True Blood 201: Bedtime at four a.m. and not a minute later

It’s back! And by crikey, it don’t mess around. Wonderfully, we arrive at the exact moment we left: with the discovery of a leg dangling lifelessly from Detective Andy Bellefleur’s car.

It's not Lafayette. He'd never wear such tacky red toe-nail polish

The first thirty seconds – before the credits roll – are a masterclass in Hammer House excitement. The chaos, the black humour, the fear: Tara panicking the body might be Lafayette’s; Andy, focusing as ever on the wrong thing (‘someone moved my car!’); Sookie gasping, ‘Check for a pulse’; Andy drily telling her there’s no need, there’s a massive gaping hole where the heart oughta be; Sam yelling, ‘It’s not Lafeyette’; Sookie sobbing, ‘Who is it?’; and Tara realising it’s Miss Jeanette and letting out the mother of all screams. My word, I had to have a lie-down after that and the programme hadn’t even properly started.

I’ve been trying to fill the True Blood gap ever since, like Andy Pandy, it waved goodbye last year.  Glee has helped, but as we tumbled once more into the looking-glass world of Bon Temps, I realised that, lovely as it is, Glee is just a methadone substitute. Nothing can compete with TB for sheer high-octane, suck-you-in-and-spit-you-out enjoyment.

So for starters, we had Miss Jeanette , mouth rigor-mortised into a terrorised silent howl. As Sookie said in her dopey way, ‘Someone just wanted to see her suffer.’ Well, yes, Sookie. Good to see you firing on all cylinders.

Believe me, your hair will need a little freshening when you've been around for a thousand years

We had Lafayette, alive thank the good lord, but chained to other prisoners in a dank dungeon, awaiting some horrible unknown fate. Pretty soon Eric appeared, wearing highlighting foil, making it clear what the fate was likely to be. And I don’t mean dark roots. I’m not worried about Lafayette, though. Worst-case scenario, he’ll be made into a vampire: a laid-back, jive-talking vamp with a penchant for gold lamé. That’s a happy bonus of this show. When your favourite characters get killed off, they’re likely to return, good as new, except with sharper teeth.

I'd soon as bite my own arm and drink the... come to think of it...

We had Bill, baby-sitting teen vamp Jessica, patiently helping her sample all the different flavours of Tru Blood, to mixed reviews: ‘This tastes more like ass than the A positive!’ I’m loving Bill’s firm parenting style. When he told Jessica he was expecting a guest for the evening, and Jessica asked if they could eat her, he said sternly, ‘You may not!’

Jessica: ‘Eric let me feed on a guy with tattoos.’
Bill: ‘I’M NOT ERIC!’
Jessica: ‘You’re SOOOOO not Eric.’

Bill was just showing Jessica where to recycle the Tru Blood bottles when Sookie arrived. She was somewhat irritated that Bill hadn’t told her he’d ‘made’ Jessica, and also had failed to mention he’d killed her sexual abuser Uncle Bartlett. Honestly, she’s a right old nag. Don’t sweat the small stuff, Sookie. So Bill’s a murdering dead man who drinks blood. Big deal! At least he sorts the recycling.

We had Jason, wide-eyed with convert’s zeal, meeting Steve and Sarah Newlin, anti-vampire church leaders. Sarah, a wholesome blonde, gazed just a little too intently at Jason’s god-given pecs, making me suspect she might soon offer to show him more of God’s Great Bounty. Jason’s lips moved as he avidly read his Bible, and later he turned down advances from a pneumatic dolly-bird for the first time ever. I definitely prefer this Jason. Being saved has made him slightly less predictable.

We had Tara, still enjoying gracious living Chez Maryann’s: dangling her legs in the swimming pool and flirting with Eggs (should that be soft-boiling with Eggs?) Maryann’s got some ancient gods thing going on, with her Doric columns, her greek dresses and her cornucopias of fruit. Just don’t ask her what’s a Grecian urn, she’s likely to give you a sharp slap like she did her creepy butler when he interrupted a Tara/Eggs snog (a scramble?).

Most intriguingly, we had Sam flashing back to when he was a young pup – woof!– of seventeen, and had a bizarre sexual encounter with Maryann, who did her weird vibrating thing at the point of, er, no return. There’s one woman who doesn’t need a Rabbit sex toy. The reason Maryann has turned up in Bon Temps has something to do with Sam, but what? What? I must know.

Teddy, the words are, 'Time to go home', not 'I wanna do bad things with you'.

All this, plus the lovely Hoyt, Lafayette bemoaning his wicked past (‘The drugs! The sex! The websites!’), a racy Bill/Sookie sex scene, a fledgling romance between Arlene and Terry… it’s too many riches. I almost cried when it finished, just as I used to when Andy and Teddy waved and waved till they faded out.

 Posted by Qwerty