[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Sunday's True Blood series finale, "Thank You."]
True Blood showrunner Brian Buckner isn't sorry for the series' controversial finale, in which Sookie (Anna Paquin) ended up with neither Bill (Stephen Moyer) nor Eric (Alexander Skarskgard).
The HBO drama ended Sunday with Sookie pregnant and married to a husband whose face viewers never see (played by stuntman Tim Eulich, Buckner revealed). The vampires are out of the picture — Bill has been staked through the heart by Sookie at his request, while Eric is running a multimillion-dollar blood substitute company and Fangtasia with Pam (Kristin Bauer van Straten). Wait, what?
Buckner defended the decision not to pair Sookie off with either vampire.
"I don’t think there was a lot of talk about the end game other than people sitting around in a room going, 'Bill or Eric? Bill or Eric?'" he said in a conference call with reporters. "That was the thing we were pretty leery of, because you immediately alienate everybody who likes the other guy. We choose to have it as Sookie marries every man." (Read the conversation in full here.)
"I think I've actually honored all the writers who’ve been here in terms of 'which man will Sookie choose,'" he added.
Introducing Sookie's husband as a new character in the final minutes of the finale "wouldn't have made a lot of sense," he said, but "we felt like it was irrelevant honestly who Sookie wound up with. What we wanted to know was that she was happy and living the life that she wanted to lead."
The finale's title, "Thank You," was meant for Paquin, who "took a lot of heat" for her performance but "was the center of the show again" this season. But it was also for the fans that stuck by the series, Buckner said. (In True Blood fashion, the title was shared with the ending credits song, a 1969 Led Zeppelin track.)
"I'm sure it could be told a different way, but we can’t break story from fear of how people are going to be disappointed, and the show had to end somehow. I’m sort of defiantly proud of what we did," Buckner said of the episode.
Some fans were, in a word, disappointed:
But others reacted positively:
