If True Blood has taught fans anything, it’s that nothing lasts forever – even immortal vampires.
After seven seasons, the HBO drama died the true death and ended on Sunday after 80 episodes of vampires, shape-shifters, werewolves, witches and fairies.
Warning: True Blood spoilers ahead for the final time.
As the final episode begins, Bill (Stephen Moyer) comes over to explain that he is choosing the true death to give Sookie a normal life with children. Sookie (Anna Paquin) protests and insists he should get help, but asks Bill to leave when he formally implores her to end his life with the last bit of fairy power she has left. His logic? Not only will he get to join his children and wife in the afterlife, but Sookie will also no longer be “catnip” to vampires because of her blood.
Meanwhile at Fangtasia, Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) chooses to release Sarah Newlin (Anna Camp) after he feeds her a bit of Pam’s blood as a tracking device of sorts. Once the source of the cure for Hep-V has escaped, Eric and Pam (Kristin Bauer Van Straten) kill Mr. Gus (Will Yun Lee) and his mob of hit men – including the ones lurking outside of Sookie’s house, waiting to kill the blond former waitress.
Pam finds Sarah hiding out at the carousel where Eric had turned Willa (Amelia Rose Blaire). Sarah asks Pam to change her into a vampire, but Pam refuses.
Back in Bon Temps, Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) and her on-again boyfriend Hoyt (real-life blood drinker Jim Parrack) come to pay a visit to Bill so they can say their final goodbye to the man who turned her into a vampire.
Taking the “liberties” of a dying man, he asks Hoyt if he has intentions of marrying Jessica, and to the redhead’s surprise Hoyt asks her to be his bride. Jessica is worried that Hoyt doesn’t know her at all because he had all memory of her wiped from his brain after she cheated on him with his best friend Jason. Bill explains that you sometimes know in an instant that someone is right for you, and he just wants to make sure she is spoken for after he is gone. Jessica ultimately decides that she wants to marry Hoyt, and she wants to do it today!
The rain begins to fall back at Sookie’s, and she recalls a moment from her childhood with her grandmother and her best friend Tara. In the flashback, Gran (Lois) asks Tara to hold Sookie to the promise that she will not let her special fairy problems ever affect her normal life. Sookie goes to visit Jason and tells him what Bill has asked of her. She is not sure if she wants to end Bill’s life and is also wrestling with the fact that she would lose her fairy powers for good. Their conversation is interrupted with calls for both Sookie and her brother from Jessica and Hoyt asking for a wedding dress and best-man duties.
Sheriff Bellefleur (Chris Bauer) is set to officiate the ceremony and is reminded by Bill that as his distant but closest heir, he will inherit Bill’s house. The vampire asks the lawman to rent the home to Hoyt and Jessica for the reasonable price of $1 a month.
With Bill by her side, Jessica walks down the aisle to marry the man of her dreams. As Bill takes his seat, Sookie begins to hear Bill’s thoughts (something she wasn’t able to do when he was a strong vampire). A few tears are shed at the ceremony, but only happy ones. After the wedding, Jason is set to drive Brigette (Ashley Hinshaw) to the airport but is convinced by Sookie that Hoyt’s recent ex-girlfriend may be someone worth fighting for despite the tangled web they are a part of.
Sookie drives her deceased boyfriend Alcide‘s truck over to the church to get some words of guidance from Reverend Daniels (Gregg Daniel). She says she wants to lead a normal life but the reverend tells her that she has saved the town more than once because of who she is and God would want her to use the brain he gave her. She leaves the church with a sense of calm and agrees to meet Bill at the cemetery at sundown.
In a black dress very different from the stark white one she wore on her first date with Bill so many years before, she stands before a freshly dug grave and waits for Bill to arrive. When Bill arrives, she asks him why the grave has a coffin in it. He tells her that since he was presumed dead after the civil war, they buried an empty coffin underneath his tombstone.
Bill and Sookie share a long embrace and a passionate kiss before Bill thanks her and opens the centuries-old coffin. In it, he finds a picture of himself and his daughter. As he crawls into his final resting place he tells Sookie, “I’m ready.” To which Sookie says, “Bill, I will never forget you.”
And with a ball of flashing light emitted from her hand, Sookie is about to end his life before realizing that her fairy-ness is a part of her that she is not ready to part with. Bill expresses he still wishes to die, so Sookie breaks the handle of a shovel and straddles Bill in his coffin. “I love you Bill Compton,” she says. He responds, “I love you, too,” before he guides the stake into his heart with Sookie’s help. And with that, Bill is gone.
Covered in blood, Sookie walks tall out of the cemetery as the scene fades to black.
But that was not the end of True Blood. In a flash-forward, Eric and Pam film an infomercial for their New Blood and three years later they are ruling the stock market. The following Thanksgiving, a pregnant Sookie is cooking dinner. Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell) arrives with his daughter and a new baby, as do Jason and Brigette with their three kids.
Over at Fangtasia, Eric is ruling his throne as he did when the HBO series began in 2008, and Pam is charging $100,000 per minute to those who want to sip Sarah’s blood straight from the source. Back at Sookie’s, the entire town has gathered to give thanks. Arlene (Carrie Preston) and her vampire boyfriend Keith (Riley Smith), and Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) and his vampire boyfriend James (Nathan Parsons) are just a few of the happy faces sitting around the table when a man in a beard walks up and kisses Sookie.
The man’s face is never shown, but Sookie’s smile says it all. She’s found happiness.