It’s the end of the world and no one feels fine, ha ha. (You can have my puns when you pry them from my cold dead hands).
Before we go any further with our discussion of this episode, let’s all, as a country, tip our hats to the tunnel-crawl scene, one of the most immediately unnerving sequences I’ve seen on television ever. Claustrophobia is an easy fear to capitalize on, but the staging of this particular run-through was expertly done. Just the image of Eph crawling through that tight tunnel was disturbing enough, let alone the promise that at the other end lay some undead nasties. So tense was the sequence, it was almost a shame when a vampire did show up to give chase. I say ‘almost’ because the actual image of the vampire contorting itself to wriggle through the tunnel like some kind of rabid worm is enough to scar an entire generation.
So bravo on that one, The Strain. And fortunately, the episode as a whole was one of the strongest the show has yet to produce, a tight and focused little chiller that recalled previous “best episode yet” ‘Creatures of the Night’ in the way it ably got down to the business of scaring the shit out of anyone who watched with minimal fuss.
It should be noted that any attempt to tie The Strain to something like the real-world has gone completely out the window. This is grand, larger-than-life horror, with a color-palette and shot composition that would not be out of place in the panels of a comic book. The Strain seems to have finally found its comfort zone, resulting in an hour of television that knows exactly what it’s doing and how to go about doing it.
For starters, Gus has finally turned the corner as a character. After his initial delivery of The Master’s coffin, Gus has existed at the absolute fringes of the story, his appearances always feeling more like the show spinning its wheels with a character until it was time to bring him back in the fold. He does so in grand fashion tonight, returning home to discover his brother and mother have been turned. Gus releases his brother via baseball bat, then mourns both sibling and parent. It’s the most vulnerable we’ve ever seen Gus, and a well-played scene by Miguel Gomez. With nothing left to him, Gus seizes a fire ax and proceeds to rampage through the city, wantonly slaughtering whatever vampires he can find.
His path briefly crosses with Zack, out grabbing cigarettes for Mrs. Martinez, whose dementia and paranoia continues to be a major burden while the world goes to Hell. Mrs. Martinez is so pathetic as to almost be unlikable (they’re really laying her complete helplessness on thick, to the point that she’s more a device than a person) and the entire sojourn to get cigarettes is mostly empty space. But, again, the show makes up for it by virtue of just how damn entertaining they make the side-trip. Zack’s desperate attempts to climb the wheel-ramp to escape the basement with a vampire around-but-unseen was a great little scare scene, and The Strain in general continues to find breathing room for the kinds of extended suspense sequences that most dramas, with the need to keep churning through plot, don’t have time for.
The main body of the episode is, of course, one such suspense sequence that keeps ramping up to greater and greater intensity. Eph, Nora, Fet and Abraham travel into the abandoned subway system beneath the World Trade Center to locate The Master, and the entire trip is a gleefully insane haunted house adventure, complete with differently themed rooms and one-off vampire critters that pop up to be destroyed in amusing ways.
(You knew the second Fet mentioned the third rail that someone was going to have to step on the thing and fry, and the episode didn’t disappoint. Even better than the random vamp getting flash-cooked was the deadpan Eph response).
Eph sees vamp-Kelly, and later is haunted by what he mistakes to be her voice. It turns out it was simply The Master, baiting him into greater danger. It appears that Eph was truly Master baited.
(FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS).
The Master remains a truly goofy looking fucker, but the show more or less owns that completely by putting him front and center with the human characters and letting them play extended scenes off of each other. It’s quite a sight to see, respected thespian Cory Stoll really playing the hell out of Eph’s pain and confusion, while meanwhile a fucking bat-muppet preens and monologues about how evil he is.
It all climaxes with Fet using his an ultraviolent bomb to disperse the vamp-horde and rescue Eph and Abraham, who had been once again paralyzed by The Master’s voice. Abraham snaps and destroys The Master’s coffin, then insists they plunge even deeper into the dark to continue the hunt.
Creeping forward, the gang discovers a cavernous room filled with literally hundreds of vampires, all of whom are rocking back and forth, nattering to each other, breathing heavily, and basically being the most obtrusively creepy beings imaginable.
Even Fet backs down from those odds, and the episode ends with our heroes dragging a ranting, desperate Abraham away while he demands they press on with the suicidal mission.
With only two episodes remaining, The Strain continues to dive deeper into its own particular strain (fuck you) of lunacy and black-hearted fun. The show has a lot of momentum carrying it into the home stretch, and I for one am excited to see just where they are building to.