“Karma.” What an apt episode title name. That or “Irony” would do it. While True Blood, I feel, still hasn’t found its footing this season and still has a scattered plot, this episode had some nice character moments and a few surprises in an episode that shows, in the end, that what goes around, comes around.

The episode begins immediately following Eric’s battle with the Yakuza. In fact, he’s still carrying around the face as a souvenir. Through blurred vision, he spots more Yakuza, but deals with them. Before another battle can begin, some Yakuza bring forth Pam, her neck wrapped in silver chains.

The two are brought to the Yakamono Headquarters and are placed in a room with a view. A man places a clock counting down how many hours remain until dawn. How about that? All this madness, but Eric and Pam still find time to have their first sunrise together. Very romantic.

A few states over, Bill makes a phone call and sets an appointment. Jessica enters the house and overhears Bill state that he’s Hep-V positive, but he’s unaware that she’s returned. When Bill prepares to leave, he simply tells Jessica that he’s fine when asked about his condition.

Since the good Reverend will be knocked out for some time, Lettie Mae’s shacking at Lafayette’s, as is James. Lettie Mae still believes that Tara is speaking to her and needs some of James’ blood. Surprisingly, James offers it up, but Lafayette, still against this, decides that he will trip alongside Lettie Mae. This is the last time, however, and it’s only for closure.

Outside of his home, Jason prepares to face Violet. He heads in and finds lit candles all around. Violet walks out in a very skimpy and sexy outfit- all as a surprise for Jason. But more than that, she wanted to show Jason how much she appreciates him. She came from a different time, but she can adjust to this one just fine. Jason should feel in control. Even though she still knows that Jason is hers, she belongs to him, as well.

Bill drives to Kapneck Law Offices and finds it packed. The clerk, who sounds like he’s been here for quite some time, just tells Bill to take a number and have a seat. The wait is only five to seven hours.

As Eric and Pam await their oncoming death, a man enters the room. This is the North American President of Yakanomo, Mr. Gus, played by Will Yun Lee. Yakanomo is now bankrupt and he needs Pam and Eric’s help to rectify the situation, mainly by providing the location of Sarah Newlin. Eric won’t cough up anything and gets into a prick measuring contest with Gus over who can be the bigger prick and who gets to kill Sarah first.

The heat is literally on as the sun begins to rise. As she and Eric begin to turn red, Pam, rational, lovely Pam, breaks up the argument. While Gus and Eric fight, Sarah Newlin gets the last laugh. If the two don’t make a deal, they’ll all lose. So the deal is Eric will kill her, but Gus gets the body. A deal is reached just before Eric and Pam burn to death. Time to pay Amber a visit.

Sarah beats them to it. After some breaking and entering, Sarah enters the house, but Amber gets the jump on her. This is before she starts vomiting blood and passes out on the ground.

Jessica calls Jason, who slips away to the kitchen- and away from Violet- to talk with her. She needs Jason to find Sookie and bring her as soon as possible, but can’t say why just yet. When Jason leaves, Violet reacts how you’d expect her to: destroying the room.

Andy overhears Adilyn and Wade making sweet love. How sweet. He storms into the room, throwing the two into a panic and sending Wade out of the house. Naked. Andy demands that Wade keep away from Adilyn, while Holly comes to her son’s defense. She and Wade leave in a huff.

Someone apparently didn’t tell Sookie that the next episode started, because she’s fast asleep like the series had already ended. Jason comes in and wakes her up, but she’s still pretty groggy. Jason tells Sookie to answer her phone, and Sookie should probably tell everyone that she ditched her phone.

In Dreamland, Lettie Mae and Lafayette take Tara down from the cross. She repays them by running off. All right.

Sam comes in as Nicole finishes a conversation over the telephone. Nicole plans to leave and go home because she just doesn’t belong in Bon Temps. Hallelujah. I could not agree any more. However, she also wants Sam to come with him, even though this crazy town is the only place where he’s ever felt safe. That, in and of itself, may be crazy. Anyway, Nicole’s parents will come to get her tomorrow.

