True Blood Finale

Warning: Spoilers

I was quite dissappointed in the True Blood finale, and most of the second half of the season, after I watched the last three in a row, especially compared to last season. Last season featured two big plots that slowly built up, gaining momentum - more and more happening - and then one plot reached its cliamx, the Fellowship of the Sun plot, leaving the last couple episodes up for wrapping up the Maryann the maenad plot.

This season, the most exciting episodes seemed to happen about halfway through the season. The season started slow, sure, but all True Blood seasons (or all three of them, anyway) start slow. Generally they've started to seriously speed up later on. Some of the plots that I was waiting to be folding into one of the more important plots never really coalesced. For example, the Jason plot - him with the warepanther Crystal and trying to defend her from her incestuous family while saving her compound - where was that going? What does that have to do with anything? Who cares? I thought for sure her people would somehow be relevant to the season's end game, but nope. (This doesn't mean I expect there to be no smaller subplots - just fewer and more focus on the bigger plots, especially by the end - smaller plots like the Hoyt-Jessica one are fine, or even the Lafayette plot with his new guy - that never really seemed like it had much to do with anything and that was fine aside from the too much screen time it got at the end where main plots should be taking over). Also, towards the end of the season, certain plots seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere. Sam and his murderous backstory burglarizing and then being backstabbed? Where the fuck did that come from? Why is that coming up for the first time in a season's last episode, where things are being concluded? And the Sam plotline never went anywhere in terms of the main plotlines - I thought for sure Sam's brother would end up being one of the main villains of the season, but that never kind of really developed, it just kept repeating the part about him being a bad kid and Sam trying to straighten him out over and over again until the last half hour or so.

Finally, there's the main plotline itself. Russell Edgington is made out to be the oldest, most powerful vampire any of the characters on the show has ever known or heard about (at least until next season). He is the King of Mississippi, and now Louisiana as well, and commands an army of werevolves that have been around for centuries. He ends the ninth episode of this season by killing a news reporter on TV and telling everyone he is prepared to take over humanity. And that's about the most climactic his story gets. Considering how much Russell has been built up, it's remarkably easy for Eric and Bill to trick him, and it takes about 10 minutes. There's no fanfare. Shouldn't there be some vampires or wolves protecting him? Why the countless mentions of his wolf armies and flashbacks of Eric fighting them and then absolutely no mention of that again? I really don't get it. Maybe they're building up something especially epic for next season, but I don't have much faith in that. I just feel kind of disappointed.