Season 3 of True Blood picks up exactly where season 2 left off. So what happened in season 2? Let’s have a quick recap.

Bill, Sookie’s vampire paramour, was abducted from a restaurant – moments after he asked Sookie to marry him. Eggs was killed after Jason saw him waving a knife at Andy Bellefleur. Andy took responsibility for the killing, to keep Jason out of prison. Sookie’s house is still wrecked from a pesky maenad infestion, in the form of Mary Anne, who seemed well on the road to making most of the town crazy until Sam, Bill and Sookie stopped her. Lafayette is selling V for who he thinks is Eric, but is actually Sophie Anne – Queen of Louisiana – operating through Eric. Jessica attacked a trucker and drained him, but is still in love with Hoyt, and Hoyt is still in love with her. Finally, Sam has decided to search for the family that gave him up for adoption in the hope they can give him some answers.

All caught up? OK!

Sookie spends this entire first episode running from human contact to vampire ally trying to find a way to track Bill down. She doesn’t have much luck until she realises that Bill can compel Jessica – as Bill’s protégée – to go to him. It turns out that Bill has been taken by some vampire drainers (including Ugly Betty’s Connor). Bill escapes by killing his captors and – much weakened by the loss of blood – literally goes to ground for the night.

Sherrif Bud Dearborn and what seems like the rest of the staff of Merlotte’s manage to get Tara’s back up by not showing the compassion she would like for the death of Eggs. Lafayette takes her under his wing and calls her mother –Lettie Mae – to look after her. As her mother flirts with Reverend Daniels Tara locks herself in the bathrooms and takes a whole bunch of pills.

Jessica, as well as Bill being missing, has her own trouble in the form of the now dead trucker who is stinking up her basement. She tries to turn him, but it is too late, so she is left with no one to turn to for advice and a corpse under the stairs. Hoyt is still in love with Jessica and pestering her to see him.

Jason is suffering major anxiety at the killing of Eggs, but is persuaded to ‘act normally’ by Andy Bellefleur. Even though he picks up two girls in Merlotte’s Jason has a hard time sealing the deal as he keeps seeing them with bullet holes in their heads.

Sam is in Arkansas looking for his real parents, and manages to find them.

Finally, Eric and Sophie Anne are facing some trouble of their own. If they are ever found out to be selling V they will face the wrath of the Magister, so the pressure is put on Lafayette to get rid of the V and get the IRS of Sophie Anne’s back.

A complex episode of True Blood, it seems that the stage has been set for the season through this one episode. The episode could seem to have too much going on for those joining for the first time, but those who have followed the show from the beginning will be all too aware of the complicated relationship that these characters have with one another.

Sookie and her search for Bill – even though this is sure to be the main storyline of the season – is forced onto a back burner for most of the episode, instead her presence is used to link all the characters together as she looks for help. Anna Paquin’s accent flickers on and off through the episode as normal, but it is enough to keep us going for the moment.
The rest of the characters behave as we would expect them to. There are no surprises here, but this is not a bad thing. The reason that the show is so popular is the cool indifference of Pam, Sophie Anne’s unpredictability, Jason’s adorable stupidity and Tara’s volatile temper.

The big thing, for the fans of the books, is how different the show is from the book that it is based on. Almost from the start of the episode things are every different. The show has been deviating from the books more and more with every episode, and now that characters that have been killed in the books are mainstays of the TV show it seemed to be only a matter of time before the show went in a very different direction from the books. This is not a complaint – the show is enough of a self contained world to accept this – merely an observation.

The episode is complicated and the relationships between the characters are getting more and more tangled, but this is why we love True Blood. It looks as though season 3 is gearing up for all the thrills and spills of the previous two seasons.

There are also some fantastic one liners – as always. The best being Sookie’s quip: “Pam, I am in no mood for lesbian weirdness right now”.

Welcome back True Blood. We missed you!

GS Reviewer: Brogen Hayes