(Along with recapping tonight’s episode, I’m also going to be discussing how one character’s fate differed from their book counterpart. If you’ve yet to read the book and are anxious about discovering those sort of differences for yourself, you’ve been warned. I’m also going to be discussing a character’s death IMMEDIATELY once the article starts. Again, you’ve been warned so don’t come crying to me on Twitter. Unless you’re, I don’t know, secretly in love with me and want to tearfully confess via Tweet. Should that be the case, feel free to hit me up. I’m probably not doing anything. Have I wasted enough space so that people won’t see the spoiler right away? Cool, OK, let’s get to spoiling:)
RIP Jim Kent, the first of our regulars to fall, courtesy of several rounds to the head from Vasily Fet. For people who read the book, Jim’s fate has been sealed since day one, which made Sean Astin’s tremendously sympathetic performance and the show’s expanded backstory all the more wrenching. In the book, Jim was a traitorous cipher who ended up infected after the first encounter with Captain Redfern and abandoned by his Stoneheart masters to slowly die and transform. If I remember correctly, Eph and Nora didn’t learn about his betrayal until long after the vampire plague had begun to settle in, and Jim’s ultimate fate as an inhuman wretch was never a concern for anybody.
So when the show arrived at that fateful encounter with Redfern and Jim survived without a scratch, we were all of us in uncertain territory. The show used the reprieve for both big emotional moments (Jim confessing to Eph), plot continuation (Jim helping Gus dispose of Redfern’s body) and finally to create a longer and more tragic arc towards a kind of bittersweet redemption. Jim still ends up dead, but he dies with his soul intact, and his guilt leavened by having helped strike some blows against The Master and Eichorst. The last thing Jim saw before dying was Eph and Nora desperate to save his life, and, hey, that’s something.
Jim’s death was the major event of the episode, but ‘Creatures of the Night’ written by co-author and co-creator Chuck Hogan and directed by Walking Dead alum Guy Ferland, is packed with incident from first minute to last, delivering a wicked little siege episode in the latest of what’s been a very strong run of episodes as the show nears the home stretch.
After last week’s subway battle with Eichorst, the pretty-damn-fearful vampire killers hurry to an out of the way medical supply store to stock up on UV lights. They encounter Fet (YAY! FET GETS TO DO THINGS THAT ARE RELEVANT!) and divvy up the lights. When the gang goes to a convenience store across the street to stock up on supplies to ride out the coming nights, a swarm of vampires descend on the place, murder Rick Baker, and start trying to break in.
So it’s a siege picture, and the episode wastes no time in recalling the structure and evocative atmosphere of your Night of the Living Deads, your Assault on Precinct 13s, etc. Hogan’s script wisely avoids the trap of loading the store with idiots to be killed off willy-nilly, instead keeping the focus almost entirely on our heroes with the few other characters all serving needed plot functions.
Of course it wouldn’t be The Strain without a little funkiness in the plotting, and so one of the people caught in the crossfire is the Australian lady that broke the Internet on behalf of Stoneheart (which remains maybe the dumbest thing to ever happen on this not-always-so-intelligent show). While those particular beans remain unspilled by episode end, Internet-Murderer Lady survives to the end and is still with the heroes as they flee, so presumably she’ll be in a more divulging mood next week.
The bulk of the hour is given to all the usual siege-story-goodies. You got the infighting, the various failed escape attempts, the paranoia about infection, the attempts to strategize how to old off the invading forces and the countermeasures taken by the horde. Eph and Nora attempt to treat Jim’s infection by slicing open his face to extract the worm, while Fet and Abraham bond over being way cooler than everybody else on the show.
Man, it was so great to finally get Fet interacting with the main group. His pragmatic and adaptable worldview once more came in handy, as his initial skepticism over dubbing the vermin ‘vampires’ is overridden once he sees Setrakian laying some wrath of God waste down with his sword and silver nails.
“I need to know the rules,” he says, and once Abraham breaks it down for him, Fet is off to the slaughtering-evil races. Given that Eph and Nora continue to resist Setrakian’s advice and magic-heavy explanations, Fet’s immediate and unquestioned acceptance must come as a relief to the old man.
It does not come as a relief to Jim Kent, though. Because, again, bullets to the face. The reveal that Jim was not, in fact, saved by the operation and is still crawling with worms is one of the more painful moments on the show thus far (though the impact is somewhat lessened by the script’s needless foreshadowing. Jim spends so much time post-operation lauding Eph and thanking him for the second chance that it is quickly obvious that he has to die by episode’s end) only compounded by Astin’s trembling fear and desperation. When he begs for death over becoming a creature that will attack his former loved ones, it’s a brutal and painfully human scene, only to be shockingly curtailed by Fet’s shots.
Eph and Nora are less than pleased, understandably, but it’s only seconds later that the vampires come crashing through the ceiling and everyone needs to hustle outside. (This is the only part where Hogan’s lean screenplay maybe works against the episode. Everyone who rushes outside manages to survive, which seems implausible given how unformed and chaotic it was. There should have been at least one throwaway character to get popped in that last dash.)
I think we’re also supposed to see Eph’s euthanizing of an alive-but-infected man as a major turning point for the character. It’s a nice thought, and Stoll certainly puts it all into selling Eph’s horror at what he’s doing and what the world has become. But the scene doesn’t quite hit as hard as it should, given how lax Eph has been about the whole “murdering sick people” thing in the past. Having him now hem and haw over at what stage of sickness it becomes OK to thoughtlessly murder is just forced and weak drama (much better was Nora whispering “Forgive me” before firing into the horde).
All in all, ‘Creatures of the Night’ was the latest in a steadily-increasing hot streak for The Strain. The meta-storyline was backburnered for a night (although Abraham does reveal that the vampires all share a hive-mind linked to The Master, a major detail in the show’s gradually evolving explanation of the undead) so the show could tell a simple story about our characters in a bad spot, and the show and characters are all stronger for it.
As it stands, the Strigori Scooby gang now have a direct link to Stoneheart, and the services of Fet and his exterminating mastery. It was a long night in Hell, but might the dawn finally be starting to break?