True Blood - She's Not There review

We love the song “She’s Not There”! It was featured in the closing credits too. Anyway, the season four premiere actually had a lot going on. Thankfully, there was a one-year time jump so the characters who were just mopey and lame (Bill, Tara) are interesting again.

When we left Sookie Stackhouse, she was in the land of the faeries. She spent what felt like fifteen minutes there, but apparently time is different on another plane, so when she got back to the normal world, more than a year had passed. Sookie must be special, because she is the only part-faerie who figured out that it was dangerous for part humans to stay in faerieland. Unrealistic. She grabbed her grandfather (who was also there) and escaped. Queen Mab showed up, and she was ugly. Some ugly bat dudes appeared and randomly helped Sookie escape. Sookie’s grandfather died once he got back to earth, because he had eaten the faery fruit.

So….yeah….that was that. The best that can be said about those events is that they happened quickly. The show didn’t waste too much of our time on such stupidity. Or maybe that’s the WORST thing that can be said about it. It felt really rushed and it made little sense. After all the faerie build-up, we are a little annoyed at how that panned out.

Sookie returned to find out that Eric bought her house so that she would be “his.” He stole Bill’s “Sookie is mine” line, only he butchered it. Jason is way less annoying than he has ever been and seems like a decent cop. His backwoods creepo were-panthers locked him in a freezer though. He’s still hanging out with them and caring for them even though Crystal is gone. Andy is still annoying.

Bill and Eric have been trying to clean up the vampire community’s reputation post-Russell, and they are particularly smooth at it. Seriously, we would listen to them. And vote for them. And sleep with them. Pam tried, but she came off as super-stiff and fake. Kind of like…nope….we’re not going to go there. No politics. But we are voting for Romney, in case you were wondering.

Bill and everyone else thought that Sookie was dead, but Eric “never gave up on” her and has to remind Sookie of that a LOT, as if denial makes him a much more attractive option than everyone else she loves. Bill and Sookie remain broken up (good), Bill is the new vampire king (too bad we didn’t get to see him fight the queen), and he is dating Andy’s sister Portia. Way to move on quickly.

Jesus is trying to get Lafayette to embrace his witch powers and keeps taking him to a Wiccan coven that contains Petunia Dursley from the Harry Potter movies. She does not have a British accent in this, but we are still pretty sure that it’s her. We guess her latent witch powers for which she envied her sister Lily finally surfaced. She must have shunned Hogwarts for some middle school goth’s backyard and some serious drugs though. She is looking scarier than ever, bringing dead birds back to life, and channeling dead Eddie (who used to sleep with Lafayette). We’re kind of impressed with her acting skills. She’s weird. And she will be sticking around. This is the year of the witch. Honestly, we kind of wish Lafayette had died in season two like he was supposed to. And we preferred Jesus on Southland.

Tara is now some ultimate fighter dating a beautiful lesbian martial arts master. We find this superior to everyone else Tara has ever been involved with. The lesbian lover doesn’t know Tara’s real name or where she grew up. Tara is kind of a liar right now. We still find her useless.

Tommy has replaced Hoyt, living with Hoyt’s mom and taking care of him. It’s really funny. Jessica and Hoyt fight a lot and even that just turns out to be adorable and purehearted. Sam found some friends who share his same powers. He was really mad at Sookie and is far from the mopey nice guy he started out as on this show. Arlene’s baby seems to be a devil baby. He ripped the heads off of Barbie dolls. Arlene is more concerned than Terry, and we are not concerned at all.

So, to recap: Tara, Andy, Lafayette, Bill, Arlene, and Crystal still annoy us. Sam and Jesus just started annoying us. We still like Pam, Hoyt, Jessica, Eric (yum), Terry, and Hoyt’s crazy mom. We just started liking Petunia Dursley, Portia, and Jason Stackhouse. We go back and forth on Sookie. Where was Alcide?

This show is such a mixed bag. But we like the way things are heading. New positions for Bill, single Sookie, and creepy witches. It has to be better than last year, right? Fans of the show should be pleased with this premiere. It's more of the same, only different enough to still be interesting. This season has been hyped like crazy. It needs to come through.

Episode grade: B+