True Blood Season 4 is here!

True Blood has finally returned for its fourth season and I’ve personally been biting my nails waiting, so I’m ecstatic to be able to say that this episode was everything I wanted from the new season plus a little more. In fact, as soon as the episode finished, I watched it again.

True Blood picks up right where it left off at the end of season 3 – for Sookie, at least – transporting our part-fairy protagonist into a literal glowing fairyland. There she sees her grandfather as well as Barry the bellboy, a fellow part-fairy telepath. However, she soon realizes that things aren’t what they seem to be. The fairyland is just an illusion while the beautiful fairies are revealed to be hideous goblin-like creatures dead set on claiming all the human-fairy hybrids as their own.

This is easily the most fantastical True Blood has ever gotten, but it works. And it will continue to work as long as they don’t overdo it. After all, most people got into the show for the vampires, not the fairies.

Sookie manages to escape back to “the normal world,” but she discovers that she has been missing for nearly thirteen months despite the fact that she’d only been in the fairyland for about ten minutes.

So where did we find the rest of the characters after Sookie’s time jump?Everyone (except perhaps Andy Bellefleur) is happy to see Sookie again, especially her brother Jason who has seemed to mature a bit over the year, which is a relief since he’s finally become a sheriff’s deputy. Unfortunately for Sookie, he sold her house after believing her to be dead. The house had been purchased by an unknown buyer who later turns out to be the Scandinavian vampire Eric Northman.

Sookie and Bill have a moment to talk, a conversation many fans were probably waiting for after Bill’s devastating, curveball betrayal right at the end of season 3. Their conversation is handled delicately, and despite what happened between them, it’s clear that they still have some love for one another. The love triangle with them and Eric will probably continue well into season 4.

Jessica and Hoyt have settled into a domestic routine. And although they may be two of my beloved characters, they’re a little boring now compared to everything going on around them.

Tara, who has been traveling from place to place after leaving Bon Temps, has become a cage fighter in New Orleans. She also has a girlfriend, but it’s unclear if she has forever forsaken heterosexuality or not. Either way, it’s nice to see her happy for once after being traumatized and victimized for three seasons.

Sam Merlotte claims to attend an anger management class, which turns out to be a small group of other shapeshifters with whom he has bonded (AKA: chatted, gotten drunk, and run around in animal forms).

Jesus and Lafayette are still going strong. However, Jesus continues to push a wary Lafayette to access his magical potential and takes him to a coven meeting led by Marnie, a timid palm reader who reveals a darker side of herself during a session in which the coven members (with the help of Lafayette) briefly manage to bring her dead familiar, a parrot named Minerva, back to life for less than a minute. Marnie is played by Fiona Shaw, an Irish actress mostly known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter movies. And now she’s ironically gone completely, witch.

Things have changed and opened up just enough in the True Blood universe to let us know that we’re in for an intense and bloody fourth season that was worth the wait. The only thing that seems out of place is that our werewolf friends are nowhere to be seen. Not yet, anyway.