Why I Didn't Hate the 'True Blood' Finale (EDITORIAL)

WHY I DIDN'T HATE THE 'TRUE BLOOD' FINALE

The final season of True Blood hasn't exactly been a story cohesively told. In-between fleeting moments of fun, the season fell victim to failed poignancy, forgotten primary characters, inexplicably highlighted secondary (and even tertiary) characters, and narrative ends that didn't really justify the means they took to get there.

For example, Tara gets offed at the start of the season, building to...what, exactly? Redemption for a character whom the audience has never been given cause to root for, in Lettie Mae? I don't think I ever would have believed it if you'd told me back in Season 1 that Tara would last seven seasons just to get killed offscreen in a story that amounts to seismic nothing. I'd have been similarly shocked if you'd told me Alcide would get killed by some random nobody, with his death ending up largely forgotten by season's end. Meanwhile, I'd have been downright confused if you'd told me Sam would move to Chicago with little fanfare, resigning as Mayor and disappearing into the ether with his pregnant girlfriend of less than a year. But I would have called you something you'd never be able to repeat in good company if you'd told me that Lafayette wouldn't even have a single line in the final episode, despite being alive, happy, and totally right over there. Hell, I'd have even been shocked if you'd told me Arlene's endgame romance was with some random, 500-year-old vampire named Keith. I suppose I'm just easy to shock.

Credit: HBO

But, despite all this, I wouldn't have been shocked at all if you'd told me the finale was going to disappoint a lot of people, nor would I have been surprised to learn that a lot of fans would find it to be a downright stupid -- if not insulting -- finale. But I'm not really one of those who was all that disappointed by it. Because, frankly, I'm not sure I ever expected anything better than this.

I don't mean to say that True Blood is a bad show, because I liked it. Quite a lot, actually. If nothing else, True Blood was a show that always seemed to know what it was, and often indulged in the deliriously campy, insane aspects of its gory, pulpy, sex-drenched storytelling. So when I say I didn't really expect better than this, it's because I never put True Blood on the level of a Breaking Bad. There was no huge standard for me to hold it to, because it never deluded itself into thinking it was some prestige program in the first place.

Credit: HBO

I'm going to get a bit into spoilers for the finales of Lost and How I Met Your Mother, as points of comparison. I'll try and be brief, but hey, spoilers ahoy.

Now, a lot of people hated the finale of Lost when it aired, and I'm not sure I blame them, even though I was actually pretty fond of it, myself.

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse fell into the same trap that a lot of series with "bad finales" fall into: they don't realize that their show has outgrown its endgame. They set out with a plan, and stick to that plan in the final season, convinced that it's all going to tie together. But they don't realize that the ending they have planned no longer fits with where these characters are in their development, or where the viewer is, in their own reading of the show. I'm sure the "Flash Sideways" concept (and that ending in the multi-denominational church) worked on paper, but it was always going to come across to fans like a Hail Mary pass back to that Purgatory ending you promised us it wasn't going to be. People were mad because they felt they were sold a false bill of goods -- first by the show hooking them on the mysteries, and then by Cuse/Lindeloff saying "But it was never about the mysteries!" Now, I enjoyed the characters, and I've come to understand that there never was, nor would there realistically have ever been a satisfactory explanation for what the Island was, why it worked the way it did, or why anything happened the way it did. But I feel like the series finale to Lost fundamentally misread audience expectations by presenting a finale that pretended everyone had been watching a different show than what they had actually been watching. Because that final season was far less about the characters than the mysteries at the heart of their circumstances. So it made sense that people were mad that so much was left unexplained.

How I Met Your Mother's finale had a similar problem, plagued by the incongruity between its finish line and the race track that preceded it over the course of nine seasons. It wasn't an awful finale because Ted went back to Robin. It was awful because it no longer made sense for Ted to go back to Robin. He'd outgrown that endgame, and to keep on that track is to essentially say that Ted didn't really experience any growth over the nine years we were with him. The show was basically just saying he was detoured from his destiny by this pesky Mother we keep hearing so much about. You know, that woman who turned out to be absolutely WONDERFUL? Seriously, don't cast Cristin Milioti as The Mother and make her adorable if you want me to actually be happy that Ted's endgame is Robin. And I say that as a man who thinks the sun rises and sets on Coby Smulders's smile).

They could have made a Ted-Robin finale work by laying the groundwork for it earlier than they did. But the final season went out of its way to hammer home that Ted was definitively, positively, absolutely over Robin. Hell, it was practically the singular theme of the season, even more than Ted inevitably getting together with The Mother. It was the story of how he let go of Robin, and how that decision allowed him to meet the love of his life. But then the finale tells us that, well, no. The love of Ted's life was the girl he was trying to get over all along, and he was just temporarily sidetracked by this bass player he ended up having kids with.

In much the same way Lost tried -- at the last moment -- to sell that the show was never about the mysteries, HIMYM tries -- again, at the last moment -- to sell that the show was not only not about The Mother, but it was never really about how Ted met The Mother either. And, frankly, that's bull.

Credit: HBO

Yet True Blood never had this problem. Sure, we took a bit of a detour away from the love/hate relationship between Sookie and Bill, as Sookie hooked up with an amnesiac Eric, Bill became a god with a best-selling book, and Bon Temps residents continued to be blissfully unaware of how bonkers their town is to anyone from a halfway-normal place. But, at the end of the day, True Blood was basically always about Sookie and Bill: their love, their hatred, their passions and plights, their connections and conflicts. It was their show, so it made sense for this to be their finale. I can see now, in retrospect, why the final season spent so much time on those seemingly pointless flashbacks to Bill's life in the antebellum (and postbellum) South, as it illustrated the penetrating sense of decay on Bill's mind and soul. More than ever, he was beginning to feel like an anachronism, a piece from a different time that didn't belong in the present. I'm sure, on a possible rewatch, this entire character arc will play out a bit better, particularly since we know there's no 11th hour save coming for Bill. When he asks Sookie to kill him, and we go through the motions of Bill settling up his accounts with those he loves, we'll already know it's the end. We won't be expecting a rescue, and we'll be able to see the ending for what it was supposed to be: the culmination of a love affair that isn't exactly prestige television, and hasn't even been tolerable all that often, but has always been an integral part of the show around which it was centered.

Credit: HBO

And that's so much more than I can say for some other series finales, even while I don't necessarily think this was a great finale by any means. Was it awful? I certainly didn't think so. Hell, I was entertained for the entire hour-plus, whether it was from Eric killing Mr. Gus, Hoyt and Jessica tying the knot, Jason starting a family, or Eric/Pam becoming millionaires by going public on the New York Stock Exchange with New Blood. But I suppose it's in our blood to expect more from a "goodbye". Even when it's from someone silly whom we might have always taken for granted, like True Blood. I don't know what version of this finale would have pleased the most people, but I thought we got exactly the finale that felt right for this show, if only because it was about what this show has always been about. Basically, the worst finales are the ones where the show essentially tries to pretend that it's not the show you've been watching all these seasons. But this finale never pretended as though we were watching prestige television. And that's why I can't really hate this True Blood finale. Because True Blood has always been this campy, this cloyingly sentimental, this vigorously ridiculous. And for that reason, I'm actually going to miss True Blood quite a bit.