True Blood Season 4 Episode 3

It's a worrying sign when the season is only on its third episode and it already feels as though it's stalling. It may be down to the fact that this was simply a poor hand dealt, in terms of storylines. We have plenty of gross Hotshot scenes, which only build upon my hatred for Crystal and her unwashed panther-y cohorts (say it with me: shampoo!). And almost every other storyline has one or two strands that simply don't tie together.

Alcide is finally back on the scene, looking as buff as ever, greeting Sookie with a giant bear hug. Unfortunately, he's made amends with Debbie, a wolf in sheep's clothing if ever there was one. It's hard to buy into the idea that Debbie has reformed, and I was glad Sookie saw right through her ''pardon my French'' facade, choosing to leave Alcide's almost immediately and find somewhere else to hide Eric.

The 1000 year-old vamp that has lost his memory.

I didn't think that I'd enjoy this storyline much, but I have to admit, it was most certainly the highlight of the episode for me during an hour with very slim pickings. There is something endearing about an Eric who giggles when someone tickles his feet and apologizes at every turn for his past mistakes. I also really got a kick out of him shoving Pam to the ground the second she tried to intimidate Sookie. AND, I almost got up off the couch and cheered when he killed Claudine. One fairy down. While I want this storyline to be dead and buried, I'm guessing the Queen of the Fairies will have something to say about her second in command biting the dust (quite literally). It only means more trouble for a (moderately) defenseless Eric Northman.

I found it funny that Lafayette, Tara and Jesus spent the majority of the episode scurrying about and arguing over how to approach Eric for his forgiveness. It's the kind of plot development you have to look at through your fingers, since they have no clue regarding Eric's amnesia, and will no doubt inadvertently land themselves in even more trouble. Like with Pam. God, I love Pam, she's easily my favorite character on the show. I may have a few gripes with her if she kills Tara or Lafayette, though.

Speaking of favorite characters, or should I say former favorite characters, Jessica and Hoyt continue down the road of their relationship crisis. It's an awfully tedious subplot to sit through and I'm just wishing for the day that she either kills Hoyt or simply breaks his heart. This plot is running both characters into the ground. Maybe now that Jessica handed over that hideous doll to Arlene's kid, they'll start being adorable again. Oh, and before I forget, I did enjoy Bill's scene with Jessica, however brief. It's good to be reminded on occasion that they're meant to have a very strong emotional bond as maker and ''vamp pup''.

Bill appears to be adapting to his new throne with very little hassle at all, quite capable of making the tough decisions (sentencing a vampire to his true death for being caught on camera feeding) and enjoys reaping the benefits, and less difficult decisions, of adding sex to his new professional relationship with former Dexter hottie, Courtney Ford.

There's very little here to do with Marnie and her coven this week. The snippets we do get are still mostly setup, though the spirit that possessed Marnie last week clearly has her sights set on the wiccan. As of right now, there's still very little here in terms of character. Marnie is a pious woman who believes that she was born with one foot in another world. That's still not very much to go on.

Overall, it's a mostly uneventful hour, True Blood by the numbers, if you will. The season is still trying to set things up for further down the line. I hope it pays off.

After last week's episode, I had high hopes for the direction this season might take. But this episode took the goodwill garnered by the last episode and ruined it by cramming it with so much ridiculous stuff and somewhat lame storylines that I just grew fed up with it all. That being said, there WERE some really good stuff going on. I just can't look at Season 4 so far and say that it's as good as the other seasons were in their first three episodes.





I'll start with what I'm liking. The Jessica/Hoyt plot had some good payoff. We spent the first two episodes watching Jessica and Hoyt's little cutesy act disintegrate before our eyes, with Hoyt growing frustrated at Jessica's inability to make a real meal for him and Jessica being frustrated by the urges that overtake her as a vampire. It all culminated in the moment last week when Jessica fed on another man. We get an awkward heart-to-heart between Bill and Jessica and we get Jessica glamouring Hoyt into forgetting about her infidelity. Sure, perhaps Jessica and Hoyt aren't the most thrilling plotline on the show, but boy, the writers did a great job of preparing us for this and making it seem tragic.





