goopy plot was that we were never told what or who Lilith actually was. She was presented as that optical illusion where from one point of view we see a vase of blood and another a naked lady covered in blood but what she really wanted or why she was making appearance now was never explained.

The final scene of this final episode was of Bill drinking the alleged blood of Lilith, dissolving into a pool of blood and then reforming as a bloody Bill.

Though True Blood creator, Oscar-winning screenwriter Alan Ball will remain with the show as executive producer, this was his final season as showrunner, so here’s hoping that last image of a newly formed villain Bill was his promise the plots of season six will have some actual form.

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Movie Review

Action-packed Kraven the Hunter showcases gritty Marvel antihero

Photo by Jay Maidment

Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven the Hunter.

One of the oddest things about the blockbuster era we live in is that while Disney owns the rights to the majority of Marvel comic book characters, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man and any affiliated characters. Since they’re sharing Spider-Man himself with Disney, Sony has been trying to capitalize on those rights by making stand-alone films using niche characters that only comic book fanatics would know.

Having exhausted Venom and whiffed on attempts with Morbius and Madame Web, they’re trying again with Kraven the Hunter. Also known as Sergei Kravinoff, Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a self-styled vigilante who, as the film tells it, travels the world exacting vengeance on the truly bad people of the world. He’s the son of Nikolai (Russell Crowe), a hard-edged Russian oligarch, and brother to Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), who is relatively weak compared to the rest of his family.

The origin story has Kraven gaining his animal-like powers - including super-strength, speed, and jumping abilities - as a teenager from a mysterious serum given to him by a girl named Calypso (played as an adult by Ariana DeBose) after he was mauled by a lion. The two maintain a tenuous partnership as adults, with Calypso helping him hunt down other villains like Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) and The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott).

Directed by J.C. Chandor and written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, the film looks and feels enormously lazy, something made merely to hold on to potentially valuable intellectual property. Other than the tense family dynamic between the Kravinovs, little makes sense in the story. Kraven has an indecipherable moral code that has him going after poachers - because he’s part lion? - in addition to other high-powered criminals, with no clear goal except to … get back at his father?

The laziness extends to the action scenes, which feature Kraven being mostly impervious to any damage, whether it’s hand-to-hand combat, knives, or guns. The CGI-heavy scenes don’t even allow moviegoers to enjoy an R-rated bloody free-for-all, as all of the blood splatter is computer-generated, too. Since apparently one Spider-Man villain is not enough, three others make appearances with abilities that are under-explained and CGI that is poorly done.

That’s not even counting Calypso, another Spider-Man villain whose purpose in this film is nebulous at best. Her early connection with Kraven is so coincidental as to be laughable, and her continued reasons for helping him as an adult strain credulity as well. The only saving grace of her presence is that the filmmakers don’t try to shoehorn romance into the plot; perhaps they’re saving that for the (inevitable?) sequel.

Taylor-Johnson has had one of the most prolific-yet-anonymous careers in modern Hollywood, with appearances in big films like The Fall Guy, Bullet Train, and Tenet that have made very little impact. Even as the star here, he fails to hold your attention, with the story and visuals doing him no favors. DeBose has followed up her Oscar win for West Side Story with schlock like I.S.S., Argylle, and this, which doesn’t bode well for her career. At least Crowe gets to chew the scenery.

With a contractual inability to mention the name “Spider-Man,” movies like Kraven the Hunter exist in a weird area that forces filmmakers to make up stories for characters to which most people have no attachment. And just like Sony’s previous efforts, it is a very poor way to spend two hours in a movie theater; avoid at all costs.

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Kraven the Hunter opens in theaters on December 13.

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