The Strain is going to be a tricky show. Adapted from the epic vampire book trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan and featuring a creative team headed up by del Toro, Hogan, and co-mastermind/blame-receiver of Lost, Carlton Cuse, the series faces the task of bringing to life books which strain (I am so sorry) to bridge the biological and the metaphysical, the mundane and the fantastic, and serious drama with giddy pulp. It’s a balance that the novels only occasionally succeeded at, and it remains to be seen if the show can strike the right tone and pacing week to week.
The pilot episode certainly lays out a strong case for the show being a valid interest. Directed by del Toro, the first episode opens with an international flight from Berlin coming to a mysterious halt on the runway of JFK Airport. No lights, no communication, no nothing. As government agents move in, it’s discovered that almost every single passenger is dead from some unknown biological agent. Mysterious events begin to mount up, including a massive coffin filled with earth, freakish worms, and an old man with important knowledge, concentration camp tattoos, and a silver sword hidden in his cane.
That man is Abraham Setrakian and, as played by an appropriately grizzled David Bradley (you know him from Harry Potter and/or the “Red Wedding”) he embodies the larger than life Gothic horror which The Strain only occasionally feels free to indulge in. Bradley knows exactly how to play this sort of gonzo material, and the scenes featuring Abraham are far and away the most compelling moments in the pilot.
On the other end of the show’s tonal balance beam is Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll; a baffling hairpiece) who heads up the CDC investigation into the plane. Stoll drew rave notices for his turn on House of Cards, and it’s likely that as the show goes on the strain (it just keeps happening) of the impending vampire apocalypse will let him play more resonant character notes. As is, Eph (as he’s called) is mostly a flat bore in this first couple of hours, as is his storyline about battling to keep his marriage afloat and keep in touch with his son. del Toro loves him some melodrama, but Eph’s marital issues are not compelling in the face of the berserk vampire plot, especially as the new boyfriend character is written and played as such a cartoonish dickhead that any hope for genuine drama is killed in its infancy.
Most of the rest of the episode is given over to table setting for the story to unfold. A lot of ground is covered in this episode; a lot of players introduced. We meet Gus (Augustin Gomez) a young gangbanger who unwittingly assists in the vampire scheme; Eldritch Palmer (Jonathan Hyde) the billionaire who very much wittingly plays a role in the apocalypse, and an entire gaggle of government officials, enigmatic supernatural figures, and infected passengers who could help or hinder the heroes’ attempts to halt the vampiric outbreak.
It’s a busy episode, with a lot of the plot handled at breakneck pace as characters and mythology are hurled at the audience. Luckily, the expanded episode length lent del Toro the ability to take his time with the horror. The major set-pieces of the episode feature nice escalation and mounting dread before bringing the hammer down. A coroner’s encounter with some newly minted undead is a strong showcase for this sort of cinematic storytelling. We see the autopsy (it’s a del Toro joint. Something is getting cut open and studied) go from mundanely gross before becoming creepy before becoming truly freakish and then finally descending into an all-out bloodbath.
By the way, when I write “bloodbath” I’m not kidding. FX has developed a reputation for letting showrunners push the content as extreme as they need to go, and they gave del Toro, Hogan and Cuse a helluva lot of rope. Skulls are crushed into gooey pixie dust, hearts continue to throb even after they’ve been cut from bodies, and the episode takes great pains to show that no character is safe from getting the gory end of the stick, regardless of age. The network has dedicated itself to taking risks, and it’d be nice to see them gamble on a genre entry and be rewarded with something of consistently high quality (first person to try and praise American Let’s Steal Every Classic Scene We Can Think of and Pretend to be Geniuses Horror Story gets smacked).
If there’s anyone up to the job it’s del Toro, and the pilot does a great job of capturing his visual and aesthetic brilliance while also leaving room for future directors to actually follow in his footsteps. The world of The Strain is intimate enough that future episodes won’t have to bankrupt the network, but stylized enough that the show can conceivably pursue the narrative as it descends further into out-and-out craziness.
Will there be an audience for that? Who knows. For myself, I’m happy to see what sort of madness Cuse and his team can spin over the life of the show. Even with the extended length of the pilot, there are still major characters to meet and huge chunks of history and mythology to be revealed. For now, I’m happy to climb aboard this particular freight train and see what the landscape of del Toro’s modern day Hell looks like. Will you? Or will it be too much of a strain?
…
Fine, I’m leaving.
