The only thing worse than an annoying character is an all-powerful annoying character with no apparent weaknesses. In preparation for tonight’s True Blood season finale, I’m going to kvetch a bit.

In season 3 of True Blood, Sookie et al had to contend with the 3,000-year-old, entirely-psychotic vampire Russell Edgington. Basically, no character could do much of anything to hurt him, at least physically, on their own. The only explanation ever given for this, as best I can recall, was that he is over 3,000 years old. Evidently, vampires only get better with age. It was only through a collective effort that the main characters were able to weaken Russell by getting him into the sun, and then they proceeded to not kill him. I still don’t get that. I suspect that the producers wanted to keep his character on the back burner for the time when they decided to start phoning it in, e.g. season 5. (Seriously, how do you bring back Russell when Roman barely had a chance to do anything yet?)

Now, in season 5, a group of religious fanatic vampires who never seem to leave their conference room have brought Russell back to assist with their whatever-the-hell-they’re-doing, and Russell has entirely predictably gone off the deep end and freaked everybody way the fuck out. Setting aside the question of how the characters didn’t see that coming, were the producers expecting the viewers to be surprised? Once again, no one can stand against Russell because (cue inscrutable accent) he is over 3,000 years old!!!

Then, after the show spends a good bit of time building up the Elder Fairy as the only one who can face Russell, Russell offs her in a matter of seconds. Meh.

It was fun to watch Russell for roughly the first half of season 3, but eventually an all-powerful character gets boring. (Not everyone agrees with me.) If Superman didn’t have kryptonite, the story would have gotten dull pretty fast. If Eric Draven in The Crow didn’t rely on the actual crow for his invincibility, it would have been a story about a ghost who kills a lot of people and never breaks a sweat. If you are entertained by that, I do not want to know you.

Here’s the deal, as far as I am concerned: superpowers have to have limits, and magic has to have rules. Gandalf couldn’t conjure indefinitely without getting tired, for example.

The best example of this to me is the final fight scene in The Matrix Revolutions between Neo and the original Agent Smith. Under the conditions they have created in the Matrix, they cannot do anything to hurt one another. All they do is destroy buildings and create craters for what feels like half the movie. They even bounce off of each other several times. It takes some sort of deus ex machina that never made much sense to me for Neo to defeat Smith.

The X-Men movies sort of have this problem with Logan/Wolverine, considering he has survived several gunshots directly to the head. They make up for that, in my opinion, my making him feel the full pain of every fast-healing injury, and by making him a deeply-flawed, emotionally-troubled character. For every physical wound that heals, an emotional scar is left behind. Or something like that.

The best subversion of this I ever saw was in the otherwise-abominable League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, when the immortal Dorian Gray is fighting the vampire-like Mina Harker. Every time they sustain a wound, it immediately heals, prompting Gray to remark “We’ll be at this all night.”

True Blood breaks the rule I made up with the whole concept of glamouring, too. A vampire can pretty much control a human’s actions or thoughts through glamouring, and they never really set any limits. The simple fact that the vampires don’t do this all the time suggests that it does have limits, but they are never explicitly stated to my knowledge.

Setting aside all the other issues I have with this season of True Blood, we are basically right back where we were two seasons ago, with Russell Edgington running loose, causing mayhem, and reminding anyone who tries to stop him that no one can hurt him because he’s old and stuff. If the Vampire Authority has any sense, they will institute some sort of Logan’s Run-type rule that prevents vampires from getting that old, since it obviously has negative psychological effects. Regardless, Russell needs to just die already, because it’s getting boring.

Photo credit: Russell Edgington, copyright HBO, via trublood91 on Tumblr.