Well, if the Season 2 finale ended with a bang, then the Season 3 premiere can be said to have blown things wide open!  This episode was an incredible rush from start to finish, and if the rest of the season is at all like its opener, then we are in for a dark and amazing ride!  Welcome back, Haven!!!

Okay, we started Season 3 where Season 2 left off – with Audrey (Emily Rose) missing from her apartment and Nathan (Lucas Bryant) and Duke (Eric Balfour) locked in possibly a battle for their very lives.  The mysterious tattoo that’s been haunting Duke ever since he learned that it would be on the arm of the man who kills him is now in full burn on Nathan’s arm as he takes aim at a fallen Duke on the floor of his boat.  Nathan believes Duke to be behind Audrey’s abduction, and means to get her back at any cost.  Shots are fired and punches are thrown, but the fight comes to a screeching halt when everything metallic in the room – including the gun – is suddenly yanked to the ceiling and suspended there without apparent cause.

In the next moment, we are shown poor Audrey’s predicament, tied to a post in a dark windowless room, being beaten and interrogated by a man (Tim Post) whose face remains in shadows.  The man wants to know one thing and one thing only:  Where is the Colorado Kid?

Holy Hell, Havenites!  Cue credits!  We are rolling on Season 3 at last!!!!

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Now, I actually love watching Haven’s opening credits, especially at the start of a new season, because there is SO MUCH in there, and it all happens to fast that it’s easy to miss a lot.  On this particular viewing, I was half-busy trying to scribble down a note before I forgot what I’d just been thinking, but kept glancing up to see what I could catch the first time around.  There were the familiar images that I love (the reference to Stephen King uber-villain Flagg, the little dog, the Haven Herald picture from the Colorado Kid murder that started Audrey on her quest, etc), and some that were new, but went by too quickly for me to catch.  What I did notice, however, that I don’t remember seeing before, was the inclusion of Adam Copeland, as WWE Superstar Edge in the opening credits!  Awesome!  I love Dwight as a character, and have had the good fortune to meet Edge in person briefly, so seeing him pop up in the credits as a regular got me pretty excited, to say the least!

Anyway, on with the episode.  There was quite a lot of confusion inside and out when all the metal objects dropped back to the ground a few moments later, and Nathan grudgingly decided to accept the idea that maybe Duke had been framed for Audrey’s abduction, so the pair head out to see if they can find out what happened to her.  Dwight (WWE Superstar Edge) is on scene helping to clean things up downtown (he comes up with a story about gas lines blowing some manhole covers from the street) and helps alleviate any panic among the people of Haven.  Stan The Cop (Glen Lefchak) tells Nathan and Duke that another woman was also abducted from her home just hours ago, and that it may have been connected to Audrey’s disappearance, so the frienemies head over to talk to her son.

The Teagues brothers, Vince (Richard Donat) and Dave (John Dunsworth), don’t really seem to be speaking to one another, given their firmly divided stance over Duke’s position amongst the Troubled of the community, and possibly about how much of Audrey’s past they know or want her to know.  But a few very interesting things happen in the space of a few minutes, at this point.  Some of these things must ultimately be important to keep in mind as the series progresses through Season 3, I think.  In one, Dwight and Vince have a conversation in which Dwight confirms that Audrey is missing and asks if Dave could be involved.  What?  Why would he think that?  Then I remembered that Dave saw another Audrey lookalike as “that which he fears most” in the second season episode that dealt with visions of fear, and again wondered what that could have all been about.

During that conversation, Vince suddenly gets a nosebleed, and my X-Files-lovin’ brain goes, “aliens!”, but then I remembered that we are in Haven, Maine, and that this is all linked to some kind of Trouble.  Not Little Green Men.  Or gray, as the case may be.  😉

However, when Nathan and Duke arrive to question the son of the other missing woman, Wesley Toomey (Michael Therriault), he himself believes that it was aliens who took his mother, and is eager to show both men all of the evidence to corroborate his theory.  Wesley believes that the Troubles are a myth, but that aliens is a perfectly rational explanation for what happened to his mom.  It all falls in with what his grandfather told him as a child – right before HE was abducted by aliens from the front yard, which young Wesley saw with his own eyes.  Duke talks Wesley into going to the police station where they have “better equipment” and where he’ll be safer from possible abduction himself, but Wesley speeds off on his motorcycle and Nathan and Duke are forced to pursue.

Back to Audrey being held captive and questioned about the whereabouts of the Colorado Kid.  Now, the whole thing up to this episode has been about who KILLED him, so why does this mystery man talk about the CO Kid as though he’s still alive?  Then, right on top of that, he asks Audrey if she thinks she was the only person who loved him?  WHAT?!  Pretty sure her jaw dropped at the same time mine did at THAT particular question!  Man, I love this show!!!

We also learn that another woman is being held in a room next to Audrey, also tied up and being questioned about the Colorado Kid.  Her name is Rosalyn (Deborah Tennant), and she was running the inn where the Colorado Kid had been a guest all those years ago.  Rosalyn tells Audrey that they are being kept in the inn’s basement (Altair Bay Inn?), but that she has no idea who their captor is, either.  The two women keep one another talking and connecting while Audrey works to cut herself free using a piece of broken glass.

