“I Found You” lets us spend some time with the Hep-V vampires, and what we get is pretty lacking, as they have less personality than vampires who we’ve seen on this show already. Like the premiere, the episode juggles multiple characters, but the pace is nowhere near as frantic as last week’s.

There’s a bit more control and we spend more time with characters, but we also get some pointless scenes that serve no purpose. And based on what the premiere set up, there’s a disappointing follow-up. The stakes right now don’t feel as high, but “I Found You” had more semblance of a plot than just a random assortment of scenes. This doesn’t mean the episode was a massive improvement, but it’s somewhat more coherent.

The episode begins…somewhere. Given what we know, the camera does a pretty poor job of trying to conceal the identity of the man we follow, who turns out to be Eric.

Jason shows up and tells Eric that he can’t get him out of his head. He’s not a fan of Eric’s lone wolf game. And Violet? Jason is still head over heels for her, but he can’t forget Eric. The two get on the bed and lock lips, shirts off, chests exposed for the world to see…

Wake up, Jason!

So after that dream sequence, Jason heads out of the congregation. Sookie, despite her passionate speech from a few minutes ago, still hears the biting thoughts of the populace that still looks down on her. She mentions the dead girl she found while walking home- a girl that she didn’t recognize. Sam hasn’t heard back from the Feds, so Bon Temps is on its own. The plan is for Sookie, Alcide, Sam, Andy and Jason to take a little road trip.

Before this, however, Reverend Daniels suggests that Sam give the people something to do since they’re still spooked after the attack. Something to alleviate their fears. Well, nothing’s better than good old fashioned service, so everyone’s to get to work on the restaurant so it’s spic and span when Arlene returns.

Adilyn also wants to help out, but Andy implores that she still not invite Jessica into their home.

At Fangtasia, the Hep-V vampires have few kind words for Ronnie, played by Dustin Ingram, the one who fed on Deputy Ellis. The vampires are desperate- they don’t want to die like animals.

One of the vampires, Betty, played by Lily Knight, goes down to check on the captives. She takes off with Belinda, while Arlene eyes her with a curious glance.

Sookie leads the others to the body which, after checking her actual ID and Starbucks card- thank you, Jason- belonged to one Marybeth Grant.

Lettie Mae pays Lafayette a visit. Mae still misses Tara and lets Lafayette know as such. After all, the two had a chance to make peace before Tara was ripped away from her. She’d love nothing more than to wrap her arms around her daughter one more time. Lafayette makes it known right away that he will not summon Tara, but that won’t be necessary. All she needs now is some vampire blood. Lafayette insists that Tara wants Mae to let her go, but Mae is well beyond that.

At the restaurant, Vince enters and goes on a long winded rant about how the good people of Bon Temps are being taken for fools. They shouldn’t be listening to the likes of Sam and Andy. And with law enforcement gone, Vince lets everyone know about Sam’s ability to shift, which Maxine confirms the one time she saw a bear and later saw Sam in its place. Pretty convenient of you to remember that now, Maxine. And Lou mentions Andy pointing a gun in his face, so the law is no longer on their side. Adilyn, meanwhile, leaves with one of the cleaners.

Back at Fangtasia, Betty returns downstairs. Holly and Arlene confirm what they suspected: Betty taught their children at one point. Betty, caught in a hard place, admits that she can’t show any sign of mercy or she’ll be killed. Arlene is quick to point out that Betty is going to die anyway. Very true. Betty repeats that she can’t help them, but Arlene cuts the bullshit and gets to her point: being chained in the basement of a vampire bar is not a dignified way to die. Betty at least knows her life is on the clock. With that, Betty tells Arlene that she’ll try and figure something out. This is before she drags off and feeds on another captive.

Sookie and company arrive in Saint Alice, Louisiana. And no word of a lie, the abandoned city looks like it came straight out of The Walking Dead with empty, looted buildings and warnings spray painted on almost every wall.

At Sookie’s call, the others come to her location for the trailer shot.

Oh, and to see a pit full of bodies.

