HBO released a ton of new short character-based TV spots for season two of True Blood, including this ethereal Anna Paquin one. (The rest are below.) And producer Alan Ball talked season two's themes and direction with reporters. Spoiler bite!
Show creator Alan Ball did a conference call with reporters, and had some grand pronouncements about season two. For one thing, the theme of season two is "the power of cults," whether organized Christianity or weird neo Greco-Roman cults. Another theme: the danger of intimacy.
Ball also tells Sci Fi Wire what to expect from the new season:
Everything gets deeper. Everything gets more intense. It's a lot scarier. It's sexier. It's just really, really fun.
He says the reason Bill and Sookie go to Dallas is to find a missing vampire who's the "sheriff of the Dallas area." (?) Also, we'll discover that when Maryann offered Tara a place to stay, she had a sinister agenda, and Maryann will be stirring things up. The show will be dealing with the terrors of intimacy, says Ball.
The original novels' author, Charlaine Harris, who's about 90 percent happy with the show so far, will make a cameo appearance in the season finale. Ball won't introduce the character of Bubba to the show. At some point in the season, we'll meet the oldest and "most human" vamp we've seen so far, who isn't Evan Rachel Wood's 500-year-old vampire queen character.
In another interview, Ryan Kwanten describes Jason's arc in the new series:
He's looking for a real sense of who he is, of belonging and his purpose in the world. In Season 2, he thinks he's found it, until cracks start appearing. But, he's definitely trying to mend his wayward ways. Anything that he does is always out of a sense of innocence. When he hit Sookie in the first season, and a bunch of other things that he did that would not be considered right or good, just because of his innocence and his childlike nature, he can be forgiven. There's redeeming qualities in there.
And he's with the Fellowship of the Sun, especially the Reverend Newlin and his wife Sarah, for the first half or two-thirds of the season. Towards the end, Sookie's world and Jason's start colliding, as vampires infiltrate the Fellowship.
Separately, UGO has a True Blood spoiler roundup, including some I don't think we've included. Yes, that was Lafayette's dead body they found at the end of season one, but before Sookie and Bill can investigate, Eric summons them and sends them to Dallas to investigate another vampire problem. In Dallas, the anti-vamp group Fellowship Of The Sun orders Sookie's execution.