The Strain Season 1

IGN

WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR.

→ OCTOBER 16, 2014 Note: Full spoilers for the entire first season of The Strain follow.

On paper, The Strain was going to be fantastic. Guillermo del Toro and co-writer Chuck Hogan overseeing an adaptation of their horror novels for television along with Carlton Cuse? About a nasty vampire outbreak in New York City? Starring David Bradley and Corey Stoll? Sign me up. The Strain looked like a slam dunk. But that was on paper. And that’s why they play the games.

With del Toro himself directing the pilot, the horror elements of The Strain were established from the start as the strongest part of the show. Borrowing a lot of the creature design from Blade II (also directed by del Toro), the vampires here weren’t elegant – they were brutal, blunt instruments with gnarly “stingers” shooting out at their victims. Whenever it was time for a vampire attack the show came to life, and the creators’ enthusiasm for the genre was plain to see. The flip side of that, unfortunately, was that aside from those moments it was a show very much in need of that shot in the arm. The dialogue was distractingly poor and the story meant to get us on Eph’s side – his fractured family – was forced and unnecessary.

Still, no pilot is perfect, so it stood to reason that these weaknesses would be addressed as the season went on. But not only did the saga of Eph’s family drag on, several other characters had their personal dramas piled on without adding anything new. The idea that once turned a vampire will go after the ones they loved is a good one, and yet it often seemed like the series was afraid we’d miss that point.

Too much of the early part of the season was devoted to detailing the lives of the plane survivors and their metamorphosis. There was some interesting stuff here – one survivor fought against it, chaining himself up while another eased right into it, “going smooth” in memorable fashion – but when it was all said and done, these characters were dropped or turned into mindless eating machines by the halfway point. There was no payoff to all the time devoted to the survivors, leaving the feeling that the series simply didn’t have enough plot to fill a season.

Despite not being the biggest name in the cast, Richard Sammel made the biggest impression with his time on the show. Eerily still, gleefully sadistic and arrogant, Eichorst was the most well-drawn character from the start. On the other side of that was the marvelous David Bradley as Abraham, who more often than not found himself standing off to the side and gravely talking about what people are prepared to do. With the writers constantly having him hit that same “maybe now you’ll listen” note, Abraham wound up being more of a killjoy than an enjoyably crusty vampire hunter (the lone exception coming when he played dumb about his silver sword so a judge would release him from jail, and even then he reverted back to scolding Nora in the next scene).

As for the Master’s plan to take over, The Strain wanted to have it both ways; with chaos in the streets but most of the populace going about their business as usual. An out-of-control New York is, of course, prohibitively expensive for a TV series to depict onscreen, so instead the sound design worked hard in the last third of the season. Sirens, helicopters and barking dogs were always filling the soundtrack whenever someone was outside. But what was being depicted in the frame was never close to that level of anarchy – in fact most of the time it looked like an average day. Our heroes seemed to be the only residents in all of New York that recognized everything was going to hell.

To watch any show or movie, regardless of genre, you’ve got to suspend some disbelief. When it comes to horror or fantasy, the leash gets even longer. So while Palmer’s one-man takedown of New York City (complete with a hobbled Internet) was absurd, it was a plot point that you glide over as a viewer in order to enjoy the show. The problem came when the series insisted on focusing time and again on the particulars of how it was done, usually in a scene with Palmer meeting one or two officials or Dutch explaining that she had a team of hackers. Instead of bolstering the case for how it would be possible, these scenes only highlighted all the holes in the story.

The series often felt like it was trying to buy time with redundant beats, systematically showing us the family or friends of every major character. This was presumably to raise the stakes by showing that everyone has something to lose, but the stakes were already high enough with the vampire apocalypse on the horizon. And so the show spun its wheels by spending time with Nora’s mother, Jim’s wife and nearly an entire episode on Kelly getting infected and turning. When the focus would then turn back to our main characters their scenes fell flat for the most part, as Eph fretted over how to protect his son or Abraham stared longingly at his wife’s heart in the jar. Only Gus noticeably improved over the season (although it should be noted that there was nowhere to go but up: he was easily the weakest character in the pilot) 

The Strain showed its enthusiasm for horror from the start with brutal vampires and merciless villains, the rest of the series fell flat all too often. A combination of bad dialogue and sluggish writing made for characters that were hard to care about, while more interesting stories like the Ancients and their commandos were briefly introduced only as a teaser for season 2. The good news for next season is that there's plenty of room for improvement.

Full Season 1 on Xmovie8