Adilyn tells Kenya about the incoming mob. They begin taking out guns, but on cue, the mob arrives. Kenya stands her ground as an officer of the law. Vince stresses that the town is just exercising its Second Amendment right to defend itself. Really, True Blood? I know this is a town in the Southern part of the United States, but don’t you think that’s a bit too cliché? Anyway, a Black woman in the mob gets under Kenya’s skin by reminding her that she was meant to get a promotion, but Jason Stackhouse got it instead. See that, Kenya? You’re just a Black woman who is getting stepped on by the almighty White Man.

Rather than see through this as a blatant attempt to get a rise out of her, Kenya turns and arrests Adilyn. Well, she tries to, but gets a face full of fairy blast. The mob advances.

Jessica, meanwhile, senses that Adilyn is in trouble, but obviously, because it’s daytime, she can do nothing about it. She calls the police department, but as we now know, the department is under new management. She then calls Sookie, and we get a payoff to Sookie throwing her phone away during the previous episode when we see it ringing on the grass.

Speaking of Sookie, she and the others enter a ransacked home. From the looks of things, the vampires even kidnapped the humans in the middle of their pizza dinner. The bastards. Jason, whose sixth sense that allows him to judge time based on pizza taste, estimates that the attack took place two and a half days ago. The vampires must hit a town over and over again until the job’s done. All right, I don’t know what Jason ate to give him that ability, but I want some.

Upstairs, Andy and Jason talk. It should be noted that Jason is still eating a slice of the leftover pizza. Once all this business is over, Andy says, he’ll make an honest woman out of Holly. He was always bad at sticking with plans, but a man is nothing without his family. It’s only at this point that Jason tosses the pizza. Why not just finish it? He already started.

Sookie, meanwhile, reads Marybeth’s diary. Marybeth came upon a vampire named Henry, who she took to Fangtasia and began to know very well. Even though the comparison is clearly there for the audience to see…

…we get an obligatory flashback to Season One, specifically “Escape from Dragon House,” when Sookie first invited Bill to Fangtasia and insisted that it was not a date.

Yeah, Sookie thinks that Marybeth is just like her. As if we couldn’t tell that already. She reads on. After a church attack, people either died or disappeared.

Lettie Mae intentionally burns her hand in an attempt to get Willa to give her vampire blood. However, Willa has never been woken up before, so she attacks Lettie Mae in a rage before realizing what she’s done. Willa suggests that Lettie Mae do the sensible thing: go see a doctor. But Mae insists that it’s far too late for that. Despite Reverend Daniels insisting that Willa give Mae no more blood, she eventually concedes.

Mae then finds herself in a woodland setting and spots Tara on a cross with a snake slithering across her body. Tara begins speaking rapid fire in an undistinguishable language.

All right, then.

On the drive back to Bon Temps, Alcide tries to comfort Sookie by telling her that Marybeth isn’t like her. She shouldn’t beat herself up. Yeah, let the people of Bon Temps do that through their thoughts! Sookie thinks that Bon Temps could end up the same way as Saint Alice. Alcide believes that they don’t have to stay. They could just gas up their vehicle and drive into another series- I mean, drive somewhere else.

We head back to Fangtasia where the Hep-V vampires settle in for a 15 minute nap. Betty wants to be the sleep monitor. After all, she’s the weakest and she doesn’t trust Ronnie to do it, so she gets the title.

She heads back downstairs and is about to free the hostages, but she must feed first. Arlene is the lucky lady, and she’s even luckier when Betty reveals that she must feed from the femoral artery, which she does.

Then she melts.

Andy arrives home to the sound of Jessica’s voice. At first, he accuses Jessica of doing something to Adilyn, but Jessica, of course, did not. She’s still there to help. Once the sun goes down, she’s heading out to help her. The question is whether Andy will join her.

At House Stackhouse, Alcide prepares for a bit of shut-eye, but Sookie insists that he bathe first. Why does she have him do this?

So she can pay a visit to Bill, who she asks if he can still sense her fear.

Across the pond in Rhone Valley, France, Pam finds an un-fucking-believable sight before her eyes: an infected Eric Northman.

The strength of True Blood, to me, has never been its writing. Part of it has been about being as over the top as possible. Focusing on shock factor over quality, at times, has led to lazy writing and conveniences that come up just because the plot demands it.

