by Brendan Foley
If you are making a heavily serialized drama, there’s no escaping the Pieces Moving episode. That is, an episode in which very little effectively happens, but a lot of characters are shuffled around the board and moved into place (hopefully) for fireworks that are coming down the line.
The Strain last year suffered from what felt like a preponderance of set-up episodes, constantly hopping around between characters and locations, never giving anything the time it needed to breathe. The show spent so much time establishing, establishing, establishing, there was very little it could do in the way of payoffs to make it all stick.
Thankfully, The Strain is now such an exercise in nutty, even a Pieces Moving episode is something of a hoot. If you can’t be tightly plotted and carefully arced, you better have the good sense to be a heckuva lotta fun, which tonight’s episode certainly was.
So we got Gus ripping out a vampire’s entrails with his bare hands, we got Setrakian grinding up vampire worms and injecting them into his eye, we got a Staten Island councilwoman displaying the headless corpses of vampires before a press conference like a Visigoth queen, and we got Palmer revealing that his office comes equipped with UV lasers. Also a UV death pit, just for funsies.
Besides the nuttiness, the show has also figured out pacing in a big way. Last year, the show would introduce a random plot thread, then only advance it in drips and drabs over the course of several weeks. Here, Gus is told at the top of the episode that the vampire commandos want his help kidnapping Palmer, and by the end of the episode he and the commandos have already attempted it. The commandos go into the aforementioned death pit (and I would guess that at least the main guy survives, if only to be interrogated by Palmer and/or Eichorst) and Gus flees.
There’s some nonsense involving Dutch trying to track down the girlfriend that took off on the night of the convenience store siege, a plot thread that really exists only so that someone, in this case the girlfriend’s mom, can remind Dutch (and us) that she is a terrible person who leaves destruction in her wake. Dutch has been part of the team for so long, it can be easy to forget that she had a direct, major hand the devastation of New York, but the show isn’t dropping it. Sooner or later, the karmic wheel that guides horror fiction is going to turn and Dutch will have to answer for what she’s done.
A similar karmic wheel probably wouldn’t turn in Eph’s favor after this week’s episode either. He and Nora are still plugging away at their experiments in creating a biological agent against the vampires. One of their subject dies, and Eph can barely be bothered to remember that the vamp was very recently a human being. His thoughts are entirely consumed with the loss of Kelly (absent this week) and the prospective loss of Zack.
I mean, Zack is a little piece of shit that I think we can all agree is torpedoing the show, but his dad, at least, would be bummed if he died. At first anyway. He’d be sad but then, I don’t know, maybe he’d get himself a hobby or take up a club, start spending some of the money he probably was saving up for Zack’s college, living large. Pretty soon it’s like ‘dead kid, what? Oh, yeah, that guy. Shame, that.’ Give it a chance, Eph. Give life beyond your murdered child a chance.
Not that it looks like anyone’s going to get that chance. Eph delivers a speech to the remaining vamp, underlining his intention to kill both Zack and himself should the infection ever strike them. It’s a ruthless, chilling moment for Corey Stoll, as Eph’s alcoholism continues to reveal the pragmatic, dangerous man beneath Eph’s bluster. In that instant, I had no trouble buying that Eph might indulge in a little The Mist action, should it ever come to that. It’s yet another note of tension to add to the growing symphony of discord and danger hanging over every scene of the show these days. The bad times are here, and they’re not getting any better.
Better make sure you keep those swords handy.