As a telepath Sookie has an omnisicent perspective, being able to get into other people’s heads and know what they are thinking, but the information is limited and biased. That is the same point of view that True Blood shows us. Sookie is not just sharing her story with us; she’s telling us all of the stories–Jason’s, Arlene’s, Hoyt’s, Tara’s, Lafayette’s, and Sam’s.

We are shown that Sookie is the narrator at the very beginning of episode 2 when the Rattrays are beating her to a pulp. Four times the screen goes black when Sookie loses consciousness. (For more about Sookie’s POV, read ‘Perceptions of a Vampire.’) Throughout the series, when Sookie is shock, like after she finds Adele murdered, other voices take over the narration, but here in episode 2, with the Rattrays dead and Sam in canine form, there is only Bill present to do that, and he’s as silent as the grave, so the story stops and we have to wait for Sookie to regain consciousness to continue.

That was the night Sookie had her first taste of vampire blood, the first step in Bill’s plan to influence Sookie to gain control of her powers. The next was glamour. Bill’s declaration that he would never use glamour on Sookie sounds suspiciously like Melinda Minkens’s, “But we’re not drunks.” Unfortunately for Bill, glamour doesn’t work on Sookie, but that doesn’t mean she is immune to its power.

The morning after the vampire orgy at Bill’s, Sookie says she doesn’t know if she should listen to her head or her body when it comes to her relationship with Bill. Gram euphemistically substitutes the word ‘heart.’ What neither of them realize is that what Sookie is feeling is Bill’s influence through the blood bond they have formed. Sookie tells Gran that she’s frightened of Bill because she can’t read his thoughts and looks to Gran for advice.

Gran replies, “I would imagine that that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you with your…”

The first time I saw this episode, I held my breath during that extended pause, waiting to see if Gran would refer to Sookie’s telepathy as she did in Dead Until Dark, as a disability, and breathed a sigh of relief when, after searching long and hard for the right word, chose “ability.”

But wait a minute, the difficulty Gran had to find the right word and Sookie’s negative view of  her telepathy indicate that Gran, although she has many good qualities, isn’t as accepting and open as we want her to be, and Sookie herself told us that her family doesn’t talk about her mental anomaly, causing her to regard it as a handicap. So what has changed?

Everything.

With that long pause, Gram physically cannot not say the word she wants to use, and eventually settles on ‘ability,’ With that word, True Blood veered into an alternate Sookieverse, a universe in which Gran has been glamoured.  Mysterious music began playing and continued as Gran, in  an unprecedented display of openness and honesty, revealed a secret she’s kept from Sookie all her life; Sookie’s grandfather, Earl Stackhouse, was a telepath, too. This is no longer the plot of the SSNs, in which Gran goes to her grave without revealing the origin of Sookie’s telepathy or her affair with a fairy.

Gran says that Earl’s gift allowed him to save the life of his brother who was contemplating suicide after returning from Korea. Not coincidentally, the next day, the music will play again when Gran implores Sookie to use her telepathy to save her brother and when she carries out Gran’s wishes at Merlotte’s that night. For Bill, this is putting Sookie through her paces to see what she can do and start training her to use her telepathy for a particular purpose, which will ultimately be decided by the queen.

After Sookie invited Bill into the house when he came calling, he surely paid Adele a late night visit to continue their conversation about genealogy so that he could ask the questions that he really wanted to know. The answers he got allowed him to circle Earl’s name on his Stackhouse family tree as the source of Sookie’s telepathy. Bill must also have commanded Adele to never again describe telepathy it in a negative way and to share the family’s deep dark secret with Sookie.

In season 2, Maxine Fortenberry demonstrated that people who have built their lives on lies, don’t suddenly come clean out of guilt or enlightened benevolence. Those lies only come out under extreme duress such as being controlled by a maenad…or glamoured by a vampire.

The night before the Sookie and Gran’s conversation about her ability, Bill claimed Sookie’s body when he announced that Sookie was his so that Malcolm, Diane, and Liam could not feed on her. That morning he claimed her mind. Gram tacitly gave Sookie permission to stop fighting what her body was feeling. From this point, she stops thinking critically and asking questions. She’s driven by her emotions, primarily fear and desire, as much as Jason is. Brain off and  libido on, as Andy might say. From her conversation with Gran, Sookie goes straight to Bill’s house and parks herself on the steps as if she plans to wait there for him all day. It is only Sam’s call asking her to go wake up Dawn for the lunch shift that prompts her to leave.

Something else happened when Sookie stopped thinking critically and started allowing herself to be guided strictly by her emotions. Take a look at the photo below. It is from the same scene we’ve been discussing. Sookie is listening to the story about Earl and Frances. Sookie has already made her decision about Bill and turned off the critical reasoning areas of her brain. In effect, she is now not much different than one of Mary Ann’s black eyed zombies in their over aroused Dionysian state.

We know this to be the case because the kitchen chairs have all been replaced by ones from the dining room.

