The Strain Series Review

Spoiler Alert: this review contains major spoilers of the whole first season and depictions of gore.

The Strain ended on Sunday the 5th with the episode ‘The Master’. Truth been told it has been a very uneven season full of suspense, gory scenes but also blank dialogues, weak characters and repetitive scenarios. Here is a review of Guillermo Del Toro and Carlton Cuse’s first season of ‘what-happens-before-The-Walking-Dead-but-with-vampires’ aka The Strain.

There is Showtime and Sky’s Penny Dreadful, FX’s American Horror Story which is back once again with Freakshow every Wednesday and AMC’s The Walking Dead, coming back on our TVs on October the 12th with its fifth season. These shows differ from the others because their main goal is to frighten but essentially to make us sit through whatever sick scenario came through the writers’ mind. Is The Strain part of this small list? Its resemblance to the successful The Walking Dead might lead us into thinking that. The writers of The Strain, though, definitely needed more time to write a compelling plot and to give equal screen time to all the characters.

The series had at least one or two great moments per episode and also a nice build up during the first episodes where everything would get better every week from character development to dialogues and action sequences. Then everything stopped with ‘The Master’, the 13th episode of the series. The Strain had lost too much time over minor plot details and forgot to keep the tension up and make it explode with the season finale.  In the end one cannot help but get annoyed by the show’s structure built around the sentence: ‘wait for it great things will come’, especially when other mistakes keep repeating themselves from episode to episode.

The Strain had lost too much time over minor plot details and forgot to keep the tension up and make it explode with the season finale

Something that stands out frequently in the show is for instance its obsession with unsympathetic characters such as Kelly (Natalie Brown), Eph’s (Corey Stoll) ex-wife. In ‘The Loved Ones’ we are once again presented with the vampire transformation phase of a woman we never liked and never got the time to like either. But one of the show’s major flaws remains its low production budget which restrains the action and realism of the show. Pay attention to the never ending NYC-chaos-sound-track that is supposed to give us a peek of what is happening outside the frame or the fact that we see the problems created on the internet by Dutch’s (Ruta Gedmintas) hacking skills only sporadically.

On the one hand The Strain benefits from its perseverance: suspense is in fact staged perfectly and the writers are constantly playing with the audience’s expectations and need to see the vampires on action. On the other it decides to dedicate too many episodes to Eph’s family problems, Jim’s (Sean Astin) betrayal motivations and the plane survivors’ slow transformations. I agree that it is good to know where our characters come from but the show uses repetitive exposition scenes and dull dialogues. The brightest moments of the series (beside the brilliant gore moments) are in fact the ones when characters interact with each other through action. In the opening scene of ‘The Third Rail’ for instance Eph and Vasiliy (Kevin Durand) are testing UV bombs to use against the vampires occupying the tunnels. Here in a few minutes the show collides action, humour and their hatred for one another.

The Strain’s promotional poster was banned in the U.S. after complaints.

The Strain had obviously a long list of qualities as well for instance what kept the show going for me were four characters: Abraham, Eichorst (Richard Sammel), Vasiliy and Gus (Miguel Gomez). Abraham and Vasiliy seemed to be the only characters who fit in Guillermo Del Toro’s dark universe, capable of switching from horror to humour in few minutes. Gus was the only character that we really learned to know through his actions but who unfortunately did not get enough screen time. Richard Sammel’s performance stood out for me since he manages to tell so much with just his cold blooded facial expressions. He clearly proved that in ‘Gone Smooth’ where he meticulously assembles his human disguise. This scene was more shocking to me than every kind of monologue ever made in the show.

In conclusion ‘The Master’ failed in providing closure to the first season and awkwardly tried to set things right. By the end of the episode we have a brief appearance of The Ancients, the oldest and quietest vampires, Kelly is still on the run and everything is back to the beginning: the number of the vampires is growing, the actual position of The Master (Robert Maillet) is yet unknown and no one believes our heroes about the upcoming apocalypse (even if thousands of people are getting sick and dying on the streets at night but no one seems to care when more important things are happening such as Facebook does not work).

Other less important things happen in this last episode as Palmer (Jonathan Hyde) discovers that he has yet to prove to the Master he deserves to be a leader vampire like Eichorst. But things seem to escalate quickly when he deals with the problem of the Secretary of Health and Human Services by throwing her out the window. The writers also created The Strain’s own painful Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Carl (Chandler Riggs) and Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) love/hate triangle with Zach, a son that does not seem to understand what happens around him, Eph a naïve father who becomes the leader just because he says so and Kelly, the vampire hunting for both of them. Nonsense, I would say, though dominates this last episode in which: the Vampire Squad from ‘For Services Rendered’ comes back at the right time to save Gus and nominate him the ‘human soldier’ or our heroes face with no problems a small army of vampires (an army extremely passive and which refuses to use their stingers, budget problems again).

Personally I am looking forward to season two just because The Walking Dead formula has worked pretty well for this show as well: the drama is not as effective as the writers think and the audience just cannot say no to good old fashioned monster apocalypse and war.