Pulse Pause Moment: Bill and Sam in True Blood

The True Blood TV series is not known for pulling sexual punches, but because it is so frank about sex, sexual tension is often missing.

Sexual tension is one of the most delicious ingredients in romance novels.  The “will they now?” question that sits in the back of your mind as you watch the heroine and hero(es) circle each other and build up a (mental) sweat…oh my!

But sometimes, True Blood manages to flirt, rather than strut.

One of those moments — and it was a doozy — came very early on in the third season.  It also seemed to come completely out of left field.

~ spoiler alert ~  (if the pictures haven’t already done the deed…)

Bill, the vampire who pines after the heroine, Sookie, stops by to speak to her employer, Sam.  It seems innocuous enough, except the scene takes a severe turn into the erotic innuendo, when Sam mentions he was about to take a shower, and Bill speaks about heat and maybe he might join him…and then there’s a long, heated look they exchange, and they lean toward each other….

It wasn’t just the language.  These two men were simmering with hot silky body language.  There were heavy-lidded expressions.  Hard breathing.

And just as they lean towards each other, Sam wakes up.

Yes, it was a dream, and Sam was deeply relieved it was only a dream.  Normally, any high-risk scene in any TV show or movie that is “only a dream” gets waste products thrown at it.  Audiences hate the “it was all a dream” device.

But the writers of the show were dead to rights putting that scene in there.  It was absolutely correct according to the way they had established previous vampire lore.  Bill had used his blood — lots of it — to heal Sam at the end of Season Two, which set up a sensual bond between the two.

It was the same sort of bonding that Eric used so ruthlessly to draw Sookie to him.  If the writers hadn’t acknowledged the bond between Bill and Sam, then they would have been betraying the laws of their own fiction world and letting down a lot of attentive viewers.

Plus they would have missed a prime opportunity to surprise viewers with a scene that absolutely stopped pulses, paused breathing and kicked ass.