True Blood Review: New Season, Same Love Triangle

It’s been such a tremendously long wait and I like many fans have been dying to know how much of our beloved Dead To The World would make it over to this new season. Ever since we were teased with pictures and clips of Alexander Skarsgard sans shirt running down the highway, hopes were ignited that we would get our amnesia Eric this season.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry because you’re in for a fantastic treat as True Blood finally returns back to our televisions this week. When we last left the residents on Bon Temps, Tara (Rutina Wesley) chopped off her hair and skipped town while Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis) discovers that he’s magical thanks to his new boy toy Jesus. Bill was in a showdown with Queen Sophie-Anne (Evan Rachel Wood) and Sookie (Anna Paquin) had disappeared to fairyland with Claudine.

Inside fairyland all was not what it seemed as Sookie runs into Barry the bellboy and her Grandpa Earl. Grandpa Earl thought he had only been there for a couple of hours when it had actually been twenty years. The fairies also weren’t the nice helpful kind and they actually looked more like trolls or goblins who were harvesting humans. After Bill (Stephen Moyer) had managed to cross over to their dimension from ingesting too much of Sookie’s blood, the fairies became extra paranoid and started kidnapping any human with fairy blood in them, including Sookie and Barry.

Claudine’s brother (who in the books is named Claude) leads Sookie and Grandpa Earl to the portal where Mab is beginning to close it, partially due to their fear of extinction from vampires who once nearly drank them all to death. This part stays true to the books, though Mab is an entirely new character. Sookie and Grandpa Earl jump through but shortly after the elder Stackhouse dies having eaten a light fruit from the other dimension. He gives his granddaughter a watch to give to her brother before passing. Sadly another family member disappears from poor Sookie’s life.

As she returns back into her world, both Bill and Eric wake up sensing her presence. Admittedly I did get giddy at this scene, as she’s had such an impact on these two undead men that they wake even from their day sleep. Once 6pm hits, the two arrive at her doorstep within minutes of each other (we’ll get that that later).

Sookie soon learns that she’s been gone for nearly an entire year in the real world. Her brother Jason (Ryan Kwanten) is now a real police officer and had sold their grandmother’s house, Andy Bellefleur is the sheriff and addicted to vampire blood, Tara left town (and now moonlights as some kind of underground MMA fighter plus she’s also into the ladies), Lafayette is still with Jesus who keeps trying to convince him to embrace his inner Harry Potter, Arlene’s (Carrie Preston) young son likes to decapitate Barbie dolls, Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) and Hoyt (Jim Parrack) are living together and experiencing the pangs of a human-vampire relationship, Eric and Bill are working on improving vampire image in their own ways and lastly Sam’s (Sam Trammell) joined a shifter’s anger management group.

Let’s get to our anticipated love triangle scene. Bill arrives at Sookie’s first and begins to tell her how much he’s missed her and how he’s felt so empty and dead after not feeling her presence nearly a year. Eric arrives soon after with his two cents, that everyone who claimed to love her gave up and believed she was dead, except him. Interestingly Bill commands Eric to leave and that is our first hint of a change in dynamic in their little vampire world. Sookie is conflicted as she faces Bill since to her, it’s only felt like an hour ago that he had broken her heart into tiny pieces. We’ll get back to our resident telepath in a bit.

The other only living Stackhouse has matured quite a bit in the year that his sister was gone. He’s a respectable police officer who is the one trying to get Andy to stop using V. He provides food for the community out in Hotshot and even calms Andy down when he’s aggressively harassing Lafayette for drugs. Unfortunately for Jason he gets trapped inside an icebox in Hotshot, the motives of which are still unknown.

What we need to watch out for are the witches that will be the main bad guys this season. Fiona Shaw plays Marnie, the head witch and she is supposed to be the “Hallow” character from the books. I won’t spoil what she does but it certainly makes for an interesting storyline. This week we see glimmers of the craziness she can do by getting the other witches to channel their power and bring a dead bird back to life, albeit only for a few seconds. Lafayette appears to be an integral component to this which might explain why Jesus has been so insistent on them becoming like Ron and Harry.

Back at the formerly Stackhouse ancestral home, Sookie is upstairs in her room changing into a slinky nightie when Eric appears behind her. The industrious vampire has secretly purchased her house because he knew that she was still alive. Cue my heart fluttering! But the Viking is not so gentlemanly declaring that since he owns the house, she is his. This of course in vampire terms is not necessarily romantic but possessive in a potentially psychotic kind of way. The fangs come out and Sookie screams.

The most interesting development of the episode though happens at the very end. One of the witches from Marnie’s circle has just walked up to a gate where she says that the king is expecting her. It’s a lavish mansion and I believe was Russell Edgington’s old place. The witch comes into a study room where the king greets her. Who is this new king? Why it’s Bill Compton.

I guess he won that battle to the death against Sophie-Anne after all. This explains his commanding Eric to leave earlier at Sookie’s house. This is a huge departure from the books but one that I am definitely intrigued to follow. This makes a huge difference in the way Bill and Eric have interacted with each other and it’ll be interesting to see if the power has gone to Bill’s head. Is he the king of Louisiana and Mississippi? If so that’s a pretty sizable domain and this vampire has certainly done well for himself.

Things have certainly changed around Bon Temps and this was a good move by Alan Ball and company. Enough time has passed that Sookie now has to deal with a new set of circumstances. Our favorite characters have changed and I’m sure there will be lots of great flashbacks to show us how they got there. Annoyingly Tommy Mickens is still around but maybe he’ll prove to be more than just an annoying thorn on Sam’s side. I’m most interested in Bill and Eric though and I can’t wait to find out what kind of trouble they’ve been brewing.

Waiting definitely sucked.

Season 4 Episode 1 – She’s Not There (Originally Aired June 26,2011)

Pictures Courtesy of HBO