Nathan and Duke hit a snag in their pursuit of Wesley when all of a sudden the truck engine dies and they coast to a halt in the middle of nowhere.  Cell phones have also stopped working which, of course, must also mean aliens.  In fact, everything that’s happened so far pretty much fits the stereotype of alien abduction and invasion tales, and it doesn’t stop there.  Nathan confesses to Duke that he can feel Audrey’s touch, right before he is dragged into the forest by an unseen force.  Duke tears after him on foot, and Nathan comes to a halt as quickly as he’d been upended – but now they are both standing in a field of crop circles, filled with strange (read: alien) symbols.

It turns out that Wesley Toomey is obsessed with alien conspiracies, and as luck would have it, his Trouble is that he can make those stories come true.  Everyone catches up with him at his house, where he has gone so that he can try to “jam their frequency” and save everyone. A meteor crashes nearby, and for the first time, I realize how close Nathan, Duke, Dwight, Vince, Dave and Wesley all are now to where Audrey and Rosalyn are being held.  The meteor draws attention to the area, and starts a small fire in the basement, which Audrey manages to put out before it can do much damage.  Their captor is back, too, only this time he is in the other room, hurting Rosalyn and dragging her away.  Audrey manages to cut herself free, but by the time she does, there is silence from behind the wall.  She sneaks upstairs and finds a phone to call Nathan and tell him where they are, while Nathan realizes that Rosalyn is Wesley’s missing mother, and takes him with them to try and save both women from their abductor, as well as possibly the town from Wesley’s alien invasion if he realizes that it was a man who’d taken her, not the aliens of his imagination.

The guys arrive at the Inn in time to save Audrey but, unfortunately, not in time for Rosalyn.  They find her body burning in an outdoor brick stove, and that horrid discovery fuels Wesley’s alien conspiracy story even more, bringing it to a fever pitch.  The man who abducted them is nowhere to be seen, and Wesley says that his grandfather showed him pictures of what the aliens do to people they don’t keep, which is how he accounts for his mother’s cruel fate.  A large mothership arrives overhead, and everyone heads indoors to try and talk Wesley down before he detroys them all.

Now, at this point, my own brain is in overdrive trying to figure a few things out, but coming up with more questions than answers.  I haven’t gotten a good look at the newspaper picture of the Colorado Kid murder, but to me it always looked like he was a burnt corpse leaning up against a dock piling in the foreground of the picture.  A bit macabre for a local paper, but that’s kind of what I always thought it was.  So THEN I started wondering if the CO Kid was actually Wesley’s grandfather, and that he’d been abducted and left burned on Haven’s rocky beach all those years ago, as a result of the family’s Trouble.  I also got pretty worried about our intrepid crew, because how do you convince someone that what they are seeing with their own eyes isn’t actually real?  How do you get them to believe that they are creating it all with their own mind, when all of the evidence matches up with reports from all across the globe?  Wesley himself says to Audrey that you can’t just erase everything he’s known about himself and his family for as long as he can remember.

And yet – that’s pretty much exactly what’s happened to Audrey, time and time again, isn’t it?

Duke grapples with the idea of killing Wesley to save everyone else, but Nathan instead talks him into allowing himself to go with the aliens, to “learn the truth”.  He tells him that maybe that’s what his grandfather did, and Wesley thinks that maybe he’s even still up there, waiting for him.  So he goes outside and lets himself get abducted by his own Trouble.  Wrap your mind around THAT!

As if all of this wasn’t enough to take in, Episode 301 isn’t quite through with us yet!  Duke and Nathan argue about which method of essentially killing Wesley was the “right” way to handle the situation.  Audrey confronts Vince and Dave on the secrets they’ve been keeping from her.  Was Lucy in love with the Colorado Kid?  Is the Colorado Kid still alive?  Vince says he helped bury the man himself – Plot Number 301 in Potter’s Field.  Nathan coaxes Audrey home for a rest, saying that they can see what’s buried in that grave tomorrow.  The brothers Teagues agree to put their differences aside in order to investigate who abducted Audrey and Rosalyn, and how he knows so much about Haven’s past.

Nathan and Dwight discuss Nathan’s tattoo while digging up the Colorado Kid’s grave the next day.  Did Nathan actually go out and get that tattoo, so he could be on the list of those who may kill Duke someday?  I had assumed that it just appeared on his arm temporarily while he and Duke were fighting, much like it had briefly shown up on Julia’s (Michelle Monteith) shoulder back in Season 1.  But it appears to actually be a part of him now, and Dwight seems unsure as to what to think about it.  Meanwhile, Audrey is on the phone with someone – a coroner, perhaps? – about Rosalyn’s body, and she can be overheard saying that she’d just been talking to the woman less than an hour before her body was discovered, so there’s no way that she had been in that fire for hours, as the evidence seemed to suggest.  I have a feeling that little tidbit might be important later, too, so I’ve tucked it away for now.

The dying moments of the episode, however, explode forward with even more pressing questions.  The coffin has bricks instead of a body inside, so now we don’t know where the Colorado Kid is, dead OR alive.  What’s more, there’s writing on the inside of the coffin:  “find him before the Hunter”.  What does that mean?  And who wrote it?

The second question is answered by Audrey immediately.  It’s her handwriting.

Haven airs Fridays at 10pm on SyFy in the US, and at 9pm on Showcase in Canada.