by Brendan Foley
The Strain episode 2 is, like far too many episodes of The Strain, a glaring mixture of the propulsive and well-done, and the inert and unmotivated. There’s engaging story movement, creepy images, strong character beats, and then there’s stuff that just falls flat and eats up time.
The central thrust of the episode is Eph and Nora’s treatment of the recently infected couple from last week. Sequestered into a small lab, Eph and Nora watch as the couple gradually succumb to the vampirism disease, then begin trying to concoct a biological agent that they can mass-disseminate into the blood-sucking population.
It’s a solid enough plan, so far as plans created by totally fucked people in totally fucked situations go, and there’s some good juice wrung out of Nora and Eph’s conflicting approaches to dealing with what is happening to this couple (she empathizes, he drinks), and to the slow decay of the couple’s personalities as the vampirism takes its toll.
The problem, as it was so often in the first season, is that there’s so much more to be wrung out of this situation, if only the writers could give it any breathing room. As it is, we barely get to know the saintly elderly pair before the transformation begins in earnest. The show also establishes that many of the other fearless vampire killers have a problem with what Eph and Nora are up to, even drawing a slight parallel between their actions and the ‘experiments’ that Setrakian witnessed in the concentration camp.
It’s meaty, pointed stuff, and the show has almost no time to deal with it before shoving on to the many other moving pieces it has going on week-to-week.
So we cut away from the actual story of the episode to follow Fet and Dutch as they clear out a vampire nest in a gym, then have sex in the pool (interestingly, the camera spends way more time on Kevin Durand’s naked backside than anything Dutch is showing).
We also spend more time with Zack. Zack sucks.
Setrakian is in the grips of a crisis of faith, punishing himself for his mistake with The Master, which causes him to fixate even more on a mythical book which might contain the true origins of the ruling class of vampires (and, by extension, how to kill them).
There’s also a good deal of busywork with both the vampiric and bureaucratic. Eichorst re-explains that The Master will be seeking a new host (and may be coveting the spot), while Kelly takes the feelers out for a spin. The feelers, with their digitally enhanced motion and unseeing eyes, are rapidly becoming the most consistently unsettling thing on a show that is constantly seeking to one-up itself in the unsettling department. Bonus points to the scuttling sound design of the ‘children’ as they shuffle and crawl all over the place.
Over in the human side of the equation, people are no longer oblivious to what is going on with the vampires, even though they still can’t bring themselves to say the word out loud. We see that outside forces are starting to mobilize resistance to the Stoneheart party line, while meanwhile Palmer continues to establish himself as the savior of the city. He sets up a shelter (which, given their insistence on taking down everyone’s blood types, is probably not the best shelter to go to during a vampire Armageddon, maybe. Probably.) but the grand opening is spoiled by Setrakian and Fet.
Here again, there’s interesting stuff going on, as our heroes with their explosives and desire to bring down the comfort and ease of the burgeoning wartime society are akin to domestic terrorists. Fet’s explosives come only a couple minutes after a 9/11 reference, after all. The show has already tried to do this sort of thing last season, and it really didn’t take (a bad realization of bad writing) so I’m not totally confident in the show actually taking this sort of strain (YES. YES I WENT THERE. THE SHOW IS BACK, THE PUNS ARE BACK MOTHERFUCKERS.) of thought to an actual well-developed conclusion, but we’ll see.
There’s a lot of that, actually. The show is setting up a lot of interesting stories and themes (including an emphasis this season on legacy. The Master is prepping a new host, at the same time that Fet is aching for Setrakian to become a father figure, at the same time that Zac is pushing back again Eph [albeit in the douchiest manner possible because Zac is the worst]) but we can only hope that they will actually do a better job of it this year than last. So far, the show is a good deal more confident and efficient than it was last year, so maybe things have turned the corner and the show will be able to carry out its full potential.