At Bill’s, Jessica fills Jason and Sookie in on what she heard. Jason still thinks that Bill, given his abilities from last season, should be able to survive. Sookie has a brief flashback to the night Alcide died, when she wound up covered in Hep-V vampire blood, after she’d cut herself to draw the vampires. Sometime after that, Bill did feed on her, so it’s possible that she infected him. However, now she needs to get tested, just to be sure.

Holly and Arlene arrive at Bellfleur’s, which is still trashed from the night Vince’s mob trashed it. Pity that no one bothered to clean it up, but hey, not like Holly and Arlene have anything else to do.

Back at the clinic, Bill listens as other vampires talk of the early stages of Hep-V. He looks down and sees that the virus has quickly spread to his arms.

Sookie, however, is already being seen. The nurse, played by Mandy Levin, packages Sookie’s blood, which is sitting right along many other vials. Sookie should receive a call later on in the day with the results. When she meets up with Jason, Sookie tells him that she would rather go anywhere but home right now.

Back in Dreamland, Lettie Mae and Lafayette continue to chase Tara, but can never catch her. Not sure why. She’s not moving that fast. They finally stop when they see Tara digging in the yard of a house, the house they used to stay in when Tara was young.

The dream ends when Reverend Daniels wakes Lettie Mae up. Lafayette breaks up the fight, telling the Reverend that he didn’t believe Lettie Mae either, but after going on the V-trip, he’s convinced that Tara is trying to tell them something. So now they must go to the old house to find out what Tara wants them to know. The Reverend won’t stand for this, so he gives Mae a choice: him or her dead daughter. Mae chooses dead daughter.

Andy arrives at Bellfleur’s so he and Holly can argue about those crazy kids and their sex thing. Arlene the Mediator tells them that this is the least of their problems. After all, Adilyn and Wade are at that age.

Sookie and Jason have a moment to talk about their past love lives. Despite everything that’s happened, Sookie can still sense Bill’s presence. There’s just something about your first true love. Jason, however, doesn’t feel much when he’s with Violet. In fact, he’s sometimes afraid of her, even though love shouldn’t make you scared of anyone. After all, none of us know how much time we have left, so that time shouldn’t be spent with someone you don’t love. With that, Jason plans to have a talk with Violet.

However, Sookie receives the phone call she’s been waiting for. We don’t hear it, but just based on her reaction and facial expressions alone, it’s not good news.

After seeing that the virus has spread over his chest, Bill’s turn finally arrives and he meets Madeline Kapneck, played by Kathleen York. Bill gets to the point: he wants to turn over his entire estate to his progeny. The problem is that the state doesn’t recognize vampire progenies. Bill’s will was drafted in 1894, but he was turned in 1865. Technically, Bill was impersonating a human at the time he drafted his will. The only real option would be for Bill to adopt Jessica, but such a process could take five months to a year. Obviously, Bill doesn’t have time for that, so Ms. Kapneck offers to move Bill to the front of the line…for the modest sum of $10 million.

In response to extortion, Bill tries to glamour Ms. Kapneck, but like Eric’s attempt on the Governor last season, it falls flat. The humans are learning, it seems. Kapneck doesn’t see herself in the wrong. Vampires have had centuries at to live as they please. Humans don’t have as much time, so she shouldn’t be at fault for wanting to make some cash.

Well, since glamouring didn’t work, Bill settles on murder instead. A messier alternative, really.

Holly and Andy head back to confront Adilyn and Wade, but the two are missing. I mean, it’s pretty clear from the moment the two don’t get a response that Adilyn and Wade probably aren’t there. They wanted to be alone, so they swore Rocky to secrecy about their location. That works until Holly threatens to gut him, even though they’d never find out if she did that.

Back in Texas, Amber wakes up to find Sarah still there. Sarah needs a place to hide and Amber, of course, is insulted that Sarah had the nerve to show her face after everything she’s done. Sarah has gone spiritual, however. After finding a place where she didn’t exist, Sarah has made peace with herself.

