Last year, “True Blood” featured a fey vampire king toting the distressingly sloshy remains of his lover around in a crystal compote jar and relieving a news anchor of his spine on live television, not to mention a rendezvous between former lovers that gave new meaning to the phrase “angry sex.” (Ever wonder what a porn “Exorcist” would look like? Wait, I just Googled it -- of course there is one.)
Everyone’s favorite supernatural Southern Gothic Grand Guignol soap opera returns tonight (HBO, 9 p.m.). So how will creator Alan Ball top the bloody third season?
Let’s hope he doesn’t.
It’s not like we expect a show about a telepathic waitress and her cohort of supernatural pals in rural Louisiana to be, say, plausible, but shock for shock’s sake shakes us out of the creepy, kinky and curiously charming world created by Ball and Charlaine Harris, the novelist on whose Southern Vampire books “True Blood” is based.
My other main beef with the third season of “True Blood” was that, for long stretches, there seemed to be no main beef — that is, Ball had each character embroiled in their own sordid dramas, independent of everyone else. (And often independent of basic common sense.)
There's a new Wiccan in town: Marnie (Fiona Shaw) is a witch who is experimenting with necromancy and runs afoul of the local undead. The good news about the fourth season is that, judging from the early episodes, Ball appears to have found a way to integrate many of these characters into one major arc, centering on new baddie Marnie (brilliant Irish actress Fiona Shaw), a Wiccan who runs the local coven and is interested in the stretching the limits of necromancy, which understandably gives the undead the heebie-jeebies.
At the end of the third season, our heroine Sookie (Anna Paquin), vampire boyfriend Bill (Stephen Moyer) and vamp bigwig Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) had dispatched, Hoffa-style, Russell Edgington, the Mississippi vampire regent who was proving to be a bit of a public relations nightmare for the pro-mainstreaming American Vampire League.
And speaking of spines, Bill certainly displayed one when he tried to bury Eric as well in that vat of cement, ostensibly because Eric knew Sookie’s secret: She’s part fairy, which makes her irresistible to vamps. But moments after Bill declared his eternal love for Sookie on her front porch, a concrete-matted Eric appeared and spilled the beans on Bill. He didn’t show up at Merlotte’s because he heard the waitresses were easy. He came to Bon Temps on the orders of vampire queen Sophie-Anne Leclerq to “procure” the gifted Sookie, and let a skeevy couple viciously beat her up so he could heal her with his blood, forging a bond between them.
Meanwhile, self-destructive barmaid Tara, despairing over the death of boyfriend Eggs in season two, was kidnapped by a delightfully unhinged vampire — delightful to us viewers, if not to Tara — but escaped and was last spotted heading off for points unknown.
Fabulous short order cook Lafayette found love with the supernaturally-inclined Jesus — “You’re a witch who’s a nurse who’s a dude?” — and began to unlock his own untapped magical powers.
Soft-hearted Sam tracked down his parents, who abandoned him as a baby, but quickly realized they were con artists who forced his shapeshifter brother Tommy to compete in dog fights. He exiled his parents but tried to be a good brother to Tommy, but he turned out rotten too. Waitress Arlene and boyfriend Terry were expecting a baby, only Arlene found it was actually her serial killer boyfriend who impregnated her shortly before his death.
And Sookie’s brother Jason, a wannabe peace officer, jeopardized the bust of a big drug-dealing ring out of were-panther hot spot, Hot Shot, after falling in love with the kingpin’s daughter.
This season, Eric, as the sheriff of Area 5, tries to bust up Marnie’s coven but runs into trouble and unwittingly upends the dynamics of his personal relationships, with Sookie in particular. (The plot follows the contours of Harris’ novel “Dead to the World,” beloved by those on Team Eric.)
In fact, the relationships between many of the characters have undergone radical shifts since last we saw them. Notably, the (un)death of Russell has left a power vacuum in Louisiana, which is filled most unexpectedly; Jason, finally coming into his own as a man, faces another evolution; and Bill’s vampire daughter Jessica is battling her primal instincts and trying to stay true to lunky but loveable human boyfriend Hoyt.
Werewolf Alcide (Joe Manganiello) is also back, along with a host of other creatures, supernatural and otherwise, including a female cage fighter, a schoolteacher-shapeshifter, and various and sundry Wiccans. Jessica Tuck, who plays smirky AVL spokeswoman Nan Flanagan, has been promoted to a season regular. We also get some much-appreciated backstory on how Bill returned to Bon Temps including a flashback that lets Moyer, a Brit, show off his native accent.
Ball asked reviewers pretty-please to not divulge certain plot points, notably where Sookie has been hanging out lately, even though the first few minutes of the premiere is widely available online and spells it out pretty clearly.
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