True Blood Episode Recap: "You'll Be the Death of Me"

Well, True Blood's first season is over already — can you believe it? It's been a wild ride. Sunday's episode, titled "You'll Be the Death of Me," finally revealed the identity of Bon Temps' serial killer, which was good news for Jason, who had unwittingly confessed to the murders. Sam and Bill resumed their battle for Sookie's attention. We learned more about Tara's mysterious benefactor. Vampire marriage was legalized in Vermont. And at least one more — maybe two — of our beloved characters died. How did it all go down? Read more after the jump...

TARA
Tara enjoyed the generosity of a mysterious "good samaritan" named Mary Ann (Michelle Forbes), who bailed her out of jail when she was arrested for drunk driving in the wake of discovering that her exorcism was a sham. At Mary Ann's house, she met cute with the handsome musician Eggs (Mehcad Brooks), who is also staying at Mary Ann's house. Is this a future love interest for Tara?

MARY ANN
Well, as suspected, Mary Ann has a secret, and it's a doozy, but not one that we entirely understand just yet. In a perplexing scene, we saw her sitting in her backyard with a pot-bellied pig, with her eyes closed, vibrating. Yes, vibrating. What the heck was that all about? Also, when Tara introduced Mary Ann to Sam, Mary Ann pretended not to know him, but as soon as Tara wasn't looking, she snapped at him, "Did you think I wasn't going to find you? You silly, silly dog." Yikes!

JASON
Poor Jason spent most of this episode in jail, racking his tiny brain trying to figure out how he killed four women, including his grandmother and his girlfriend, Amy, without remembering any of it. He got a visit in the slammer from Orry Dawson (Michael Bofshever), a representative of an anti-vampire church called the Fellowship of the Sun. While Jason was initially resistant to Dawson's sales pitch, by the end of the episode, we saw him worshipping with the closed-minded faithful. It's a strange development considering his change of heart about both Bill and Eddie, and Jason is highly gullible, but surely he isn't that gullible, is he?

TERRY
Nothing much happened with PTSD-afflicted veteran Terry, but his presence in the finale made me wonder if Alan Ball isn't setting him up for a larger role in Season 2. "Nobody ever listens to me, but they should," he told Sookie, just as she was about to get in a car with Rene. Could he be some sort of unlikely soothsayer? It's always the village idiot, you know! He also told Arlene that her hair "is like a sunset after a bomb went off," which isn't really portentous, just funny.

SAM
Our favorite shapeshifter used his keen sense of smell to figure out who the killer was (hence all that rolling around in the sheets earlier in the season), and rescued Sookie when she got into hot water at the graveyard. By the end of the episode, he was taking huge quantities of money out of his safe for some reason. Was Sam going to run? And from whom?

RENE
Perhaps the most hilarious revelation of Sunday's True Blood finale is that the one character who was using the most relatively accurate-sounding Cajun accent was faking it. Yes, Rene (aka Drew Marshall) is the killer, and as the episode unfolded, we saw, through Sookie's thoughts, how he killed each of his victims for being vampire sympathizers. Arlene's kids conveniently found Rene's "box o' evidence" in the garage, which included videotapes of the murder victims and a "Cajun Accent for Actors" tape.

SOOKIE
Sookie knows that Jason isn't the killer, and spent the finale trying to figure out who is. When she finally zeroed in on Rene, mostly by getting inside his head and "witnessing" the murders, it was almost too late, as she had accepted a ride home from him and was in the process of pouring him a glass of sweet tea. After a short chase — through a cemetery, of course — and with an assist from Sam, in collie form, Sookie kills Rene with a shovel.

BILL
When Bill realized that Sookie was in trouble, he did the unthinkable and set out during daylight to save her. This, of course, isn't a sound idea for a vampire, and as he made his way toward the graveyard where Sookie and Rene tussled, he was burnt to a crisp by the sun. When Sam and Sookie discovered his ashy body, they buried him to get him out of the light. By the end of the finale, he was back to his old self, and let it slip that he fed on a human to regain his strength. (Who?) Bill also has a new woman in his life. Jessica, the young redhead he converted in the last episode (she's kind of the anti-Sookie), is such a handful that even Pam and Eric can't deal with her, so they unceremoniously dump her back in Bill's lap.

LAFAYETTE
Just when things seemed to calm down, Lafayette was attacked taking the garbage out to the Dumpster behind Merlotte's. Two weeks later, while his coworkers wonder aloud where he is, Andy Bellefleur — driven to drink by his shame for screwing up the investigation — found an African-American body with painted toenails in the back seat of his car. We don't get to see who it is that made Tara and Sookie scream, but technically it could be Lafayette, right?

What did you think of the finale? Which stories are you most looking forward to resolving?

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