‘True Blood’ showrunner and director gives inside scoop on episode 8 “Dead Meat”

If there are words for True Blood’s eighth episode they would be violent, disturbing, confusing, depressing, and horrifying…all in one. We saw the uncomfortable death of Ms. Suzuki, Sookie weighing her odds with promising herself to Warlow, and Eric losing complete and utter control.

Showrunner Brian Buckner and director Michael Lehmann go behind the scenes of some of the episode’s highlights and discuss their intentions as to what the episode accomplished. Here’s some insight we gained about the episode.

1. The death of Ms. Suzuki was the highlight in the episode. Not that the spokeswoman and Tru Blood manufacturer was at all a major character, but the way Sarah Newlin violently chased her down and struck her with a high heel to her death was so unexpected and showed just what measures she will take in order to protect her vamp camp from being exposed. Buckner says the writer of the episode always wanted to do a girl fight scene where it’s not as easy as it looks in the movies to kill someone, as shown by Sarah struggling to twist Ms. Suzuki’s neck. Lehmann called the scene “the most fun, the most bizarre and most violent event.”

2. Sookie can’t find any reason to stay human. Lehmann says the standout scenes to him in the episode were the ones where Sookie is preparing herself for the big decision she’s about to make – by Warlow agreeing to help Bill she must promise herself to Warlow for eternity. It’s a very emotional arc for Sookie as a character and more so as a human being. She tries to find an answer and any reason to stay human by paying visits to Sam, Bill, and her parents’ graves. Bill is unfathomed by Sookie’s speech and her potential to become a vampire. She hopes that Sam, one of the only non-vampires in her life, will give her some sort of hope to stay human but does not find it. Finally, she visits the graves of her own mother and father who wanted her dead. Lehmann says, “The memory from mom and dad might have prevented Sookie from saying yes to Warlow, but because she’ learned what she learned that they wanted to kill her to prevent her from becoming vampire, she’s like ‘I’m not going to lie beside you if you were willing to do this to me.’

3. Bill and Eric are no longer on the same team. If there’s anything to set off Eric it’s insulting Godric. And that’s just what Bill did to elicit some sort of response. Unfortunately for Bill it was not the right kind of response he hoped for and instead sets him up to drink Adeline’s blood and almost drain Warlow. As Lehmann puts it, Eric’s got something up his sleeve and he’s definitely devising a plan of his own.

Check out the full inside scoop down below and our recap of the episode here. True Blood airs Sunday at 9pm EST on HBO.

Image: YouTube screenshot