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The Girl with All the Gifts

Remember when zombies were the “it” thing?  Where seemingly every movie, video game, and tv show had to have them and have some trivial thing differentiating them from one another?  This lead to, as it does with every thing that becomes popular, to hand-wringing about keeping the genre fresh, interesting, more clever than each previous installment.  To be sure, some of this hand-wringing can be pretty valid, especially since the very first zombie movie Night of the Living dead set the tone (both intentionally and inadvertently) with social commentary and frank observations about humanity while still managing to be frightening.  These concerns proved true with arguably the nail in the coffin of big budget zombie fare, World War Z.  I defy you to find a movie that was made more clearly to be a cable mainstay.  It took no risks, had nothing unique or interesting to say, and frankly was the type of scenario we’d all seen before.  The secret ingredient to Romero’s success, and something World War Z failed spectacularly at, was that characters matter, and characters we’re invested in will drive a movie better than any set piece with mounds of CGI zombies conquering Jerusalem.

Enter The Girl with All the Gifts.  Based on the novel of the same name by M.R. Carey, the Girl with All the Gifts begins with a girl in a cell counting.  Eventually her door opens and she is tied down to a chair at gunpoint with restraints on her hands, feet, and head.  It’s slowly revealed that the world has undergone a massive fungal infection, turning most of the world’s population into what are referred to as “hungries” and our counting girl protagonist, Melanie, along with dozens of other children, are infected but not so far gone that they are full feral.  They are being schooled and experimented on to potentially find a cure.  As most zombie movies do, zombies end up ruining the sense of order and Melanie, along with some military officers and scientists, set out to meet up with another, bigger base.  If I’m being completely honest, the plot in this is pretty boilerplate and the idea of half human/half zombie hybrids is not interesting enough to elevate this into something more.

What DOES elevate this into something more are the characters and the actors playing them.  Melanie is played by Sennia Nanua and delivers a performance that is is full of childlike wonder, confusion, and growth that should not be possible for someone her age.  Emma Garteron is the teacher that develops a connection with Melanie and believes in her humanity.  Paddy Considine is a soldier who initially reacts poorly to Melanie being brought along on the trip but comes around; his world-weary demeanor feels lived-in and earned.  But the cream of the crop here is Glenn Close, playing a doctor convinced that she can find the cure by vivisecting Melanie.  Honestly?  You can have Meryl Streep, give me Glenn Close in a genre film she has no business being in knocking it out of the park without showing up her castmates.  Where a lot of high profile actors may have viewed this role as an opportunity for camp, Close dives right in as seriously as she does for any of her more recognized roles.

I’d also like to recognize Colm McCarthy, the director for his work on this film.  There’s one shot in particular that I keep thinking about when the initial base is under attack by zombies.  It’s nothing too fancy, but the camera just keeps slowly panning around capturing the chaos of gunfire, zombies, and trying to find an escape.  The set design, the practical effects, everything here has the hallmark of a much bigger production which is why I was surprised to learn it was only a $5,000,000 movie and McCarthy had really only done television before.

If this is the future of the zombie film; memorable characters, solid acting, and thrills enough to justify a viewing, I’ll be more than happy with the genre.  The Girl with All the Gifts is streaming on Amazon Prime, if you’re a zombie fan there’s no reason not to check this one out.

[drthestrainlove]

Bright

Bad movies generally fall into two camps: Movies that are bad but done sincerely and movies that are bad because nobody cared while making it.  Think The Room for the former and the Transformers franchise for the latter.  A much rarer breed, especially these days, is the bad movie that is bad for the execrable message it’s trying to send.  Think Mike Meyers’ The Love Guru.  If you were to put all three of these camps into a Venn Diagram you’d find Netflix’s new Fantasy/Thriller/Whatever Bright at dead center.

Where to even start with this contemptible turd of a movie: Directed by David Ayer, fresh off of Suicide Squad, and written by Max Landis who as far as I can tell is only famous because of his last name and a youtube video complaining about a comic book, Bright is the story of a Los Angeles where mythical fantasy creatures exist side by side with humans.  Orcs have been relegated to hated minority status based on their backing of a “Dark Lord” in some war 2,000 years ago while Elves are essentially the 1%.  Will Smith plays Daryl Ward, a human cop who is returning to the force after his Orc partner, a “diversity” hire played by Joel Edgerton, accidentally got him shot by an Orc mugger.  Is Will Smith’s character lazily getting close to retirement?  You’d better believe it.  The movie takes place over the course of one night where the two cops get wrapped up in some kind of mystery involving elves who are trying to resurrect this mystery “Dark Lord” using a Magic Wand.  I didn’t put quotes around the Magic Wand because the movie refers to it, with a straight face, as the Magic Wand.  Is there a vague prophecy where Will Smith might be some kind of Chosen One that can handle the Magic Wand without, and I kid you not, immediately exploding?  Oh yeah this movie is that lazy.  Along the way they’re pursued by the Magic Task Force, some kind of supernatural FBI that again is called the Magic Task Force with a straight face.

