True Blood – Pam and Eric Back-story - *SPOILERS*

So I’ve been trying to stay away from spoilers, but I was unable to avoid being exposed to the contents of this interview with Kristin Bauer regarding the back-story between Eric and Pam. I’m not even sure how spoilery it is, since Bauer is actually summarizing some of Pam’s back-story that’s going to be explained by Pam on a Season 2 DVD extra. If it’s just going to be unceremoniously related to viewers by Pam in a DVD feature, I’m not sure there’s much difference between knowing now and knowing when you watch the Season 2 DVD.

From what Bauer said, the gist of it is that Pam was turned 100 years ago, when she was living with her wealthy parents and trying to find a husband—suitors were lining up all over the place, apparently. Eric showed up and swept Pam off her feet, turned her, and screwed her for a few years. At some point he released her (as Lorena did for Bill), but she stuck around because she’s in love with him.

I hate this idea for several reasons.

1. How old is Pam supposed to have been when she was turned? No offense to Kristen Bauer, who is a beautiful woman, but she’s 37 and she looks it, so I have a hard time buying that back-story for Pam. A woman as attractive as Pam would probably have been married off no later than 25 in the early 1900s, and even that is really pushing it as far as a believable age for when Pam was turned. If she was older than thirty (which seems likely going by appearance) and still unmarried, then she must have been even pickier than Elizabeth Bennett. I’d say it was miraculous that she had suitors at all, but since her family was wealthy, that part isn’t such a leap.

2. Eric shows no signs of still having any sort of romantic inclinations toward Pam these days, so it’s a little too easy to assume, from the given information, that he released her because he grew tired of her. It’s possible that it was actually something she asked for, and the falling out of love happened later, but either way, it comes off like present-day Pam is hanging around being Eric’s obedient lackey because she’s still in love with him and can’t bear to be parted from him rather than because she still hero-worships her Maker.

3. I have never felt the slightest hint of former romance in their character interaction thus far, at least not from Eric. I’ve always seen Pam as more of a spoiled-but-obedient daughter, not a kicked puppy former lover who gets ordered off to traipse around in the mud in her new pumps. I guess I should know better than to think Eric would turn a woman he's not interested in boinking, and I can certainly buy Pam being unrequitedly in love with him, but the way Eric talks about/to her is so non-sexual and brusque that it never occurred to me they might have actually been lovers. Well, it occurred to me, but I dismissed it because it just didn’t feel right.

4. As per the above, this back-story really puts a different spin on their interactions in retrospect. I'm going to have to spend some time wrapping my head around Eric talking about his former lover like a daughter to Bill and calling her "extremely lazy, but loyal" in that head-patting, paternal tone. Despite the complexity we just saw with the Godric/Eric relationship, the quasi-incestuous lover/daughter angle still just feels weird to me, or at least it does without actually seeing it played out in detail onscreen. Which brings me to my next point.

5. I passionately hate the fact that it sounds like this is just going to be dumped on viewers via some special feature on the DVD, rather than actually shown to us with flashbacks and character interaction on the show itself. First of all, it makes Pam feel like an afterthought, which kind of sucks after what a huge deal the Godric/Eric relationship was. Secondly, this back-story would probably work much better if we could actually see Kristin Bauer and Alexander Skarsgård play the complexity of the lover/daughter relationship—if they just dump that back-story on the DVD, then start playing to it in the aired episodes, it may feel like it came out of nowhere for a lot of the viewers who didn't watch the DVD features. Finally, it seems like the Pam/Eric back-story would be relevant to the Sookie/Eric relationship, which is becoming a pretty prominent part of the show.

This information has made a relationship that I always found darkly charming into something rather pathetic on Pam’s end and rather assholish on Eric’s end. If it were a mutual "Eh, the magic's not there anymore, but I still really dig your company" thing, and we were actually going to be shown some flashbacks of their history together and then get to see their present-day relationship addressed with a little more depth, I might be swayed toward thinking their relationship is totally awesome again.

This is why I hate big relationship spoilers, though. I got blindsided by something I never saw coming, and without the mitigating factor of seeing the actors try to pull it off. Maybe some of this information will make its way into aired episodes, and maybe Bauer and Skarsgård will knock it out of the park and make me think, “Oh hey, I actually don’t hate this!”