by Brendan Foley
I’ve written fairly extensively about The Strain in the past, and one of the key things discussed throughout is the show’s struggle in its early days to properly settle on a clear identity. Series co-creator Guillermo del Toro was inspired to write the book trilogy the show is based on after a stretch of watching The Wire, and the show at times displayed the ambitions (or pretensions, depending on how you look at) at being a horror equivalent to David Simon’s crime saga.
This version of the show worked fitfully, but the inconsistency from episode to episode (or even from scene to scene within an episode) was maddening. The Strain (co-created by co-author Chuck Hogan, who retains an active role with the series and has written several episodes) had characters that clicked and performances that popped, but it also had storylines that were glaringly uninteresting and/or slow moving, mixed with characters and actors that never gelled with the overall tone. The show’s silliness undercut the attempts at serious drama, and the attempts at serious drama took away from the show’s impulses towards wild and crazy genre spectacle.
Over the course of Season 2, now available on Blu-ray and DVD in time for the show’s third season (currently airing on Sunday nights on FX), you can see The Strain little by little surrender that earliest conception of itself and embrace what it truly is. By the end of the season, The Strain has committed wholly to being a larger than life pulp horror show, and it finally feels like everything is starting to click.
The Strain is about a plague of vampire activity hitting New York City and gradually spreading across the country and globe. Season 1 depicted the first outbreak and showed the efforts of various figures to either stop or spread the pathogen. Eph (Corey Stoll) and Nora (Mia Maestro) were CDC doctors researching the outbreak from a medical point of view, while elderly pawnship broker Abraham Setrakian (David Bradley) took a supernatural view of the threat. Moving pieces on the other side of the war were The Master, a godly vampire lord aiming to jumpstart the apocalypse, his servant Eichorst (Richard Sammel), a former Nazi concentration camp officer, and Eldritch Palmer (Jonathan Hyde), a mogul who allied himself with the vampires in a bid for immortality. Caught in the middle of these warring factions were street level folks like exterminator Fet (Kevin Hyde), gangbanger Gus (Miguel Gomez), and hacker Dutch (Ruta Gedmintas).
After Season 1’s failed bid at halting the plague, Season 2 finds the humans taking a more proactive stances towards battling the vamps. Eph and Nora spend the season developing a virus that could kill dozens of vampires at a time, while Setrakian desperately hunted for a legendary book, the Lumen, which was said to contain the secrets of the vampire race and included methods for killing The Master.
Along with the returning gang, Season 2 saw the introduction of former lucha libre star Silver Angel (Joaquín Cosío), city councilwoman/ascendant warlord Justine Feraldo (Samantha Mathis), and the half-human/half-vampire samurai/assassin Quinlan (Rupert Penry-Jones), who strides down apocalyptic NYC streets with a bone-sword strapped to his back.
Just from those descriptions, you can tell that in general, Season 2 seemed way more comfortable with the wacky than Season 1. Characters roamed New York City with broad swords hanging on their belts, and drove around in trucks and cars that have been MacGuyver’d with vamp deterrents. Silver achieved fame early in life starring in wrestlers vs. vampire flicks in Mexico, so he goes on patrol wearing his lucha libre mask and silver crucifix knuckle dusters.
The nominal lead in all this madness is Stoll. Whereas in Season 1 he often seemed lost as to what tone he needed to play (in addition to being hampered by an obnoxious and cheap-looking hairpiece that even the show’s producers were making fun of by the end), Season 2 sees Eph falling off the wagon and getting super mad scientist-y. Stoll clearly relishes getting the broader material to play, and Eph finally feels of a piece with the show he is at the center of (it helps that the hairpiece gets shaved off and remains gone. Stoll’s a charismatic and engaging screen presence, but not when he has a dead raccoon dumped on his dome).
Episode directors continued to expand on the visual palette set forth by del Toro in the pilot (del Toro also directed the season-opening prologue, which reveals the history of The Master’s current form with a fairy tale style that feels delightfully of a piece with his work in Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone). Kevin Dowling shepherded the terrific siege episode “The Battle of Red Hook”, while Peter Abraham was behind the camera for “Dead End”, the single best episode of The Strain yet.
And Cube auteur/Hannibal all-star Vincenzo Natali made gleeful bloodsport of the final two episodes of the season. Natali’s knack for beautifully accentuated carnage was well-serviced in “Night Train”, the finale, especially. Natali can give you both images both hysterically comic booky (a train plowing through fields of hundreds of the undead) and beautifully operatic (a major character dies in a flurry of golden and orange light).
I’m happy to report that the earliest episodes of Season 3 have continued with the trajectory of the second season, continuing the momentum and digging even deeper into the weird and silly. The Strain may have moved in fits and starts to begin with, but with Season 2 the show finally settled into its own groove and began firing on all cylinders.
I still hate Zack, though.