You would think that in a movie that is trying to pack as much lore and backstory into a two hour runtime would focus on that and not try to shoehorn an incredibly ham-fisted allegory about race and racism in as well AND YET.  The first half of this movie tries to say something about how maybe racism is bad, showing how racist the other cops are to Joel Edgerton’s Orc Cop and how bad the other Orcs in LA have it.  This would be maybe acceptable if the Orcs were not consistently dressed in football jerseys, say things like “homies” or “Holmes”, or generally have any character traits original to them instead of stereotypes cribbed from other movies about cops in LA.  Even the Elves are talked about the way Breitbart comments sections talk about Jewish people.  On top of that the human minorities that are depicted in this movie are portrayed in a maddeningly racist manner.  At one point Will Smith berates his black neighbors for “doing gangster shit” and says they should “crip walk back to the barbecue” because they’re... sitting around in their front lawn?  It’s honestly as though everybody involved in this movie has only interacted with people of color through cop movies and tv shows.  What I’m sure came off as subversive or edgy in the (I’ll go out on a limb and say predominantly male, white) writer’s room instead plays like a cruel joke where we’re supposed to feel empathy for the fictional minorities but demean the very real ones we already have.  What’s especially gross is that this is all surrounding the LAPD, an organization that has it’s own sordid history with racial relations, so listening to the cops drop what are meant to be species slurs against Orcs feels rotten.

There are exactly one and a half people that even remotely cared during the production of this film, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them.  Will Smith, who starred in Ayer’s Suicide Squad, tries to replicate the effort he showed there to mixed results.  There’s definitely life in his performance but I think halfway through filming he realized he was working a dud and half-asses it the rest of the way.  Tons of credit to Joel Edgerton, who despite having a mountain of makeup and prosthetics on manages to provide the lone acting highlight.  He came to play and provides some of the lone laughs in an otherwise dour affair.  Noomi Rapace, Edgar Ramirez, and inexplicably Margaret Cho are here too but are completely phoning it in.

Netflix’s film division has lagged behind their television department in terms of quality and this is going to do nothing to correct that.  A $90 million disaster that has an inconsistent tone, a repulsive attitude, a joyless eternal runtime, and a waste of a perfectly good Will Smith.  I can’t even recommend it for a hate-watch because it’s two hours of your life you will never get back.  Punt this movie, the writer, and the director into the sun.

[drthestrainlove]

Star Wars Episode XIII: The Last Jedi

Star Wars was a foundational bedrock of my childhood.  I honestly can’t remember the first time I saw a New Hope because I watched them so often.  I dragged my poor, saintly Mom to Revenge of the Sith at midnight because at the time, it was the last Star Wars movie ever and I HAD to see it as soon as possible.  To me, Star Wars was perfect. As time went by, I got older and more cynical.  I started to see the differences between the special editions and the originals, that the prequels were in fact very bad, and saw a little bit more of George Lucas’ weaknesses as a storyteller.  In many ways, I moved on.  So when they announced the big sale of Lucasfilm and that J.J. Abrams would be directing the first in a new trilogy I was a little hesitant.  Hadn’t we done this before?  Hadn’t we gotten more Star Wars only to be disappointed?  All of that flew out the window the second the opening hit.  The Force Awakens felt like home in a way that the prequels never did and gave me everything I could have asked for.

The criticism of Force Awakens was that it felt like a cover band replica of the original, and this criticism is fair.  The plot of the Force Awakens borrows pretty liberally from New Hope: You have a young, plucky pilot who discovers they have the force, an older wizened mentor who is killed by the villain, hell they even do the Death Star but call it the “Starkiller Base”.  You aren’t fooling anyone there, J.J.  There was certainly some concern going into The Last Jedi that it would just be Empire Strikes Back again, which would be fine but maybe disappointing for people wanting to see something new.

