Moment of Strange

The good news about the fourth season is that, judging from the early episodes, Ball appears to have found a way to integrate many of these characters into one major arc, centering on new baddie Marnie (brilliant Irish actress Fiona Shaw), a Wiccan who runs the local coven and is interested in the stretching the limits of necromancy, which understandably gives the undead the heebie-jeebies.

At the end of the third season, our heroine Sookie (Anna Paquin), vampire boyfriend Bill (Stephen Moyer) and vamp bigwig Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) had dispatched, Hoffa-style, Russell Edgington, the Mississippi vampire regent who was proving to be a bit of a public relations nightmare for the pro-mainstreaming American Vampire League.