Tragic Irony Is an All-Time Classic (Spoiler Alert)
What kind of story could be more tragic in a TV series like True Blood? Amidst maenads with zombie followers, addicted werewolves who get high on vampire blood, necromancers possessed by the spirits of witches that were burned during the Middle Ages, who in turn torment darling vampires and ancient psychopathic, intimidating vampire hybrids that threaten to eat everyone, the most tragic story is that of the unfair and untimely death of a common mortal cook.
Iraq war veteran Terry Bellefleur has more or less managed to overcome his post-traumatic stress disorder. Terry is a well-meaning man with beautiful eyes, who works as a cook at the neighborhood bar of his friend Sam Merlotte and is married to waitress Arlene, loving her children like his own.
The curse uttered by an Iraqi woman (an innocent local killed by Terry during the Second Gulf War) just before her death has awoken a fire demon that, like the Erinyes, will gradually begin to threaten the character’s quiet home life and activate his traumas.
Terry will try to get away from his loved ones (so that they don’t get into trouble), break the curse by killing again, and even take his own life. When all these efforts fail, Terry, seeking redemption, pays an old war buddy to kill him at an unsuspected time. Naturally, he doesn’t share his secret with anyone. Not even with his wife, who in turn, suspecting that her husband is still suicidal, enlists a vampire family friend to charm him into forgetting everything (vampires do have this ability, which is called glamoring), retaining only the fact that he is a happily married father and cook. As a result, the memory of hiring someone to kill him is erased along with his war experiences and demons, and so Terry dies a few days later, unsuspecting but happy. A bullet is what does the job, while Terry is taking out the garbage, proving that the series’ writers know how to handle age-old dramatic devices such as tragic irony, which, if properly used, as in the case of Terry Bellefleur, is much more shocking than any extreme evisceration.
