By By Billy Finnegan, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, September 12: the “True Blood” season finale, a momentous night in summer television. All of the various fans are anticipating what’s going to happen.  So many plotlines just waiting to converge, so many questions to be answered, and, with the season finale, we’re going to get closure.  Or we would have, if series creator Alan Ball had decided to wrap anything up.  Nothing was resolved.

This season of “True Blood” has been very much all over the place, both with content and quality, and the season finale, “Evil Is Going On,” only epitomizes this trend.  There were so many plots going on in the span of fifty-five minutes, possibly too many to be wrapped in so short a time—which is why almost none of them got any proper conclusion.

It is traditional for every episode of “True Blood,” especially in the case of season finales, to end with a cliffhanger: the first season finale had Sookie, Sam and Tara discovering the body in the back of Andy’s car and the second season had Bill being kidnapped.  However, the past two seasons were also very satisfying in the sense that most of the major plots of the season were wrapped up.  This season was different—the end of the episode was complete with four different cliffhangers, which was infuriating, especially as some of these plots need to be resolved before the show starts dealing with too much at once.

The episode itself was stronger as a whole than the past few episodes.  A lot certainly happened.  Alcide and Queen Sophie-Anne both made their returns (the Queen looking fantastic in widow’s garb), the Jason subplot finally became interesting (and also gave a perfect amount of closure), and the Russell plotline is over, assuming he is still successfully buried under concrete, which is hopefully the case, because the character is worn out despite the fantastic performance as actor Denis O’Hare has given all season long.  Particularly good was when Sookie dumped Talbot’s remains down a garbage disposal, revealing a delightfully dark side to her otherwise goody-good character.

However, despite the show’s resurgence in quality, there were some things that were just irritating.  Bill and Sam both lost so much character appeal in a flash, particularly Bill. The “fight scene” Bill was about to have with Sophie-Anne was reminiscent of a terrible ‘70’s kung fu flick.  The biggest problem with this episode though is that it did not feel like a season finale.  It did not close off this season’s plots, but rather introduced what will happen next season. Let’s hope next year is stronger, and does not introduce too many new concepts.