True Blood Sneak Peek - RECAP

I'm doing this, y'all, don't even try to stop me.

You can call her MAAAB.

Click. Fzzzz. Choir of angels. And my whole body relaxes into the pure bliss and exhilaration of anticipation. Yes, it's only the HBO title card, and yes, I have in fact heard that sweet sweet symphony since that sad sad day in September; but hearing it once again at the vanguard of a brand new True Blood episode - well, it's like the Star Wars theme. Dime a dozen, right, crappy sitcoms shell out for it or the Imperial March left right and center as a fix-all and it's everywhere and you hear it all the time... but if you were to time travel back to nineteen-seventy-whatever and catch one of the first screenings of The Empire Strikes Back with all the crazy newly-minted Star Wars nerds in a time when nobody had been entirely sure there would be a second, and in a time when it looked like Harrison Ford had up and finished with the franchise, and the lights dimmed and that silent unassuming Arial-typefaced open-ended once-upon-a-time quietly faded in and faded out, are you going to tell me that you wouldn't have a mild heart attack upon hearing that first trumpet blast? Same basic principle.

So yes, my heart skips a beat and I may or may not tear up just a tiny bit, and as the big white HBO fades out and the sweet flutey music fades in, we are suddenly in... either the worst film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream ever, or the best stage version of A Midsummer Night's Dream ever. Painted backdrops of swirling pink and purple clouds hang about a foot away from the back of the shallow set and green silk leaves sway around the heads of a thousand Miss USA contestants with their teased ringlets and body-baring sequined dresses. That, and a bunch of blue-collar types who can not believe their luck.

The "something Fairy-like is about to happen" music starts up, and obligingly several cute little Dolly Parton wannabes step away from a spot under the tree where glowing is happening... and BAM, it's Sookie! And Claudine. Sans the several varied other Greenwich Village types we saw teleporting away with them in the last moments of season 3. Everyone applauds anemically. Sookie feels nauseous and tells her so. "I feel nauseous." First line of the new season, Sookie feels nauseous! Then she asks Claudine if she's "Like, the head of the Fairies or something," because Sookie thinks highly of herself. Like remember when she made Russell Edgington giggle by asking him the same question? Anyway, no, Claudine's her Fairy Godmother ("I have a fairy godmother?") and she's one of the few work-a-day fairies in this weird land of lame, poorly attended parties with pseudo-celtic soundtracks.

"Sookie?" It's Barry from the Hotel Carmilla! He and Sookie mostly stare at each other and there's a floppy attempt at humour as he introduces his very male "Fairy Godmother" Lloyd who is wearing some sort of necklace-slash-breastplate under an embroidered Nehru jacket. A Swedish supermodel type offers them a "lumière, a light fruit" in a voice that sounds like one of those type-and-speak computer programs. Sookie stands there like she just got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan while Barry babbles on about how sweet this gaywad party is and how awesome the weird luminescent yellow tomatoes taste. Hey, remember that time he was really mean to Sookie, but then picked up her telepathic message all the way across the city and delivered it to Bill Compton (that fucking guy) nearly getting nom-nomed by the late Lorena (remember her?) in the process? They don't talk about that. Instead Sookie judges everyone around her for enjoying the tomatoes and tries to warn Barry against them, but loses her train of thought, and then her gaze lands on some Gary Cole-looking guy who totally is Gary Cole!

...Which triggers a flashback, in which Gary Cole (channeling the skinnier, goofier farmhand from The Wizard of Oz) picks a peach and hands it skinnily and goofily to Little Sookie...

...which causes (relatively) Big Sookie to gasp and go, "Grandaddy?"

...which causes Gary Cole to scoff and go "Beg yer pardon" before returning to his glowmato... but when Sookie coos "Grandaddy Earle", he gets all tingly. "I'm Sookie," she presses, and he finally lowers the glowmato, and he doesn't even argue because she looks so much like Sookie, but "I just saw you last week... it was your birthday." But that was twenty years ago. And the music gets dark and tinkly as they both realize they've been reverse-Narnia'd. And here, presumably, in the future, will ring Jace Everett's oh-so-dirty and oh-so-sexy guitar strums and we'll look at that fucking nasty white thing in the bayou and for the thousandth (or, like, 37th) time we'll ask what the fuck is it.

(Some light Googling informs me its a catfish. Further googling confirms that catfish are all similarly ugly and must be stopped.)

