"Go, flourish, and don't ever say no to yourself." - Maryann Forrester
I confess to an enduring fascination with the character of Maryann Forrester, the mysterious stranger who arrives in Bon Temps at the end of the first season of True Blood. She appears, naked and spectral, in the middle of the night standing next to a large pig in the middle of a country road, where she forces a drunk-driving, emotionally battered Tara to swerve and crash into a fence.
The next day she goes to the Bon Temps jail (looking radiant, sort of like a hot suburban housewife who shops at Anthropologie) to bail Tara out. (Tara's alcoholic mother has discovered Jesus and leaves her in jail to teach her a lesson.)
Dubious, Tara doubts her motives until Maryann convinces her she is some kind of social worker. With nowhere else to go, Tara relents and leaves with Maryann in her hot red 80s-era Mercedes-Benz SL convertible to her lavish mansion filled with fancy linens, servants and a constantly restocked buffet of tropical fruit. All of this is, to say the least, a distinct upgrade from Tara's regular life.
Maryann tells Tara, broken and humiliated from her accident and her mother's treatment: "Maybe life has just cleared out all the things that weren't working for you. Now you've got room to rebuild. Decide exactly what you want your life to look like and make that happen."
Relentlessly optimistic, and with a distinct Oprah-esque quality to her approach, Maryann preaches to Tara about self-empowerment and encourages her to seize joy and embrace the abundance of the physical world around her. Her intoxicating message wears down Tara's defenses and we see Tara relax and begin to experience a sense of tranquility, perhaps for the first time in a very long time.
We soon see Maryann's sinister side. "No one needed towels!" she deliciously bellows at Carl, her servant, before knocking him to the ground for the offense of interrupting Tara while she was bonding poolside with the handsome Eggs, a fellow refugee. And she doesn't bother to hide her dark impulses from Sam Merlotte, with whom we learn she shares a shadowy past. ("It's not your money I'm after," she tells him.)
Maryann takes her seize-the-day message on the road to Merlotte's where she encourages the customers to dance. (Detective Bellefleur: "I don't dance." Maryann: "With me you do!") She invites them to parties at her mansion that quickly devolve into hedonistic abandon. The revelers' eyes literally glaze over and become black as they drink to excess and dance like they're on 100 doses of ecstasy.
But even as Maryann's darker side emerges (and it gets very, very dark), she remains completely cheerful and optimistic in her dealings with the locals of Ben Temps, as if she is doing them the ultimate service. ("We need to be out of control, we crave it!")
The situation in Bon Temps gets progressively more out of control until the vast majority of the locals have been taken over by Maryann's weird spell. She is revealed by a really old vampire to be a "maenad," a mythical creature who believes that by luring people into wild hedonism, she is summoning her "wild god," who will appear, and the two will marry and live some sort of happily-ever-after scenario.
Maryann is played by Michelle Forbes, who gets all the credit for making this heinous character so damn entertaining. With pure conviction, she delivers signature lines like: "Go, flourish, and don't ever say no to yourself." And, for a split second, we want to obey.
There's a final showdown and Dionysus-summoning involving Sookie and Sam and Bill (everyone else is pretty much in Zombie-town at this point). Maryann's wild god appears in the form of a giant white bull. They face each other and she looks into the eyes of eternal bliss, but the wild god turns out to be just shape-shifting Sam who impales and kills Maryann (rather unceremoniously I might add.) So long, Maryann... we hardly knew ye.
You left Bon Temps in ruins, but it sure was fun getting there!
