True Blood – Season 4

Posted July 7, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Sookie leaves the Fairy world after finding out things aren’t all as great as imagined and returns to Bon Temps to find out that during her short trip to Fairyland a full year has past.

Bill has become the new vampire king, Jason has sold off Sookie’s house, Tara has left Bon Temps for New Orleans, and Sam Merlotte still has issues with his little brother Tommy. Yes, a lot of things have happened during Sookie’s absence, but nothing compared to what’s about to happen.

When a group of Wiccas manage to bring a dead parrot back to life, Bill sees this as a major threat as Necromancers are known to have powers over the dead. He sends out Eric Northman to handle things, but this intervention ends up quite different than expected…

Sound and Vision:
HBO is known for having great blu-ray transfers and this fourth season of True Blood is no exception to that. The season premiere in the land of the fairies is bright and shine and quite the contrast to the rather dark nature of the series, but it still looks stunning up until the short chase to freedom which suddenly gave us a feeling of being in a Mad Max movie. The rest of the series then continues in its usual way with deep black levels, natural colors and good textures while the level of detail is always high. Excellent transfer, just as always.

The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track delivers equally great quality with understandable dialogues (which is hard with the fat Southern accents), good use of the subwoofer (the fairy fireballs of the first episode come to mind) and plenty of action for the surround speakers for effects. Nice!

Extras:
- 6 audio commentary tracks
- Inside the Episodes
- True Blood: The Final Touches
- Enhanced Viewing Mode
- True Blood Lines

The Final Touches is a 28 minutes feature that gives some background and a behind the scenes look at the post production special effects that were added. The other extras give more in-depth info on the episodes and characters. Good stuff.

Conclusion:
The end of season 3 made the cat come out of the bad: Sookie is a fairy! So next to vampires and werewolves, we now have fairies, werepanthers, witches, shapeshifters and ghosts. Did I leave anything out? I guess we’ll be getting some more supernatural beings still but a man’s gotta do something to keep things fresh, right?

Anyway, to keep things fresh for season 4, the fairy part is quickly abandoned after the premiere to only pop up for a brief moment here and there. The real villain of the season is a 400 year old witch with some bad feelings towards vamps, but that’s not all. We also get deepened out storylines for many (if not all) side characters and of course Sookie’s romantic endeavours with Bill and Eric also get plenty of attention.

All of this, along with the often short scenes that switch between characters, make the season feel a bit messy and lacking in the storytelling department. At times it’s as if the makers want to cramp too much info into one episode while at other times they tend to linger on for too long (Sookie’s dream sequences with Bill and Eric are a good example).

Still, when all 12 episodes are finished there’s plenty of stuff set up to be able to create a great fifth season! So as such, I would suggest to see Season 4 as an intermezzo that’s filled with an overload of (not always interesting) information to get ready for season 5.

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