That's weird. The pic in my above post–waitress praying to the porcelain goddess–disappeared. But if you click the little icon it will show up.

Edit. Nevermind. It's there now.

Mikey's storyline was over by the finale, right?

So what was Brahm's Lullaby doing in that promo?

That's a valid point, BG.

But only if the HS rape actually occurred and was not a symbolic representation of Sookie's own experience. I'm toying with the idea that all of the season 4 storylines and events were a symbolic representation of Sookie's subconscious thoughts and her experiences–including Bill's 'sovereignty', Eric's true nature, and the several call-backs to scenes from earlier seasons–but I'm not sure it's logistically possible.

Bobsgran said:

Is there any clue in the CB's that we've overlooked to get a handle on the Mikey arc or that the whole of S4 was symbolic?

I'm not really sure, and my thinking on this isn't very clear yet, but when you think about how strongly we suspected Bill's magical shenanigans prior to season 4, it becomes possible that the witch storyline was Sookie's way of putting HER suspicions into symbolic form. The witches could represent not only her suspicion that Bill uses magic, but her feelings of victimhood [raped, forcibly fed off] and her desire for revenge. The witches would also represent that Sookie is still unable to blame Bill directly for her troubles. However 'blame the witches' then becomes a metaphor for her suspicion that Bill uses scapegoats to take the blame for his own actions.

This is where a rewind could come into play. We rewind because season 4 was Sookie's unconscious dreamscape, but when we pick up in season 5 we rewind back to 'reality' and more or less start over from some point we can't yet identify.

The best thing that could happen to season 5 would be for an omniscient narrator–The Author–to take control of the narrative.

Having several examples of Sookie's unknowing psychic abilities, it's also possible that some of the actions she portrayed for other characters in season 4 were her precognitive abilities on display. Or indeed, her psychic and telepathic abilities is what allowed her to know what was going on in real time with the other characters even though she was being held as a prisoner in suspended animation. This is how she was able in prior seasons to represent other characters when she was not actually present for the action, so it's not out of the question I guess.

"WTF do I mean by that?…..IDK, LOL."

LMAOOO!!

"Could it be that even though he appeared to have had complete control of the narrative, he didn't recognize or credit the "solidly emotional moments","

No. If there is one thing we can be sure of with Bill it's the fact that he is incapable of depicting real emotion because he is incapable of feeling  real emotion. [except for rage, lust blah blah 'basically, all the good stuff' as Daphne would say]. I think the actors are ALWAYS directed to act like a 'strange facsimili' of their character when a scene's narrative is supposed to be directly under Bill's control. All you have to remember is how badly he got Terry wrong in the season 3 finale.

"I've wondered if season 4 wasn't all going to turn out to be a dream/hallucination spell/screen memory as well. I think the title of the premiere, She's Not There, is Alan Ball being a cheeky badger by referring not to the year she was missing, but what we were about to see"

I always totally believed 'She's Not There' referred to Sookie not actually being in FL. Logically we can extrapolate that to mean she 'wasn't there' for the whole of season 4.

But I think we have to figure out or decide if it was a dream/hallucination OR a spell/screen memory because I don't think it can be both. With a dream, the symbolic interpretations would be Sookie's own, but with a screen memory or spell the interpretations would have been forced on her, in which case the symbolic representations might be considered wholly inapplicable to Sookie's own thoughts and feelings. I don't think the latter applies, given what we know of Sookie and how season 4 went down.

"I was beginning to take the "She's Not There" as, she's not All there.  Alluding to her inability to deal with all that's happened to her."

BG, I think this is true as well.

If what we witnessed was a dream, it would have represented her way of 'dealing' with what's happened to her. Only she didn't really deal with it, she reinterpreted everything in a more palatable light to protect herself. However much we could see harsh reality bleeding through Sookie never faced any of it head on. Plus she threw in a lot of wish-fulfillment stuff like having her house cleaned, spending 'quality time' with Eric, and so forth.

Still. I'm not sure this is a logical theory nor am I sure I am satisfied with the implications of it, one of which is Eric never became FAE to protect her. It's true though that Sookie may have conjured FAE as a way of telling herself Eric only has her best interests at heart, while at the same time acknowledging to herself that he's capable of subterfuge to reach an objective. PLUS, his amnesia would represent her own suspected amnesia.