True Blood Guide, Season 1: “Escape From Dragon House” with Commentary from Alan Ball

Bill and Sookie visit Fangtasia

This week on Channel 4 in the UK, watch episode four from season one, Escape From Dragon House. Another killing in Bon Temps finds Jason back in custody with officers Andy (Chris Bauer) and Bud (William Sanderson). Tara gets him off the hook, but neither she nor Lafayette has the antidote to his current ailment. Urged by Gran to use her telepathic abilities to weed out the murderer and exonerate her brother, Sookie persuades Bill to take her to a Shreveport vampire bar called Fangtasia, where she impresses a dominant Nordic bloodsucker named Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) with her prescient powers. Later, Bill demonstrates his own considerable powers when an abusive patrolman stops the couple on their way home.

Written by Brian Buckner; directed by Michael Lehmann.

Alexander Skarsgard as 'Eric Northman'

ALAN BALL: Jason has the “V” adventure [drinking vampire blood has a hallucinogenic effect]. I loved that. I thought that was really funny, and Brian Buckner who wrote that episode pitched that, and I thought that was great. That’s a story that organically makes sense in our world, and it’s not something you could come up with on any other kind of show. And Fangtasia, that was right out of the novel. I wanted it to seem like, on the one hand that was like where we thought we could go really cliché vampire, because that’s probably what people who are vampire groupies would do. If you look at those people who really consider themselves vampires, and they go to the vampire ball in New Orleans, and people who have their teeth made into fangs, and those people are not very creative. They go for the Goth, leather vampire thing. So we figured, “OK, we can go there, and that’s the first time we’ll do that with these vampires.” I also wanted it to be like a gay bar in the 60s. It had a danger aspect to it. Police could come, and actually they do, because there’s obviously that analogy at work in the show.

I didn’t worry about HBO’s response to the episode. I don’t try to second guess how people are going to respond to it. Because I think the few times in my career where I’ve done that, where I’ve really written from the point of worrying how it’s going to be received, I’ve failed miserably. And I also was working from source material that really worked for me in terms of creating a world and creating a story, and giving really interesting characters. I write from a much more organic place: “Am I compelled by this? Am I interested in it?” And then I hope other people will be interested in it as well. Besides, I have a really great relationship with HBO, and when I gave them the pilot, they called and said, “We love it. We love this whole world.”

(Alan Ball commentary courtesy of Ed at SciFiTV Zone.)