And then after watching that spazzy lady get baptized in the black water we'll return to a cursing and struggling Earle Stackhouse who, having just been brought somewhat up to speed (we're spared the inevitable "Are you fucking with me? No, seriously, are you fucking with me?" which is probably for the best), asks resignedly if Adele Stackhouse "passed gentle". Sookie lies expertly and very sweetly that it was "peaceful". Let's all take a moment to imagine how first-season Sookie would have handled that same question. Probably something like this:

"It was awful. And it was my fault. There was an evil man - I saw her blood on the floor - I slipped and fell in it - the cat was licking it up - she stared at me with her wide dead eyes - she fought, the coroner said she had defensive cuts on her hands - but she's with Jesus now." Remember when she threw around the Jay word left right and centre?

But there's no way to lie about her parents' death, given that they drowned and all. Earle's still struggling with the twenty-years part and consults his pocket watch, insisting he's been here for only a few hours. "I must have lost track of time," he says, realizing even as he's saying the words how insignificant they sound compared to the magnitude of what's happened. "It's just, everything seemed so... lovely."

But we've already established that all this "loveliness" looks more like a decent costume budget than anything else. And Earle's words seem to trigger something in Sookie's brain, an immunity to the loveliness. There's Gollum creeping through the smalltalking party-goers. There's a bejeweled hand reaching for a light fruit that is brown and crusty and covered with maggots. So Sookie switches into telepathy and warns her Grandaddy that it's a trap - but of course, telepathy is the one thing they do right in this freaky plane, so heads immediately flick toward them. Chrissake, Sook, here's the one place where a decent whisper could have helped you out.

Too late, though, because the most expensive dress and curliest updo of them all is now walking toward them, scoffing at her use of the word "trap". Sookie jumps to her feet with a pretty great "oh shit" face. The curly updo bitches about the general lack of bowing going on, so Sookie bows in that weird awkward way that people who have never watched a period piece bow before saying, completely candidly, "I just have no idea who you are." Which is never the right thing to say. "You can call me MAAAB," says tall updo lady - if you know even your most basic intro to Shakespeare soliloquies, you know that's really not good news. She-will-abort-your-baby-if-she-doesn't-like-the-way-your-breath-smells news. MAB tries to gently talk her into chowing down on the glowmato with a voice that sounds like Dr. Claw doing his best Elizabeth Bennet, and when Sookie whips the fruit to the ground like a petulant two-year-old (where it dissolves into brown mush) MAB goes all Evil Bilbo on her, only barely getting herself under control in time to reprimand her for letting the Dumped Bill Compton onto the Fairy plane. Sookie guaran-damn-tees her than it won't happen again but all MAB wants to do is force-feed her a glowmato, which obviously goes over well (humans are quite uniquely incapable of being force-fed anything without the help of expensive restraint devices) and then Sookie pulls herself together enough to fairylight MAB back into the tree, where she writhes and her chin grows alarmingly and it's all crazy. And when the dust clears they're no longer on the rosy-lit sound stage; they're out in some nasty grey desert world where everyone's greasy and ugly and pointy-eared. Goblin-like, if you will. (I'm fine with everything except the pointy ears, actually, I think they could have been a bit more creative, but nobody asked me.) "DO NOT LET THE GIRL ESCAPE," screams MAB in a heavily distorted voice while fairies lob fairylight cannonballs at them and Sookie and Earle book it up a precipice.

Then some British guy grabs Sookie and screams that he can help her escape, but Sookie's more concerned with the grabbing part and fights him until she watches a cannonball disintegrate his friend. British guy yells at some more fairylight throwers on the above cliff to hold their fire, which they do, and then I guess Sookie decides it's easier to trust him because even if he's lying it's either death or death, but he might be telling the truth. They stop at the edge of a cliff that overlooks a massive chasm that I would certainly go out of my way not to fall into. Apparently he's Claudine's brother, and the Fairies are trying to reap all the seeds they've sown, which sounds like they're prepping for a Fairy war? And MAB is trying to seal off all go-between between their world and ours, which British Guy is not all right with for several reasons. They establish that Sookie has not eaten the light fruit, thus she can "go" but Earle can't. And then MAB screams "DO NOT LISTEN TO HIS LIES. JUMP AND YOU WILL DIE." To illustrate her point, or perhaps to validate it, she raises her hands and starts magically collapsing the walls of the chasm. When Sookie hesitates, Earle grabs her and throws them both off the cliff, and...

YO, THAT'S IT!

Predictions? Did you ask? Probably not, but I'll share them anyway. Don't call them spoilers, because a) I haven't read the books, and b) my predictions most certainly won't be accurate. Earle's going to make it, but probably not in a super great "Oh look, Earle Stackhouse is back from the dead!" sort of way. Either in an "elderly bag of bones" sort of way or a "severly crippled from magick and mayhem" sort of way. And there's going to be a fairy war. And British Guy is going to a) be hot and b) totally fall for Sookie. And we probably won't see Barry again until the final episode.