by Brendan Foley
As we’ve talked about in the past, the leaner The Strain is, the better The Strain is. Tonight’s episode was even more stripped down than last week’s, following only three sets of characters (with a great deal of overlap between those groups). That focus gave us the strongest episode of the season yet, just the latest in what’s been a very good year for The Strain.
‘The Assassin’ picks up immediately where ‘The Battle for Red Hook’ left off, with all of our human characters seeking to capitalize on the momentum from that victory. Councilwoman Justine is bringing her clean-up crews to the Upper East Side, but before she gets to work de-vamping, she demands that all the Richie riches kick in 1% of their resources to the effort. The residents push back because even in the middle of the actual fucking apocalypse, rich people are going to be pricks about everything, just like Seth Rogen taught us.
The main thrust of the episode falls on Eldritch Palmer and his relationship with Coco, in what’s proven to be one of the secret gold mines for this revitalized season. Palmer as a smug evil bastard makes a great villain, but Palmer as a falling-over-himself romantic gives Jonathan Hyde many more notes to play and he’s been magnificent. Palmer is so puppy-ish in his wonderment at his first experience with actual love that you can almost forgot that he’s engineered the extermination of the human race for his own benefit.
Lizzie Brochere has proven to be a good match for him as Coco, too. In the early episodes there was a lot of speculation as to who or what Coco was. Was she a plant for Eichorst or a sleeper agent for the Ancients or working some other angle? What we’ve come to see is that Coco is mostly on the up-and-up, just a regular working girl who happens to have had the hideous fucking luck of working for Eldritch Palmer.
That hideous luck (and her own poor judgment in returning to work for Eldritch after she had wisely bailed) catches up with Coco when she catches a sniper’s bullet and is left all-but brain dead and exsanguinated (this being The Strain, and The Strain being on FX, we get nice long loving shots of her open heart surgery, complete with tubes vac-sucking her blood away).
That sniper? Eph. Yup, turns out the doc is making good on his vow to kill Palmer, and he and Dutch spend the first chunk of the episode staking out the Stoneheart building and waiting for their shot (natch). They also commiserate about their relationship woes (which leads to a digression on the sex-life of bonobos monkeys, for… reasons) before scooting off to go commit homicide.
(This week in Everyone on The Strain is Really Stupid: Eph and Dutch have been plotting this assassination and their entire escape plan for after they’ve killed one of the most important figures in NYC is to… run really fast down the fire escape and get on a motorcycle? Really? We’ve long ago established that Eph is a really, really bad tactician, but even for him this seems bad.)
Anywho, Eph hits Coco instead of Palmer and he and Dutch get arrested. Dutch gets hauled off by some obviously crooked cops and shortly thereafter Palmer comes by to vent some of his rage at Eph. I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure this is the first extended scene that Hyde and Stoll have done with one another, and they both deliver. Hyde plays Palmer as a tightly-clenched fist, determined to keep his cool even as his rage festers, while Stoll leans into the mania and fury that is driving Eph at this point.
(The crazier and more erratic Eph is, the more comfortable Stoll seems. He’s often caught trying to play the reality of a scene versus the absurdity [though he’s gotten much better at hitting the mark this season] and when Eph is at his most frantic is when Stoll seems most able to embrace the craziness of this show)
And shortly after THAT, a super-convenient flock of vampires comes by and cleans out all the cops. With murder, yes, which is a bummer, sure, but it does make escaping prison much easier when everyone keeping you there is dead.
Palmer retreats to his headquarters to watch over Coco. Having earlier demanded that Eichorst summon The Master to heal Coco, Palmer is overjoyed when Bolivar-Master shows up and does, indeed, use his goo to heal Coco (there’s a fun sentence to write, let me tell ya). Palmer weeps with joy, but the dude doesn’t seem to realize how thin the ice he’s on is. Coco’s reaction to seeing The Master is unbridled disgust, and there’s no way she doesn’t figure out the rest of Palmer’s, ahem, arrangement now. And given how pushy and arrogant Palmer has increasingly been, he really should be prepared for the blowback that is surely coming.
Meanwhile, Setrakian and an increasingly compatible Fet and Nora are going around searching for the Lumen, tracing the name that the Cardinal gave Setrakian before Setrakian cut his head off (this is a weird fucking show, if you ever stop and think about it). It turns out that the book belongs to the altar boy that Setrakian saved from vampires way back when, but now they just need to find him.
(This week in The Strain Using Dumb Stall Tactics: One of the not-correct houses they stop at is a bookstore, which what are the fucking odds that that would be the case?)
Fet and Nora take off to help Dutch and Eph, leaving Setrakian to track down the final address. David Bradley has been great all season (all show, really) and he really conveys the sheer weariness that Setrakian is struggling under right now. Searching the last dingy apartment, he stumbles over the Lumen, hidden in the floorboards. But Setrakian only gets a fleeting glimpse at the glorious silver pages of vamp lore before he’s brained from behind and the book is taken from him.
STALL TACTICS, ENGAGED!
Fet and Nora massacre the massacring vamps (which they do super-easy. Like, seriously, Fet is just taking off heads seven at a time by this point) and liberate Eph. They confront the only surviving cop, who just so happens to be one of the corrupt cops that dragged off Dutch because shut up Brendan writing television is hard.
And where did he take her?
Smash cut to Dutch, hands around a chain that’s around her neck, being dragged to the center of Eichorst’s kill room, Eichorst’s face betraying no emotion as he drags her, screaming, to the kill-point.
It’s a brutal cliffhanger, one that immediately has me anxious to get to the next episode. We’ve gone a while without losing any major characters, and Dutch dying (if she does, indeed, die [though shit does not look good for her at this moment]) would dramatically change the dynamics of the core cast. And then there’s the matter of the Lumen, and The Master/Eichorst/Palmer trouble that’s been brewing all season and also all the other subplots and characters that have been absent recently (we’ve gone two weeks without any word from Quinlan or Gus).
See you folks next week!