'Succession' seemingly nodded to Alexander Skarsgård's breakthrough 'True Blood' role with a twisted and bloody plot point this week

• This week, "Succession" took us to Norway, where the Roy gang crashed a GoJo team retreat.

• While there, GoJo head Lukas Matsson confessed to Shiv he'd been sending pints of blood to an ex.

• Fans immediately connected the bloody gift to Skarsgård's previous role on the camp vampire show "True Blood."

Episode five of "Succession" season four is technically supposed to be about Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) trying to negotiate — or tank — Waystar/Royco's deal with Swedish tech giant Lukas Matsson's GoJo.

But really, it's all about the blood bricks.

Late in the episode, Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), in an uncharacteristically vulnerable state after downing some psilocybin, confesses to Shiv (Sarah Snook) that he's found himself in a bit of a pickle.

"I was seeing this girl, and, um, after we broke up... because of some things that we said, uh, when things were nice and intense, you know, as sort of a nasty, uh, friendly joke about... About what I shouldn't do, um... I sent her some of my blood."

Yes, really, he sent her a "half-a-liter frozen blood brick. As a joke, obviously." Obviously.

Matsson goes on to explain that he did it initially on a whim and then kept doing it again and again and again and "now it's apparently not a joke."

That's a lot of blood bricks.

Clearly, this isn't advisable in any way. First of all, giving that much blood can cause nausea, dizziness, and fainting. But also in Matsson's case, the woman in question is Ebba, GoJo's comms director. It's a legal and psycho-sexual nightmare.

It's also a significant part of Skarsgård canon, a conspicuous throwback to his role as Eric Northman in another HBO series, "True Blood." Skarsgård played the thousand-year-old vampire for seven seasons.

Who's to say, actually, that they're not the same person?

It seems that some on the internet called this several years ago.

Former New York Times editor Tim Herrera pointed out a possible connection between the two shows in 2021.

For her part, Shiv seems utterly unfazed by Matsson's platelet-soaked confession — and is likely pocketing the info for use at some later date.

We've always known there's something mildly (to majorly) unhinged about Matsson — and now his twisted weirdness is coming to light.

Sociopathy is the mark of many a successful CEO/vampire, after all.

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