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!!! Continue reading →