True Blood – Season 6 – review

Directors: Various

First aired: 2013

Contains spoilers

My thoughts on the earlier seasons can be read at the following: Season 1, Season 2, Season 3, Season 4 & Season 5.

If I felt that the 4th season of True Blood lost its way a little, I certainly think that season 5 pulled it back. We got a very vampire orientated season that showed some powerful vampires acting to excess and ended with Bill (Stephen Moyer, Ultraviolet & Priest) drinking all of the blood of Lilith (Jessica Clark), the first vampire, dying and being reformed. In this season we get almost an opposite storyline as humanity turns on the vampires and many get interned into a prison camp in which they are tortured and experimented on. There is a lot of new lore we get out of this season.

distance sucking

Firstly, with Bill. He soon gets control of himself but not necessarily of his new powers. He is very fast and can fly (as can the older vampires) and his pull when calling his progeny is nearly fatal if they try to resist. He has visions of Lilith and her handmaidens and also visions of events affecting vampires that turn out to be glimpses of the future. He is immune to staking but not, as he nearly fatally discovers, the sun. One really cool new trick is his ability to manipulate both inanimate objects and humans with telekinesis and suck the blood out of a person’s body, via the mouth, from a distance.

Eric prepares to turn a mortal

Through the camps we get a lot of new weaponry; silvered bullets with UV emission, which eats the vampires from outside in, supplement the wooden bullets we already knew about and seem somewhat Underworld. There are now contact lenses available that prevent glamouring and, in the most devastating move of all, the humans have developed Hep V – presumably a variant of Hepatitis D, which was always able to cause up to a month of weakness in a vampire. This is virulent and can kill a vampire rather quickly and painfully.

Rutger Hauer as Niall

The other new lore sits around Sookie (Anna Paquin) and her faery heritage. We discovered in the last season that she had been promised by an ancestor to an ancient vampire called Warlow (Robert Kazinsky). At the head of the season Jason (Ryan Kwanten) is picked up by a man we suspect to be him but it is actually their faery Grandfather Niall (Rutger Hauer, Dracula III: Legacy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Salem’s Lot & the Reverend). He has been hunting for Warlow but the vampire has remained hidden because he was a faery himself, who was turned by Lilith. This means he is able – due to his faery heritage – to walk in daylight. Bill believes this is the key to saving the vampires.

Warlow returns

To be honest there were some downsides to the season. I thought the Warlow and Sookie story was under developed and rushed. This made Warlow flip from bad guy to good guy and back again too abruptly. It was also a shame that Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) was somewhat sidelined – but better that than a poor storyline I suppose. The werewolf and shifter side of the story was very much a mopping up of the previous season’s story. However the vampire story made up for all this and led to some classic moments. Season 7 is planned as the last season and the vampire storyline has lead to an interesting place for that season.

7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.