Oh, and there’s an antidote to the Hep-V virus. She drank it all, as we see in a flashback. Hence, she is the antidote.

Jason is ready to confront Violet, but he won’t have to. Her room is a wreck, but she did at least leave a note, telling him that their relationship just wasn’t working. Jason is excited, to say the least.

So where is Violet? She’s watching Wade and Adilyn, who are literally sitting in a tree house, not F-U-C-K-I-N-G, but just K-I-S-S-I-N-G. All right, they’re lying down, but close enough.

Violet warns the two about being out so late at night, especially since Adilyn’s fairy scent could be tracked by other vampires. Violet offers her protection, but just to be safe, she has Wade and Adilyn toss their phones so they won’t be traced. Sounds reasonable.

Eric, Pam and the Yakuza are all ready to pay Sarah Newlin a visit. What they’re not prepared for is the sight of a now fully healed Amber, which was kind of obvious, given how the camera followed Amber from the back, never showing her face.

The episode comes to a close as Bill enters his home. He’s greeted by the sight of the visibly upset and tear-stained faces of Sookie and Jessica.

Again, this was an aptly named episode. What goes around definitely came around this week. After last week’s mostly focused episode, “Karma” went back to multiple storylines, and I understand that the show needs to wrap up as many threads as possible before the series ends, but the execution is still weak, in my opinion. In fact, most of the subplots felt like filler compared to the larger stories that involved either Eric and Pam or Sookie and Bill dealing with the Hep-V virus.

While I’m not a fan of the multi-story episodes, they do at least build off of what happened at the party last week. The characters tackled the inevitability of life and how to make the most of a shitty situation. Some things you can try to avoid or yell your way out of, as Holly and Andy attempt to do, or you can take the proactive approach with Eric and Pam by trying to fix your problem. We can’t stop the inevitable, but we can sure as hell try. But if you’re too late, the most you can try to do is salvage what’s left while remembering the good times you had, but squandered because you got distracted.

So we got a payoff to Sookie being covered in Hep-V blood. Though she told Alcide that she never got any in her mouth, it was still on her body. It’s very possible that the disease would spread through direct contact, but maybe Sookie thought the virus only hit vampires. After all, vampires were the only ones that we saw infected.

And it’s even worse because she’s the cause of bringing pain to the man who has come to know her better than most. I don’t know what Sookie could have done differently, but she at least took the time to get herself tested, rather than just blaming herself on a hunch. Throughout the season, we’ve watched Sookie use others for something that she needed, mainly getting rid of the Hep-V vampires. Now the very sickness that infected vampires is inside of her.

I appreciate the moments she got to spend with Jason that didn’t involve any craziness- it was just a brother and sister having conversations, which I like. They could be people for a few moments and not constantly worry about some supernatural threat. And the way they talk of their first loves gave them something to bond over. For once, the characters could reminisce without the use of flashbacks.

So it looks like Jason might want to give things another shot with Jessica. This I’m fine with. I think Jason and Jessica could have potentially worked out the first time, if not for the drama with Hoyt. That said, the man should not be elated over Violet breaking up with him via letter. If her destruction is significant of anything, it’s that she’s not done yet. But I do agree that he doesn’t feel anything for her anymore. Hell, the woman gave him a blowjob and he didn’t even flinch. I said during “Fire in the Hole” that I didn’t understand Violet’s beef with Jessica and that it felt like forced drama. Now Violet actually has a reason to be pissed at Jessica, but I don’t think the writers were being clever or trying to foreshadow this.

And really, what are Violet’s intentions? If she wanted to drain Adilyn, she could have just done it. Surely she doesn’t just want Adilyn and Wade to suffer.  I mean, that’d be too easy. And cliché.

As for Andy and Holly, I can’t say I’m all that interested in their arc. It’s not out of character for them to bicker, I just wish it was more interesting than ‘the kids are having sex’ stuff. However, given everything they’ve been through, this is probably the most normal thing to happen to them. Savor this.

