The Strain is about a third of the way through its first season and in its fourth (and best) episode, you can feel it fully finding its groove, balancing elements better than it has thus far in the show’s short life. While the show continues to have structural elements that rankle, the good stuff was in heavy supply tonight.
Also in heavy supply: Gore. After the second and third episodes eased up on the splatter, reserving it for brief, upsetting surges, this episode brings it back with a vengeance. Opening with Eph and the team slicing open a vampire corpse and getting a good long (no, I mean long. Long, lingering shots of postulating, diseased organs. Sick, wonderful bastards) look at the enemy, and closing with Setrakian quickly and decisively ending the threat posed by the little French girl from the plane and her father (via murder), the episode never let up.
Huge credit for the success of the hour must go to director Keith “The Dweeby Kid That the Car Fell in Love With in Christine” Gordon. Gordon’s been an accomplished director for a while now, and he demonstrates a thorough understanding of how best to use the frame to maximize fear without breaking tone or wallowing in cheap effects. Gordon uses nice wide shots and allows the audience to find the horror all on their own, such as in the scene where blood spills out from under the doorway to the shed wherein a newly-birthed vampire has caged himself. The focus of the shot is on his wife, panting and horrified at having just fed an asshole neighbor to her vamped out husband, and it’s only after the shot has lingered for a moment that you notice the streams of blood pouring out, unnoticed, behind her.
Similar directorial flair even spiced up the perfunctory scene of Gus and his buddy carjacking a nice ride from a parking garage. Check out the way you can see Gus moving around in the background, just out of sight of the lot attendant. It’s just strong, controlled filmmaking that does the job and calls no attention to itself.
Unfortunately, ‘perfunctory’ is a good word to describe most of the time we spend with Gus this episode. After sleeping through last week’s (which seemed to cover a couple of days but whatever moving on) Gus wakes up and is annoyed at his brother and loving towards his mother and a tough-talking thug to everyone else. Kind of exactly what he was doing in the first two episodes. He also meets Setrakian for all of thirty seconds and forms some new criminal contacts while selling the stolen car (Marlo from The Wire shows up, which is nice given that the seminal HBO crime drama was the impetus behind Guillermo del Toro’s creation of the book series. Hopefully Andre Royo can find some space somewhere in this thing.) While it’s obvious that both Gus’s meeting of Setrakian and connecting with more established criminals will pay off down the line, the scenes have all the charge and energy of checking items off a grocery list. It’s arc-first, drama-second, and it’s an approach that is routinely tripping The Strain up when it needs to be light on its feet and propulsive.
Also this week: Stoneheart hires a woman to break the Internet. And she does. In, like, an hour. I do not know that anyone involved in this show knows how computers work. It would take, you know, at least an hour and twenty minutes to break the Internet for reals. And people would check on if porn still worked, not social networks. Come on, people.
But goofiness and labored storytelling aside, I was happy to see that my prediction last week that Eph, Nora and Jim’s confrontation with a full blown vampire would throw them into the action of their own story came true. After the prolonged, wonderfully appalling autopsy, Jim comes clean about the role he played in getting The Master’s coffin through customs. It’s a strong scene, with Astin’s guilt and defensiveness nicely played off of Stoll’s cold interrogation and mounting rage. Realizing the depth of their problem, Eph and Nora race over to the French girl’s home and discover her and her dead soaked in blood and hungry for more. Setrakian deals with them (again, via murder) and declares his intention to hunt down every passenger and afflicted victim and deal with them (with murder).
Nora rejects this (she’s against murder) but Eph throws himself wholeheartedly into the stab-sick-people camp. Normally I would groan about having the good guys split up so soon after figuring out the main threat (Lost pulled this move all the time: They would smack down some huge puzzle piece and then have the main characters pointedly not look any deeper as they instead argued over trivial bullshit) but it’s probably a good thing to take Nora out of the orbit of the main cast for a while.
To this point, Nora has received almost no character definition beyond “supportive of Eph”, so sending her off to do, uh, Nora-things before rejoining the main narrative should serve to give both actress and character space to be fully defined. When Nora objects to the treatment-method proposed by Setrakian (murder) it falls flat because we don’t have any knowledge of who this person is or why she would take such a standpoint even after seeing and experiencing the vampire plague firsthand. Time on her own should rectify that and give us a clearer since of who this person is.
So, four episodes in and the show is proving to be rapidly perfecting the things it has already done well and shows signs of improving on the weaker fronts. Even as things get worse in the world of The Strain, the watching of it gets better with each week.
Oh, wait, I just remembered that Fet wasn’t in this episode. Never mind, I take it all back. Pile of unforgivable garbage, this show.