And while Eric's amnesia was played for a few too many jokes, I loved the work Skarsgaard was doing here; we've known Eric as a cocky, self-serious individual who is older than everybody else and therefore has the guts to go against whoever he wants. In this episode, he's a goofy guy who somewhat remembers who he is but not quite. It seems as if the writers took his persona from a different show and transplanted it here. I laughed and thought it was funny, but how can a show as dark and macabre as this one think that this is a worthwhile plot? I understand it's part of the book series, but it's lame when adapted to screen.





As for the rest of the occurances, I didn't care that much. The "my baby is a killer!" plot involving that waitress and Terry are going through is dumb, Jason's plot is creepy and has the potential to be interesting.. but right now, I just don't know. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how Fiona Shaw's character Marnie grows from here on out. It appears that an ancient witch is possessing her and using her to do her deeds, which makes Marnie less of a villain and more of a puppet, which is interesting.





I have the bad habit of comparing shows too much to their former selves, which is why I'm trying to keep an open mind here. But this season isn't pulling me in the way the last three have. Let's hope it can keep improving.

So far it was the worse episode ever. From the gruesome story about vampires the show has become some sort of a fairy tale and soap opera which has barely anything to do with vampires. They've been placed in the background and as a substitute we are watching things about shapeshifters, skinwalkers and faeries... It sucks! It sucks unbelievably! But what the heck, you still could have watched it if the main and important characters were still important and nicely build. Since the second episode they are not! They have been reducted to some sort of retarded morons. The last three episodes are completely without any idea what to do next with the story. Jason is constantly laying in bed, Eric is playing a 5-year old child, Bill is banging anything that moves, Sookie has lost its temper and Sam is living a life in his own shifter world (since the the third season - without any reason). The idea with wicans is weak. Everything seems to be upsidedown and there is no hope to have it changed...

Frankly speaking I have serious doubts if I manage to watch this season to an end. I hope that the fourth episode will put the show's situation in much brighter light. So far for me it is declining...

Eric is drawn to Sookie's inner light but she manages to get him under control and take care of him as he knows that he doesn't remember who he was. She puts him in the space in her house for the time being. She goes to visit Alcide to see if Eric can stay with him but the fact that a now supposedly better Debbie is back with him she decides to handle it herself. Bill executes a vamp caught publicly feeding on someone and also start a sexual relationship with Portia Bellefleur was interesting foreplay and his "I can never love you" line gave me a big hint of sadness of his longing for Sookie. Lafayette looks to apologize to Eric for whatever Marnie did to him as a peace offering not knowing that his memory is wiped but Pam decides to let them go along and bring Marnie to her instead of killing them. Marnie does a blood ritual to become closer to The Spirit. Jason stays strapped to the bed and begs Crystal to let him go but she remains certain that she must continue to let him die for him to transform and he even takes back his love in the wake of death. I would do the same, she's not worth all the trouble she's worth and she's going to kill him. While it's good we got a sex scene with Crystal and Jason, some nudity would be good since we've never seen her before. I know that sounds pervy but her guys, this is True Blood we know what we wanna see, and the sex between Bill and Portia also lacked any nudity. Tommy needs to seriously get hit by a bus, I know Maxine is annoying but she doesn't deserve to be robbed by a punk lowlife like Tommy. Sam should've killed him and then we would be rid of him and his grubby little face forever. Sam acts better than him because he is better than him, that's all. Jessica and Hoyt have an argument after she admits to him that she fed on another guy and she glamors him into forgetting all about it which is sad. But even sadder is how sweet Hoyt is especially when he says that other women don't exist for him. I hope that they can make it work out, they are truly the couple that I root for along with Jesus and Lafayette. Good riddance Claudine, and also seeing innocent Eric is entertaining seeing Skarsgard take the character in a new way like never before. Good stuff, keep it comin'.

