Review: True Blood - Season 4, Episode 1, 'She's Not There'
Fairy shenanigans, a vampire PR campaign, cage fighting, and Bill Compton: baller.
****Spoilers to follow****
In the fourth season premiere of True Blood the line between goofy and good gets a little harder to see. Never a show to spin its wheels, the episode starts almost immediately after the season three finale, with Sookie (Anna Paquin) whisked away by her honest-to-goodness fairy godmother to the land of the fairies. When it very quickly becomes clear that this fairyland is something more sinister, Sookie flees with her grandpa (!), played by Gary Cole (!), while hagged-out fairies throw fireballs at them. Back on Earth, grandpa (!) dies, and then the episode really gets started in earnest: Sookie's 10 minutes in fairy heaven was really 18 months, her house is up for sale to a mysterious buyer, Jason's a police officer (and tending to the shambling, in-bred brood in Hot Shot), Bill's royalty, Eric's telegenic, Andy's got a problem, Sam's joined a group, and Tara's become a lesbian mixed martial artist. Also, Arlene's baby might be evil and the big villain of the season is some kind of super witch.
First, let me grouse and get the major complaint out of the way, because overall, this was a pretty effective episode in terms of moving the plot forward and setting up the season in (mostly) intriguing way. First off, the fairies subplot is really tough to overcome given the rest of a series which is normally comfortable diving right into camp while keeping the overall plot engaging. The problem, the really big, glowing, ugly problem is that this storyline feels like way too big an escalation in the supernatural dimension of the show.
It's a weird complaint, given that the structure from season to season has been to escalate and expand upon the supernatural world of the series: first it was vampires, then it was shape-shifters, from there magic ladies who thought they were goddesses, then werewolves, and then we reach the fairy element. It just feels like such a great big leap, and then to launch feet first into a fairy (but maybe not really) civil war, complete with desert landscapes, Touched By An Angel lighting, and magic missiles is kind of an overload in the midst of everything else. But it's really only the first five to ten minutes of the episode, and after the sequence ends, it feels like that particular plot has been shelved for healthy minute (thankfully).
The only other complaint was the introduction to the new heavy for the season, Marnie the witch, played by veteran actress Fiona Shaw (Harry Potter's Mrs. Dursley), not necessarily because it's a bad plot development or anything (witches are an element of the show that have been teased for a while now). It's simply that we don't really get to see Marnie as a human being with a personality besides shrieking, moaning, wide-eyed eccentricity. Hopefully, future episodes will flesh her out beyond a series of tics.
So what worked? Well, I mentioned that the structure of the show is based on its season-to-season escalation of the supernatural, but it's also rooted in the escalation of the personal. Just about every character has something to do this season, which is fairly typical for True Blood. Some elements didn't sit easy while watching the episode, particularly Tara's going gay and Andy's new habit, but in terms of where the characters were and have been these beats felt like they made a little more sense. For Tara in particular, she's been nearly killed or at least betrayed in some way by every man she was with throughout the series, and she ended the last season in a pretty powerless place--with the changes she's made in her life (which include a name change) she's gained agency over her circumstances, even if it has the potential to come back and bite her later. Andy's V habit is kind of a split: on the one hand, his character was a drunk and something of a mess, but on the other, it feels like he would just go back to being a drunk again, all things considered.
Finally, I really appreciate that the overarching vampire nation storyline is moving in an interesting direction as they attempt to launch a PR campaign to undo the damage done by Russell Edginton's rampage near the end of last season. From the promos it looks like clashes between increasingly suspicious humans and vampires are going to be the big thing for the season, but it's made more interesting by forcing Bill to have to become a politician and leader with Eric as his subject.
So, overall, it was a strong start to the season. Strong but not great since a lot of it was catching up, but I'm genuinely looking forward to the next episode.
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