If The Force Awakens is a faithful recreation of what Star Wars was, The Last Jedi is a movie that strives to be what Star Wars should be.  What Abrams missed was that the story beats aren’t what we loved about the originals, it was the sense of hope that a ragtag bunch of screw-ups could take on an impossible force and prevail.  The Last Jedi is a movie about desperate, unending hope and what it takes to keep that hope alive.  The rag-tag bunch of screw-ups this time out are more diverse and wide-ranging in their origin; where the originals and prequels kept the fate of the galaxy essentially confined to one family this movie broadens the spectrum of who is in the Resistance and why. There is a sense of real stakes, real desperation, and quite frankly a sense of bleakness that previous Star Wars films have only hinted at and it gives the film a true gravity.  I loved it.

It is by no means perfect, and I think I love it for that even more.  There’s a bizarre side quest in the middle involving a casino and space horses that is completely unnecessary, yes the Porgs are pretty heavily featured for no reason other than being cute, and there’s some short shrift given to longtime franchise mainstays.  But honestly this movie gave us continued development of the new characters who remain great, some incredible space battles, and a compelling villain going forward that I’m genuinely excited to see more of.  It’s Star Wars in 2017 for 2017 and it’s everything my childhood self never knew he wanted.

[drthestrainlove]

IT

Let’s get this out of the way first: If you have fond memories of the 1990 miniseries you are wrong.  What you most likely have are fond memories of Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown which are fair and valid.  The miniseries, however, is four hours of interminable slog, hilariously putrid acting, and the mounting frustration that Tim Curry is inexcusably sidelined for most of the last two hours.  This movie, while imperfect, is honestly a pretty great course correction.

IT is all about a mysterious evil personified as Pennywise the Dancing Clown that haunts the town of Derry, Maine.  Every 27 years or so, Pennywise “wakes up” and goes about scaring the bejesus out of kids, taking them to his sewer lair, and eating them.  Countering him is a band of ragtag ragamuffins referring to themselves as the Loser’s Club; a group of castoffs and misfits that all have some trauma or reason they don’t fit in (Mike, Stan, Eddie, Ben, Beverly, Billy, and Richie).  Throughout the film they all get super scared but then band together to beat back the evil clown.

This movie was a giant hit, and it’s not really that hard to see why.  All the child actors are phenomenal: For any of you who read my reviews of The Strain know a bad child actor can absolutely ruin a movie.  That show scuffled on the weakness of its one child actor while this movie manages to find seven who are all great and burst with natural chemistry with each other.  The production value is fantastic; while it’s definitely showing off in some spots with trying to prove it’s ‘80s bonafides the town of Derry manages to feel like a real place that these characters actually live in.  And oh yeah, the clown.  Tim Curry’s Pennywise was remarkably limited in what he could actually do onscreen since it was the 90s and IT aired on network television.  Here’s why I have to put out a SPOILER ALERT but this version of Pennywise rips a toddler’s arm off in the first five minutes.  There’s no cutaway, no quick editing, there’s just a kid with his arm missing crying in the street.  What this Pennywise lacks in Tim Curry’s charm mixed with menace is made up for by being leaner, meaner, and more creative with changing shape to match the fears of the various kids.  It’s telling that at one point one of the kids runs by a movie theater that’s showing “Nightmare on Elm Street 5″ because this movie evokes Freddy Kreuger in his creativity of the jump-scare set pieces and in the efficiency of moving the plot along without taking too much time to pause, impressive for a 135 minute runtime.  The movie even somewhat tackles themes bigger than “Clown kills kids”: while the adults are portrayed rather cartoonishly they serve the purpose of being either monstrous themselves or complicit in the monstrous history of the town.

Let’s talk about those jump scares though, because they’re the heart of my issue with the film.  From a filmmaking level, the director is trying to introduce so many characters and establish the history of the town and scare you and wrap it up neatly enough that the scares themselves become not necessarily easy to see coming but they do feel like they have a beat to them; it’s as though there were a Pennywise alarm clock that goes off every seven minutes reminding you “welp we haven’t been scared recently so here’s a scary thing”.  Practically speaking, this manifests itself by being LOUD.  Good lord this movie is LOUD.  Every jump scare in the movie is accompanied by a speaker-shattering Inception-style BWAAAAAM that honestly made me jump more than the clown did on one occasion.  When every moment is as loud as every moment, it loses it’s potency in the long run.

Yet I can’t be too mad at this movie for that because I can’t state enough how much work and love clearly went into it.  This studio could have said “Hey we have the rights to this Stephen King book, that’ll make money, right?” and crapped out hackneyed, disinterested trash.  There’s too much visible effort here and the performers too game for that to be the case.  I don’t think it has the same thematic elements that will keep me thinking about it the way that movies like It Follows, The Babadook, or Get Out did but I also don’t think that’s what it’s trying for.  It’s a well-made horror film that takes it’s source material seriously and for that I commend it.

