I’m not sure which is worse. Bill Compton’s overly-preachy, righteous speeches when he’s actually on the right track — you know, the protect-humans-from-ruthless-vampires track — or his overly-preachy, holier-than-thou approach to his newfound religious zealousness. Bill has always been the character on True Blood who gets to be more right than everyone else. Even when he was banished from Sookie-land for lying to her, the series painted him with an air of innocence. There was still good in him, he was still right. Well, we’ve now had at least five or six episodes to truly mull this verdict over, and I think it’s safe to say it’s finally settled: there is nothing right about the new Bill Compton.
True Blood’s penultimate Season 5 episode finds Bill in a quandary. Well, it would be a quandary for most people with brains and hearts, but it seems Bill has lost both of those things. He can no longer think for himself, evidenced by his reaction to his repeated visions of Lilith in which she says she’s chosen him and that he, alone, must rule and do so by drinking all of her blood. Bill has yet to pick up the actual vial, but he goes as far as killing another chancellor when he, too, claims that Lilith chose him. The obvious reaction would be to think, “Hey, maybe these visions are complete lies and there’s something insane going on here.” But for some reason, our formerly sweet, righteous, courageous Bill is more concerned with attaining power than uncovering the game that is so obviously afoot.
By the end of the episode, Bill has decided he truly is the chosen one and right as Salome is having her matching Lilith vision, Bill is chastising Jessica, slapping her across the room, and justifying said actions by declaring himself the chosen one. Nope. That doesn’t sound like someone drunk with power. At all.
And as for Jessica, who didn’t really do anything wrong to deserve any chastising, she’s under house arrest in the Authority’s underground chambers until she devises a plan to get out and warn Jason about Russell Edgington and Steve Newlin. Because Bill has gone off the deep end and truly believes that humans are food and not creatures vampires can coexist with, Jessica says she’ll turn Jason into a vampire so they can be together. The interesting part of her little farce — other than the fact that Bill forces her to make good on it by sending her out with two armed guards so she can turn Jason — is that she says, quite simply, that she loves Jason and wants to be with him.
When she actually does find Jason and somehow formulates a plan to pretend to kill him, lay in the ground with him, and have him pop up and shoot the guards with wooden bullets (all without having said a word to one another, which is more miraculous than Sookie finding a clan of fairies living in Bon Temps), she tells him she really does want to spend eternity with him. Poor little baby vamp. She’s genuinely in love with Jason, but between feeding on him (even if it was to save him) and being the reason Hoyt is gone forever (Alaska is really, really, really far away, alright?), he seems to be completely done with her in every way possible. She’s so distraught about the whole thing, she’s even hoping to be actual friends with Tara, even after the baby vamp beat her up last time they decided to be friends. That, my friends, is desperation. Poor, impossibly-beautiful Jess.
