“Bad Blood,” True Blood: In Pictures.

If you’ll recall, last season’s finale ended with Sookie discovering that Bill had been kidnapped. Tonight’s premiere begins where we left off and after the jump, the memorable images from this episode [NSFW]:

Sookie is frantic about Bill’s being missing, but she seems to be the only one. The restaurant owner is not so sympathetic.

Meanwhile, Sam is still on the road to tracking down his real parents, Jason is freaking out over shooting Eggs and Tara is, well, freaking out over Eggs’s having been shot. Jessica returns home to see that Hoyt’s been there…

…but unfortunately, she’s not alone. For some reason, she’s brought home the nearly dead body of that trucker she fed from in the last episode. Girl, what is going through your undead mind? I don’t even know. Meanwhile, we catch up with Bill, who is not with vampires at all. He’s with a group that’s introduced simply as the “Fuck You Crew,” but here’s a secret: they’re werewolves!

After the credits, we return to Sookie, who is giving her statement to Deputy Kenya Jones, who is not working hard to conceal her disbelief that Bill’s actually been kidnapped. It’s clear that Deputy Jones thinks it’s far more likely that Bill got angry over being rejected and ditched Sookie. In any case, statement or no, nothing much can be done until Bill’s been missing for 48 hours.

Sookie stops by Bill’s to see if he’s there and finds Jessica, who’s totally okay, nothing’s wrong, nothing to see here, just standing around in my open dress and crying tears of blood lol jk no biggie. That trucker, whom Jessica’s stashed in the cubbyhole, is dead, by the way.

At Merlotte’s, the investigation into Eggs’s death is underway. The official word is that Andy shot him, which leads to a very sweet moment where Terry (who, of course, is Andy’s cousin) tells Andy that he’s “still a man who is capable of goodness and heartbreaking generosity of spirit, and if you cling to that with everything you’ve got, it’ll be alright.” Meanwhile, Arlene’s pageant-y answers–going on about law enforcement’s service and protection–serve to piss off Tara something fierce.

When Tara says that whatever Eggs did, it wasn’t his fault, Arlene asks whose fault it was–society? Of course, it was Maryann’s fault, but acknowledging that would mean acknowledging that Arlene, like most of the town, had been enthralled and ain’t nobody wanna do that. Lafayette, who is usually the wisest one in the room, escorts Tara home along with some tequila (“…but I doubt that surprise any of y’all.”) After they leave, Arlene says that she hates it when “they make everything about race,” which is such a perfect line that I predict it’ll go right over the heads of the people it satirizes.

The Fuck You Crew are busy feeding off Bill, while Andy stops by Jason’s to get their stories straight. Andy thinks that people will notice if Jason’s moping around for no good reason, so he gives Jason a mantra: Conscience off, dick on. Sookie is already in Shreveport, stopping by Fangtasia, on her tour of all the places where Bill might be. After shrugging off any “lesbian weirdness” from Pam, Sookie barges downstairs into the basement, where Eric is in the middle of boning a new dancer. Sookie confronts him with her suspicion that he had Bill kidnapped, which Eric denies. But he does promise to look into it, since as sheriff, it’s his jurisdiction.

Although Bill is weak from being fed from, he manages to snap the Fuck You driver’s neck and wreck the car. Bill is the only one we see emerge from the wreckage.

Back at Fangtasia, Eric is furious with a “Ruben,” who apparently was supposed to kidnap Bill, but got to the restaurant too late. Also, blah blah plot something, you’re welcome.

Sookie finally makes it back to her house, where she finds Lafayette and Tara and finds out what happened to Eggs. After telling Tara how Eggs knew what he’d done (Sookie, of course, helped him remember), Tara attacks Sookie. Sookie is having a terrible day.

In Arkansas, Sam has a dream about Bill, with sexy results.

Lafayette has to go to work, so he leaves Tara in the care of her mother, although he makes it clear he’s only doing so because Tara’s been asking for her. Because of later events, I wonder if she were asking for her because Tara knew how oblivious her mom would be.

Lafayette also makes this face, in response to Lettie Mae’s hogwash about how a mother’s always there for her baby.

Hoyt manages to get Jessica on the phone, but unfortunately she can’t see how “badass” his new haircut makes him look because she’s busy dealing with her Weekend at Bill’s situation.

Back at Fangtasia, the magister and the queen show up to have a talk with Eric about the dramatic surge in V sales. The queen is shocked, shocked to find out that V sales are going on in her queendom.

This is unrelated to the plot, but I thought Evan looked really pretty tonight. Moving on, that’s exactly what Jason is trying to do–move on, with the help of two lovely NYU students passing through Louisiana on a roadtrip.

Eric finally tells the queen about Bill’s being missing but she doesn’t care, because all she cares about is her precarious financial state. The queen orders Eric to offload the remaining V, which means of course that Eric orders Pam to get rid of it, which means of course that Pam orders Lafayette to sell it. When Lafayette balks at selling that amount in a day, Pam is not having it. “Maybe I smile too much, maybe I wear too much pink, but please remember, I can rip your throat out if I need to.” My autobiography in one sentence.

While Bill comes upon the house of Olivia, a nice elderly lady from whom he’ll feed and then glamour…

As Jason is striking out with the ladies (he keeps picturing them with big bulletholes in their heads and then he tells them this), Lafayette is returning home to find Tara in the bathroom choking down random pills, and Sam is finding his birth family.

Having witnessed Eric “call” Pam, Sookie questions Jessica about Bill having called. Jessica realizes that’s the weird shivery feeling she had earlier that felt like the time she had too much Kahlua. Using Jessica as a human compass, the ladies stumble upon Bill’s wrecked car. There’s still a body inside (probably the driver), but Bill’s not there.

The driver has what looks like a brand on his shoulder of a runelike symbol and rune-matching? There’s an app for that.

As Bill is finishing up glamouring Olivia, he hears wolf howls in the distance. At this point, my 22-month-old niece started running around chanting, “wolves are coming, wolves are coming!” (It was much better than the beginning of the episode when she was running down the hallway wailing “Beeeeeeel!”) Beeeeeeel! doesn’t seem as excited as my niece when the wolves catch up with him…

…but he does warn them, “I fed.”

But baby, so have they.