by Brendan Foley
SILVER! SILVER SILVER SILVER SILVER!
Some other things happened on The Strain tonight yes, sure, but the debut of the Silver Angel has to outrank everything else by, like, at least a hundred places. A former luchador famous for battling the undead in a series of Z-grade horror films, the Silver Angel is one of the more purely fun creations of the The Strain books, and tonight’s episode’s opening (designed to resemble a crappy VHS copy of one of Silver’s crappy old movies) is perhaps the most purely fun the show has been… ever? Yeah, maybe ever.
As I’ve talked about before, the big problem with the books is that the second and third ones get so busy inventing new crazy shit every couple pages that there’s never room for a solid narrative spine. That’s been an issue for the show as well, but Carlton Cuse and Co. have at least made a lot of solid choices in how to integrate the crazy shit into the overarching narrative. So we meet the Silver Angel in his current gig as a dishwasher/bouncer at a small eatery, still devastated by an injury he sustained while making a film, still desperately relieving his glory days battling the undead. Methinks he’ll be getting a chance to relive those days very shortly.
Batshit Crazy The Strain is the best flavor of The Strain, and this week’s episode came fairly well-loaded with goodies. You have vampire mass-suicide, vampire monks, vampires taking out the entire New York stock exchange, live on camera, some more of the Feelers (which are still just the creepiest fucking thing ever), and you have Fet finally making good on his stated intention to blow up a subway tunnel, gleefully muttering ‘Meep meep’ before he sets the charges.
The show, as per usual, buries much of this good stuff under some shoe leather spinning (is this an expression? It might not be. Let’s just go with it). We spend a lot of time with Gus aimlessly wandering the streets of NYC after his bid to kidnap Palmer failed (enough with ‘characters wandering aimlessly’ subplots, Strain writers. Give them a goddamn aim). He visits his fully-vamped out mother, gets taunted by The Master, and then (even though it’s the fucking apocalypse) he goes and hangs out at that diner and even doubles back after being kicked out to geek out over meeting the Silver Angel. Gus hooking up with the Ancients last year seemed to promise that the show’s most go-nowhere subplot would finally get some primacy. This has not panned out.
Did I say Gus was the most go-nowhere subplot? Yeah, I’ll walk that back for as long as Zack is on the show. He’s a whetstone around the show’s neck, dragging down poor Corey Stoll in every scene that is spent either with Zack or mooning over how fraught that relationship has become.
(I recently saw Stoll in Ant-Man, and it’s amazing how night-and-day a screen presence he is in that film compared to here. Stoll’s fine as Eph, even great when the writing allows, but he so clearly better got the tone of that film, and clearly had a director that could clue him in to what exactly the tone was that he needed to be playing. Also, that movie just let him be his own gloriously bald self, as opposed to stapling a fucking dead raccoon to his dome.)
Setrakian and Dutch go to visit Mr. Fitzwilliams on Staten Island, trying to convince him to get back into the fight. In both the present and our flashbacks to the past, Setrakian hunts for the magic vampire book (the purpose of which the show has never really communicated clearly). It’s while hunting the book with his ‘friend’ Eldritch Palmer that Setrakian battles vampire monks, while Palmer makes his first contact with Eichorst (this season has really dialed back on Eichorst in favor of beefing up Palmer and Bolivar as the episode-to-episode villains. They’re both fine characters [Jonathan Hyde has been as good as we all assumed he’d be as revitalized Palmer] but they are missing the delicious evil glee that Richard Sammel always brings to Eichorst).
The big development this week is Eph and Nora discovering that their virus totally works. Their captured strigori rots from the inside out, ending up covered in sores (which Eph punctures with a sword, white ooze spilling everywhere). The disease spreads to an entire nest, and The Master compels each of the infected vamps to kill themselves to keep Eph and Nora’s disease from spreading (Eph and Nora laughing with triumph while around them vampires brutally splatter on railings and cars was a particularly nice touch).
Eph excitedly plans to contact the military to weaponized the disease, but the episode instead closes on Kelly and her Feelers (which, again, are just the creepiest goddamn thing in the world) closing in on Zack and the heroes’ hideout.
We’re nearing the halfway point for this season, so whatever surety the characters think they’ve earned over the course of the season, it’s a safe bet that it is all going to be blown to bits in the very near future.