There was alot of stuff happening in this episode not all of it was particularly interesting but it was still a great episode. I found it very amusing that Sookie has now expierenced enough vampire dramatics recently that when 'blank' Eric shows up acting in a threatening she reacts in a 'whatever' manner even going so far as to punch him in nose to make him back off. I loved Pam, Eric and Sookie's interactions they have a great chemistry that makes for very entertaining TV. I didn't particularly care for the whole Crystal, Jason Hotshot storyline but I am very interested in how it turns out for poor Jason. I was very happy to see Alcide back, but I'm not totally sure about the Debbie angle. That has the potentional to end badly, probably for Sookie. On the whole I think that the writers have set the stage for an exciting and fun season of True Blood and I can't wait to see more.

True Blood has a problem. Last week I praised the show for setting up a large narrative; giving every character the chance to become the focal point of an episode. What seemed like a good idea then however, is just becoming irritating now. The issues don't stem from the quality of the show as a whole, in fact, some of the character moments coming out of "If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'?" were perhaps the strongest of the season thus far. The problem is that SOME of them are. The core of main characters have the strongest story lines, as they should have, but relative to the supporting cast, the story lines are too strong. Sookie, Bill, Eric, Jessica, Hoyt and the coven all have consistently engaging moments on screen right now, but everyone else is just burning air time. The writers are trying to balance the story out and not have it be just about vampires, something that they should obviously aspire to, but it isn't working.





Roughly a fifth of Sunday's episode was devoted to Jason and his encounters with the were-panthers. Whilst I appreciate that Jason is one of the main characters of the show (a personal favorite of mine) his entire arc does not fit in at all. Throughout the episode we jumped back and forth between the goings on around Bon Temps and Jason's captivity. If there were some extreme peril, significant plot shifting points, or really anything that anyone would care about at all happening, then the screen time would be entirely deserved. However, all of the information and "drama" that we got this week was a just a slowly regurgitated version of exactly what happened last week. For no reason at all Crystal re-explained the entire lineage plan and the awkward sex scene that I predicted came to pass. When you consider what we already knew of Jason's fate, the entire experience could have been limited to perhaps two minutes on screen and allowed much more time to one of the more interesting plot threads. One such plot thread being Eric's amnesia. After violently confronting the necromancer coven at Bill's command, Eric is stuck with no memory of himself. When Sookie figures out what's going on she takes him in, and works on a plan to keep him safe, when Pam suggests that the entire circumstance may have been by Bill's design - a way to get the AVL to kill Eric. The entirety of Alexander Skarsgård's time on screen this week was fantastic. There was plenty of humor to be had simply by looking at Eric's face when he was told that he'd done something wrong or learnt something about himself. You'd have imagined that getting a grown man to act convincingly like a child would be quite the task, but it was executed perfectly. As far as story goes, questions are raised left, right and center as well - a big plus when it comes to True Blood. Bill's complicity in what happened to Eric was the biggest stand out for me - someone who has never read the books and has no idea where all of this leads. Even having thought about where they were taking this story quite a few times throughout the week, I hadn't even considered that Bill might have suspected that this would happened. I'd imagine that both he and Eric were aware of the possibility given how fearful they were when they learnt that the coven were necromancers, but the possibility of a combative struggle between the two vampires over something other than Sookie is an exciting one. Another question raised - one more likely to take prevalence in the immediate story - is what exactly Marnie (head witch) is/is doing. Every time someone in the coven asks her if she remembers what happened when she is possessed in the episodes that have come so far, when she replies no, I'm convinced she's lying. My suspicions were somewhat confirmed this week when, after claiming to not remember how she dispatched Eric, we see the witch giving herself over to the spirit that possessed her with a blood sacrifice. With this mystery taking shape, the other question that occurred to me was "do the writers have a clue what they're doing?". The faerie story line was brought back to life in this episode for a very brief moment, just to allow Eric to pull a hilariously ignorant face at the end of the episode. It seemed at the inception of the season that the faeries were what was new in town, but now the witches and their powers are becoming a big thing. Forgetting all of that, the human hatred of vampires on a large scale grows ever bigger - with them actively seeking to portray vampires in a bad light on YouTube, and Bill has to deal with the ramifications of everything that happens. Having a wealth of stories can be good, but when all of them are such large issues, how can you possibly devote the necessary screen time that is required to each? Already a quarter of the way through the season, I don't know what I'm supposed to care about the most. Story overkill aside, the character development that it allows throughout Bon Temps is a big positive. Everything going on with Jessica is extremely interesting right now. She's completely grown up, but still has no idea what to do with herself. Her dad-like scene with Bill was one of the highlights of the episode for me, and some of that unnecessary panther time should definitely be going her way. Lafayette and Tara both play off each other strongly in the time that they did make the screen this week and the return of Alcide was two episodes overdue. Sam's relationship with his brother could be an interesting one, but at the moment, appears to be setting itself up to be a carbon copy of last year. The only character really serving no purpose right now is sheriff Andy. If V was still a big part of the story or Jason was actually free and working with him, then Andy succumbing to it might be a worthy watch. The problem is that it is a completely contained story right now. Like Tara being in New Orleans in the season premiere, if it can't connect to the bigger picture, it serves little purpose. For the holes picked in "If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'?" it remained a reasonably strong episode. The intrigue brought about by Marnie as well as Bill's suave politician side are more than enough to make me want to see next week already, but more importantly for the episode itself, Eric's amnesia was great.

