True Blood: Nick Cave & Neko Case Ditch Faeries For Zombies

Alan Ball was known for his masterful use of music in Six Feet Under. He's lost none of his touch when it comes to his current HBO series, True Blood - which happens to be set in the Louisiana swamps, not terribly far from Houston.

​Expectation. That's the word of the day, gentle readers, of our not-so-gentle take on HBO's True Blood. Welcome to the fourth season of the last great vampire television show. They keep the emo to a minimum here.

Our expectations were mixed coming into this season. On one hand, the fourth Sookie Stackhouse book is one of the best in the series, a truly new look at many of your favorite characters as well another great revelation in regards to the fae inhabiting the world along with humans, vampires, weres, shifters, and even the occasional demigod.

On the other hand though, the aspects of the fae delved into in the last season were, if we may quote the Wife With One F who got us into this whole thing, a "bunch of henna-tattooed, Ren Festy bullshit." Sookie had disappeared from all her vampire troubles into a green light surrounded by Harlequin cover models and the Mary KKK. That's where we pick up the narrative.

Note: Fae, a variation of "faerie" will be spelled the way it is spelled in the True Blood Report because that is how it appears in the closed-captioning. No angry comments, please.

​The set that represents the plane inhabited by the fae makes us think that Alan Ball read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion one too many times, right down to the glowing trees. Sookie runs into her grandfather, also a telepath and descendant of faeries, who cannot believe that 20 years have passed since he last saw her. For him it has only been a few hours.

In the end, the whole set up is revealed to be a spell by the faerie queen Mab to harvest humans with faerie blood for... some reason or another. To breed is our guess. Anyway, Sookie blows the lid off the whole thing and the faeries are revealed as much more inhuman and their realm much more desolate without the glamour. Sookie escapes with her grandfather, only for him to die upon reentry to the human plane as he had eaten the fruit of faerie.

Much like us, the audience, waited for Sookie's return since last year, time has fast-forwarded a year in Bon Temps. Sookie's brother Jason is now a policeman, her best friend Tara a lesbian cage fighter, and her ex-boyfriend Bill has become the Vampire King of Louisiana.

This was not what we expected.