by Brendan Foley
The Strain began life as a book series that didn’t really work, and last year it came to our TV screens as a show that sporadically worked. Having seen and reviewed every episode of The Strain’s first season, I sat down for the premiere with equal parts curiosity and trepidation.
Curiosity because The Strain was entering the part of the story that authors Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan really fell down on. The first book was a fairly tight procedural showing the escalation of a vampire outbreak in New York City from minor strangeness to apocalyptic war-zone. Once the second and third books got going, however, del Toro and Hogan lost the plot and the second and third books featured tons of brilliant ideas and freaky imagery with very little narrative momentum or sense.
But then the show came along and bungled all of the procedural elements, while succeeding with the wildest, zaniest sequences and episodes. The more the show embraced the pulp craziness, the more it worked. So I was eager to see what showrunner Carlton Cuse and his staff could do with material that is pretty much crazy-in and crazy-out all-day long.
And there was trepidation because the first season of The Strain simply was not that great. It did some things very well, but then it would fuck things up in equal measure. There were good performances and characters, and there were characters and performances that never, ever clicked. There’d be episodes where the show hummed along nicely, and then there’d be ones that awkwardly shuttled between characters with no real rhyme or reason. There’d be great monsters and gore FX, and then the big bad of the season would be a goofy looking bat-muppet. Coming back, I wasn’t totally sure if the show could jettison the stuff that didn’t work and concentrate on the elements that did click to make a lean and mean vampire horror show.
The jury is still out, but the premiere episode, at least, is the show operating at peak crazy and peak efficiency, which roughly translates to the same thing. The episode does not fuck about, diving immediately into the fairy-tale style origin story of The Master, depicting his simple happy life as a kind man suffering from gigantism who was chosen by a cave-dwelling monster to be the new host for the vampire king’s consciousness. Creepy, in both imagery and sound, and conveying a ton of mythology points in carefully rationed chunks, the prologue was probably the best sequence the show has ever put together yet.
Not that the rest of the episode was a down-shift from the prologue. We return to NYC to discover that shit is going straight Mad Max. Not Road Warrior, yet, the codpieces and hockey masks are still on lockdown. But there’s panic in the streets, ever-present sirens and smoke, and our heroes are free to wander around clad in gun belts and waving swords around.
Heroes and villains alike are mobilizing energies for the next push. Eph is drinking hard again (and is immediately a funnier, more bearable character, something even he acknowledges) and he and Nora are plotting a potential chemical weapon to take out the vampire horde while Fet and Dutch fortify their base. Zack is a useless little piece of shit, again.
Setrakian is still reeling from the revelation that direct sunlight didn’t kill The Master, and his search for answers brings him into the path of the commando vampires, who take him to Gus, who takes him to the Ancients, the shriveled husks of, uh, ‘ancient’ vampire lords who are none too pleased with what The Master is up to and offer Setrakian an alliance.
Also a book is mentioned. Pay attention.
Over in vampire-land, Palmer is looking to buy up some land and continue to present himself as a savior to the quarantined city. Eichorst and The Master both are off their game after being wounded in last year’s finale (it should be noted that The Master make-up looks much better when his skin is half-melted off than when it’s in full-view), but they have a schedule to keep, dammit, and are going to keep to that schedule, no matter how many blind children have to be mutated.
Oh yeah, the blind children. Maybe the single creepiest detail in the entire book trilogy was the notion of ‘feelers’, blind kids that are turned into sort of super-sensitive vampires with incredibly heightened senses of scent and touch.
The Strain has had no compunction about killing off children before, but the introduction of the feelers goes beyond the pale. They don’t just kill off a kid, they kill off an entire school bus full of children. BLIND children. That’s like punting a baby into space. If The Master’s origin story takes the top spot for creep moment of the night, the image of the undead children shifting out from underneath tons of sand, newly clawed hands first, is nipping at its heels.
Both sides make big plays as the episode ends. Eph, Nora, Fet and Setrakian battle a vampire mob in a storage facility, in a well-orchestrated and edited bit of mayhem. A couple of redshirts get bit, and Eph delays the killing of the couple so they might be used in his and Nora’s experiments. This plot thread did not appear in the books (it should be noted that the series has gone off-book in major ways, killing characters much too early, letting others survive beyond their appointed times, inventing major players wholesale, so nothing that I think I know about what is going to happen is actually gospel) and I’m curious how this dark turn towards mad science will play out for Eph and his company.
The vampires, meanwhile, restore Kelly from being a mindless drone to something like her old self, reviving her memories and voice, presumably in a bid to sic her on our fearless vampire hunters.
Kelly’s got Zack’s name on her lips, the feelers at her disposal, and The Master’s glowing eyes bright in her sockets. This bodes poorly.
For the characters, anyway. Safe on my couch in a world with a 35% smaller chance of being attacked by a vampire, I’m pretty psyched to see where we go from here.