If You Love Me, Why Am I Dyin'? was a superb episode of True Blood and I really enjoyed watching this episode because there was all sorts of interesting circumstances for the characters. There was definitely more character and plot development. It was creepy to see what was happening to Jason. The scene where Marnie was begging for the spirit to inhabit her again was awesome in many ways. I think the cinematography and directing were superb. The actors are always a pleasure to watch and its great to see how they have grown. This episode was crazy in many good ways. I can't wait to watch the next episode and to learn more about certain things!!!!!!!

John Doe, Kyle XY and now Eric Northman's compass is heading south ! Last time I almost admitted that True Blood had now officially become one of my guilty pleasures but I hadn't considered that one episode could actually be hilarious. Alexander Skarsgård (Eric) and Anna Paquin (S-o-o-k-i-e Sookie !) chemistry had been great so far but it was nothing compared to this third installment. Geek tip of the day : Press Alt + 0229 to flood the Web with å and other Swedooshiganess. So Skarsgård has finally found a refreshing role to appeal his ego but more important make us giggle like drunk fairies. And it's also obvious the writers are having a lot of fun too considering the numerous jokes they pulled. You killed my fairy godmother she said and Eric making a moue was irresistible. I also loved the tension between them, perpetually oscillating between naive blood thirst and a déjà vu growing friendship between Tarzeric and Jansookie. Beside the few usual glitches in the editing the rest was a torrent of exciting, entertaining and even interesting wicked drops. From the character development, all the different approaches they had regarding the vampire menace, to the disturbing Jason arc there was nothing left to remove from this sophisticated story. And it dug even deeper when Courtney Ford materialized on screen. Her performance as Christine Hill in Dexter's season 4 was so exceptional that I can't wait to see what they have planned for her. Considering her character already knew Bill (Stephen Moyer) I suppose they met in season 3 so it seems my ignorance is starting to get the best of me. Wait, I knew I had something bad to say about it ! Indeed Hill's talent and also Moyer's deserve better than a quick sex scene. Their conversation at the restaurant was well staged and a succulent preliminary but then they ruined everything in a few split seconds. However I'm convinced they have planned a whole diner with dessert and fromage so the best is yet to come ! I'm Alive and On Fire ? You bet !

The third episode of the show's fourth season was alright, but I am not sure what to think of witches playing such a big part in the show. This is a series that continues to evolve and continues to entertain, but I think it would be best sticking to the main cast, the main idea and what got the show to this point. The near shootout tonight, it just feels like the show goes out there and tries to top itself in the crazy department week after week and that style of crash TV can only last for so long.





This is good summer fun and a nice guilty pleasure, but I have to wonder how much crazier things can get. I am liking it, but stop trying to have that "OMG" moment every week, that's not necessary.