The Hep-V vampires don’t come off as a serious threat or even that well organized. Hell, the wolves had a better sense of leadership than this. Even though they also fought, you got a sense of who led the wolf pack. Here, however, the vampires are too quick to talk over each other. We don’t know what they want other than to feed. But if that’s the case, just be done with the current crop of hostages and get new ones when night falls. Otherwise, I don’t get why they’d keep them alive.

It really is convenient that Arlene and Holly know one of the Hep-V vampires personally and that it happens to be the new reaper. It’s not impossible, but those are some pretty big odds. I did like Arlene trying to talk her way out of her situation and she had a point: Betty at least knows that she’s going to die soon. However, with Betty’s death, the hostages are no further than they were when they first got there. All they’ve done is scream and await death. Their numbers are thinned, but we’ve only lost characters that we barely got to know. And I don’t think this show, even in its last stages, will go as far as killing off Arlene or Holly before they can be rescued. They can axe off Nicole, though. I’d be fine with that.

But I guess the show did have the stones to kill off Tara. The only reason this bugs me is because it happened off-screen! Sure, it showed that literally no one was safe during the Hep-V vampires’ attack, but Tara has been with the show since it started. And the writers decide to kill her without at least letting us see it happen. And Lettie Mae hopped up on vampire blood would be more interesting if we hadn’t seen this done with other characters before, such as Jason in the first season.

As for mob rule, until these people start acting, I’m not too interested in their scenes. Ballsy of them to take matters into their own hands, but how far do these people actually expect to get against vampires?

The scene where they locked and loaded was pretty stupid, showcasing nothing more than, literally, the mob firing guns. Sure, the likes of Andy, Sam and Jason aren’t exactly what you’d call leadership material, but Vince and the mob are still breaking the law.

And I really don’t see why Kenya has any reason to be bitter about the promotion. If so, do the sensible thing and talk to Andy about it. Don’t wait for someone to bring it up while trying to coax you into joining a mob. But I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. The folks of Bon Temps aren’t really known for their intellect, so being gullible isn’t too far of a stretch.

For Sookie and pals, I assume they decided to take a break from Bon Temps to see what all this Walking Dead fuss was about. Seriously, the only thing Saint Alice needed was a few stray walkers.

Problem is that I don’t find it believable that a town within driving distance of Bon Temps would suddenly wind up empty without anyone noticing. Sure, that wouldn’t have serviced previous season story arcs, but people talk! They communicate. Heck, Sam himself said he tried to get in touch with the Feds. There’s no way these people vanished and no one was aware of it.

Briefly on Sookie. Her big speech at the end of last week’s episode apparently didn’t do anything since the folks still think down on her. So all that…well, I can’t even call it buildup since the premiere just awkwardly ended. But her talk didn’t amount to anything, so why even bother doing it?

And the similarities to Marybeth were so blatant from the diary entries that I wonder if the writers just wanted to fill up extra time in the episode, so they spliced in scenes from Season One. The writers aren’t giving the audience enough credit to figure this out on their own.

This episode wasn’t a complete mess, though. We did get some nice character moments with Andy and Jason. For example, I do like how Andy plans to become more responsible once this entire mess has been resolved. Granted, it shouldn’t have taken this one incident to spur that thought, but hey, it’s progress.

And Jason accidentally plucking Marybeth’s Starbucks card and using his pizza forensics skills in order to find out how long ago the vampires attacked? I couldn’t help but laugh at those moments.

Again, though, the scene with Eric only seemed to be there for fan service. It served no real purpose.

More than that, it kind of spoiled the reveal of Eric that we got at the end of the episode. I assume next time we’ll learn how and why he got infected. That and, you know, how he’s alive after burning!

This episode raised a lot of questions. Though the writing was shoddy at times, it had more of the humor I’d expect from True Blood and didn’t try to give equal screen time to every character. The Hep-V vampires still need to be fleshed out as characters since they don’t come off as a real threat. We know they’re dying, but they don’t seem to be in a state of desperation yet. Given how Sookie’s speech from last week didn’t work, mob rule is in control of Bon Temps for the time being. Though this episode has a lot of questions to answer, with this being the final season with fewer episodes, will we get answers to them? And even more so, will we even care at that point? I mean, we’ve stuck with the show for this long.