[drthestrainlove]

Justice League

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

In a vacuum Justice League is perhaps the least interesting movie to come out in 2017.  At face value it’s a generic “getting the team together to fight the bad guy” movie that’s been done before and will be done again.  It’s a breezy two hour movie that, as my Mom would say, is better than using your own electricity if you have nothing better to do.  And yet.  Justice League doesn’t exist in a vacuum and it’s impossible to divorce the movie from the production woes behind it, the hopes the studio placed on it, and the movies preceding it, which leads one of the most fascinating failures in cinematic history.

Justice League is the next step in the DC Extended Cinematic Universe, referred to as the DCEU by most.  It follows directly the events of Zach Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Man of Steel.  The plot, in a nutshell, is Batman and Wonder Woman are trying to stop Steppenwolf from gathering something called Mother Boxes which will destroy the world and enlist the help of Cyborg (more machine than man, made from one of the Mother Boxes), the Flash (runs really fast), and Aquaman (talks to fish, is Jason Momoa).  When they realize they aren’t enough for the task they bring in Superman, forming the classic Justice League team and saving the day.  Seems simple, right?  This movie was plagued by behind the scenes shenanigans from day one: Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and the unrelated but still DC Suicide Squad were all poorly received by fans and critics for their harsh dark tone, Wonder Woman was an unexpected phenomenon, and director Zack Snyder had to tragically leave production midway through due to family issues leaving the studio to tap Joss Whedon to finish filming.  This movie was the home run swing of a studio desperate for a hit trying to shoehorn more of a character than originally planned into a movie co-directed by two men with polar opposite stylistic tendencies.  What could go wrong?

As it turns out, just about everything could go wrong.  The Snyder touches of grimdark seriousness don’t vibe at all with the Whedon jokey banter, the entire movie is CGI since that was cheaper to shoot than physical locations, and the whole thing feels truncated when what these characters really needed was room to breathe.  Every time there’s a serious moment undercut by an off-putting one-liner that doesn’t seem to belong, every time you notice something digital where something practical would have felt more grounded, and every time a character does something that either contradicts a previous movie or a motive we haven’t seen before you see the seams breaking in the movie.  It’s a film that’s trying to be all things for all people and ends up being a palate where all the colors mix together to form an unappealing puddle of ideas that would have benefited from starting over from scratch.

There are certainly good things in this movie, in that they finally seem to have a better idea of why people like Superman in the first place, recognize that smiling is not a sin, and that letting characters bounce off of one verbally is a better method of development than punching physically.  But that doesn’t excuse the endless CGI robbing any scenes of any weight, a completely bland and uninteresting villain, and no reason to exist other than being an Intellectual Property a studio had the rights to.  It’s a CGI mess that delivers enough smiles to be worthwhile on cable down the road, but it’s impossible to recommend a theatergoing experience.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 10: “The Last Stand”, or “That’s It?”

This is it.  This is the final review of the last season of The Strain.  I think I’m going to do a post where I talk about the final season as a whole, so instead of thinking about season or series wide themes I’m just going to focus on this episode.  Which is too bad for this episode and finale, because dear reader it is trash.  Deeply unsatisfying trash.

I keep thinking about the finale to the show Breaking Bad when I think about this episode, not because it’s even remotely on the level of quality of that show but because it’s essentially almost the polar opposite.  Breaking Bad was a critically acclaimed show that had everybody’s attention.  Even if you didn’t watch it, you knew that it was a thing and had your annoying friend reminding you “Oh man dude you haven’t seen Breaking Bad?  You HAVE to watch Breaking Bad”.  Unlike say, The Wire, this popularity happened in real time, making the show’s finale as highly anticipated as any television event outside of something like Game of Thrones or the Super Bowl.  However you feel about that show, it’s really hard to argue that the ending isn’t “good”; it’s satisfying emotionally, wraps up whatever loose ends were hanging out, and ends things in a logical manner.  This is kind of a modern miracle in our age of “Peak TV” where shows are exhaustively dissected and torn down for not being perfect and the quality of the finale of a show serves as a referendum on the quality of the entire series.

What then, do we make of the final episode of The Strain?  This is a show that exists in a bizarre space in media: too awful to be popular in the mainstream but too expensive of a pedigree to cancel at the first sign of a struggle, it has the all-too-rare luxury of finishing on it’s own terms.  So what do you do when you know the end is in sight but you also know that next to no one is watching?  Apparently you phone it in from across the country and collect your paycheck before never speaking of this again.