Arlene seems to have gone through a complete transformation since her dungeon experience. I almost want to call this shift too sudden, but given how she was on the verge of death, I suppose it’s not too unrealistic that she would actually want to turn her life around, with her being the voice of reason and moral compass when Andy and Holly can’t seem to get along.

So Nicole wants out. Good. No, really. Good riddance and I hope she doesn’t run into any sort of distraction that would keep here there. I don’t think I’ve disliked a character on this show as much as I do Nicole. She feels like a distraction. She says she doesn’t belong and I can’t really blame her. I wouldn’t have as big of an issue with her as I do if she hadn’t made that comment last season about her grandparents being the ones to kick off the Civil Rights Movement, essentially making her family pioneers in a movement that spanned decades before that.

That’s what made me hate the character, even though that’s just one line. And she can’t leave soon enough for me. While it would be good for Sam to find some normalcy, I hope it’s because he actually wants to, not just because he feels obligated to Nicole and their unborn child. Hell, now that Nicole is with child, she and Sam have even more to lose, should they fail. To give credit where credit is due, she was spot on with her comments during the party: celebrating life during so much chaos is maddening. I just don’t care about her or Sam’s plot, really.

The same can be said for Lettie Mae. All right, now she wants to be the good mother? Not until she lost the person most precious to her does she now want to play a role in helping her. Sucks that the Reverend was left out to dry, but he gave her a choice. In the end, Lettie Mae chose family. Dead family, but family. It’s a clear choice for her, but it’s also certainly a late one. The only thing keeping this plot interesting to me is Lafayette’s involvement. The fact that Rutina Wesley’s name still appears in the credits makes it seem as if the writers are going to try and bring her back.

As for Bill, I like that he’s trying to pass off his legacy to Jessica. It makes sense, given that he’s her maker, but aside from Sookie, Jessica is one of the few people who Bill actually trusts. We’ve watched Bill flash back to his family life during the Civil War to show the importance of family to him. The possibility of losing your current family would be enough to throw someone into a frenzy, but Bill at least tries to salvage what he has.

We could have done without the political context, though. That’s something I feel True Blood has never been able to do right, even when Russell went on live television. We get that vampires are an oppressed people. Don’t beat us over the head with the message that’s pretty obvious. Bill murdering Ms. Kapneck may have been excessive. True, she tried to extort him out of his money, and glamouring didn’t work, but there were other people still at the center. Surely someone saw or heard him, right? Right?

It’s becoming repetitive for me to say that Eric and Pam are my favorite part of the episode. Their banter energizes the scenes and the two have been the most consistently entertaining part of the season. I like how exasperated Eric was when he thought he’d have to endure another fight. And like how the virus spread quickly to Bill, we saw a glimpse of it worsening Eric’s condition through his hazy vision.

And for as much as Pam doesn’t give a shit about almost anything, good on her to keep a level head when her maker almost got them burned due to his pig head. There’s no point in everyone fighting each other when Sarah Newlin is their common enemy.

But how ironic is it for Sarah to be the key to the Hep-V virus? I hope this doesn’t just become a repeat of last season, where the vampires fed off of Bill just so they could survive in the sun for a while. Sarah is living in her own world and can’t see things for how they truly are. Amber was correct when she said that Sarah couldn’t just pretend like all of the horrible things she’s done just didn’t happen. With Sarah downing the antidote, I can’t tell if she did it out of desperation, if she’s that clever or just stupid. She had to know that vampires would come after her if they ever learned about this. But this at least guarantees that she won’t die as early as she may have previously thought, now that she’ll be of use.

“Karma” was all right. Not bad or great. Like “Lost Cause,” it had its good and bad moments. This one I’d rank under that because the storylines involving Sam and Nicole, Andy, Arlene and Holly, and to an extent, Lettie Mae, just weren’t as interesting as the other plots. But, again, the Eric and Pam stuff made for more interesting television. There’s a lot of set-up with Sookie now knowing that she may have infected Bill, not to mention Sarah being the ultimate cure. As bad as True Blood is this season, they still find a way to sneak in one or two little bits that keep me interested.

Any questions, comments, concerns, issues, complaints? Would like to hear them, if’n you have any.