Through his blood, Bill has formed a psychic link with Sookie. Primarily we’ve seen this explored through shared dreams because in sleep the rational areas of the brain are shut down. The chairs indicate that after Sookie turned off her reason, Bill is able to influence Sookie’s waking mind. Sookie knows which chairs belong in the kitchen, but Bill doesn’t. Like Pam who can no longer tell human ages, Bill does not perceive the differences between the dining room and the kitchen and doesn’t know which chairs belong in each room. We saw this in Olivia’s house where all the furniture in the two rooms was switched, with the dining table and chairs in the breakfast room on the linoleum floor and the breakfast table in the dining room.

When Sookie comes home to break the news that Jason has been arrested for Dawn’s murder, the kitchen chairs are in the dining room, so Sookie is still not thinking critically.

Even after she has gone to Fangtasia and witnessed Bill glamour the police officer and steal his gun, she is still under Bill’s influence. She broke up with Bill that night out of fear. She is still running on her emotions the next morning when, for the first time in all her discussions with Gran, anger seeps  into her voice. This is new. The morning after the orgy, her tone was inquisitive, indicating that she was still using her brain at that point, at least until glamoured Gran started working on her.

Later that night when Sookie discovers Adele’s body, the dining room chair, without the tie on cushion that would identify a kitchen one, is present.

The shock of Adele’s murder renders narrator Sookie speechless, so for the first time, the story is told from a different point of view. The camera places us in the shoes of someone who is approaching the open front door.* When Bill pins the figure against the wall, we see that it is Sam. He is now picking up the story; we’re walking in his shoes instead of Sookie’s.

After the police have arrived, Sam comforts Sookie, and she finds her voice again and takes over the narration. The camera zooms back from her face and we are in her head listening to the stream of conscious thoughts that are bombarding her.

It’s hard to see in this screen cap, but when Sookie looks into the kitchen, the dining room chairs are still there.

The next morning, Sookie has no words, so Maxine Fortenberry picks up the story. We are walking in her shoes.

With a narrator who is not influenced by Bill’s blood bond, we finally get an accurate image of the kitchen. All the chairs are in their rightful places, dining room chairs in the dining room, kitchen chairs in the kitchen.

Jason takes over narration from Maxine when the camera approaches René and Hoyt, and we sees them through flashes of V induced sparks of light. Jason unflinchingly tells the part of the story about him rushing home and slapping Sookie.

The next day, when Sookie resumes the story. Bill’s influence has returned to the narration, and we see his delusion of the misplaced chairs through Sookie’s eyes in the infamous pie eating scene.

After the shock of losing Bill in the Monroe fire, something happens, though. Sookie spent the whole day cleaning. This indicates that she has moved into the white stage in the season 1 alchemical minicycle. It is characterized by order and reason. Sookie is starting to use her head again, and it is fighting the delusion that comes through Bill’s blood. The next night we get evidence of this as Bill, Lisa, and Coby all sit in dining room chairs, but…

Sookie’s chair is a hybrid of the two styles. Her mind is struggling to assert her knowledge of reality over Bill’s delusion.

When Eric, who represents the white stage, removes Bill from Sookie’s life completely by taking him into custody, her reason and her sanity return.

She sees the world as it really is except for a split second in episode 11 when Bill and Sam struggle and the kitchen chairs appear in the dining room.  They disappear after Sookie resends Bill’s invitation. Everything is back where it is supposed to be–chairs in the appropriate rooms and delusional vampires outside. We have come full circle, to complete the chapter that began when Sookie invited Bill into the house.

And that’s where things stay until Sookie reads René’s mind and sees Gran’s murder.

In Rene’s false memory, the chairs are again switched, but this is not just a case of Sookie shutting down her reason and running on her emotions. At this point in the memory, nothing traumatic has happened, and the chairs are not the only error.

This image is straight from Bill’s delusional mind because he implanted his memory of murdering Adele into René’s brain. Gran’s paperback book has been replaced with one from the library. Her reading glasses are nowhere to be found, and Gran herself has been replaced by a stand-in.

Unfortunately, Sookie invited Bill back into her house and renewed their blood bond, but the second time, she did not turn off her critical thinking completely. At the Dallas nest when all the vampires are running on emotion, it is Sookie who is the voice of reason.  It is only when she is in crisis mode that Bill’s irrational overly emotional influence comes out.

After the bullet sucking incident, Sookie develops wild mood swings, which are the competing influences of Eric and Bill’s blood inside her. After the visit from Eric, Sookie appears to be back in her rational mind, with the furniture where it’s supposed to be.

Of course, that doesn’t last long once Sookie gets to Jackson.

*The comments about Olivia’s furniture are based on Enjoying and Sunny Nala’s eagle-eyed observations.

**The theory that Bill murdered Olivia and Gran comes from conspiracy theorist extraordinaire, Sunny Nala a.k.a. Midnight Charm. Her blog is True Blood Underground.

***When Sam approaches the open door the night of Adele’s murder, his identity is concealed by the camera framing him from his knees to his chest. Significantly a shot of his feet is not used. This contrasts with the shot of Bill’s feet in ep 1.2 when he was in hero mode and 3.1 when he was stalking Olivia and supports SM & AS’s discussion in the s2 commentary that feet shots are always associated with villains.