This is not the worst series finale I’ve ever seen.  This may seem like damning with faint praise but I think it’s important to note because if it had been the worst it would have at least been interesting.  This show cared so little about it’s own finale that it saw fit to eat up valuable minutes with Dutch and Fet arguing about Fet sacrificing himself to defeat the Master because Dutch is apparently very much in love with Fet, an argument by the way that is rendered moot by Eph deciding to sacrificing himself instead and the epilogue showing that in 5 years after the victory they aren’t together.  This show cared so little about it’s own finale that it has a flashback to the first season when the Strigoi are just starting so that Setrakian can say to Eph that sometimes you have to sacrifice everything.  This show cared so little about it’s finale that the Master’s plan to flush out the resistance by literally murdering every person in NYC is carried out offscreen with only a few sound effects in the distance to give us a whiff of the horror being done.  This show cares so little about it’s finale that the whole Nazi/Concentration Camp thing gets thrown out on a whim because The Master gets impatient, stripping the most controversial but potentially impactful storyline from this season of any meaning or merit.

And yet.  That’s not even the worst thing that this show does.  Throughout these reviews I’ve lamented, lambasted, condemned, and generally been baffled by the character of Zach.  He is, by every instance of screentime he gets, a terrible awful no good character that deserves a Joffrey death.  What we get instead is a moment that the show honestly and truly believes to be meaningful but is beyond insulting.  Eph takes Fet’s place sacrificing himself because in the plot to destroy the Master we have Eph, Zach, Quinlan, and The Master 800 feet below NYC with a nuke and Eph just HAS to save Zach.  Through a truly awful fight sequence we get a wounded Master trying to jump bodies to Zach, Eph pushing Zach out of the way to become the New Master, and Zach saying “I love you, Dad” before blowing up the Nuke that saves the world.  Yes, Zach gets a redemption arc.  I thought I’d seen it all but this is just beyond the pale.  I guess I’m happy that Zach didn’t live through it?  But a character that nuked NYC and coerced a girl into liking him before getting her vampirified becoming the hero of the entire story is... well you know what?  It’s honestly kind of perfect for this awful show.  I hope you’ve enjoyed these reviews as much as I haven’t enjoyed watching this show.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 9: “The Traitor”, or “Uncanny Valley”

This one is a little different for me in that I watched this episode and went a few days without writing, so the episode is not as fresh in my mind.  I seriously considered watching it again to refresh my memory, but going over my notes I think I’d rather stab my eyes with a drill.  I would like to clarify, this show has exactly one episode left.  This is the penultimate episode of the entire series, and man this show so badly thinks it’s sticking the landing.  I will go to my grave not knowing if this show is self-aware or not. What’s frustrating about it is that it has all the look and feel of a penultimate emotional payoff but the little things that go into setting it up undercut it in hilarious ways.  This has rambled, let’s get to the meat of it.

As established last week, Zach has showed up to essentially get captured by Eph and to absolutely no ones surprise he’s there to lead the Master to them.  How does he go about doing this you ask?  He cuts his thumb opening a can of coke.  I’m not talking about a small cut.  I’m talking about he deeply slashes his thumb enough that there’s a sizable enough blotch of his blood on the ground that The Master can smell it.  A thing that is so absurd Eph even calls him out on it.  Zach remains the worst.  His treachery revealed, he explains his actions by... yelling angrily about how Eph killed his very much Vampire mother.  I can’t stress enough how much I hate this line of thinking.  You would think even a kid would be like “Oh man Mom’s a monster now we should probably not get eaten by her!” but Zach is just insistent that no, in fact, she was fine.  Christ.

We also get one of the weirdest interludes this show has done, and that’s saying something.  They have Desai (Creepy doctor guy from the breeding facility) chained up and are questioning him about the whereabouts of the Master.  I can’t put into words just how dumb this whole thing is but I’m going to try.  Desai claims that 1) the world is better off with the Strigoi in charge, 2) that human babies are less valuable to the world than adults, and 3) how culling the population through any means necessary is a good thing.  It takes on a decidedly weird bent where the show almost takes a pro-life/anti-abortion stance which I can’t exactly explain other than that’s the vibe I was getting from it and I couldn’t shake it through the whole conversation.

We’re going to get to Desai’s ultimate (and deeply stupid) fate in a second, but before we do let’s play a quick game:  If you were a supervillain who had taken over New York City, where would your evil lair be located?  Also, let’s assume for a second that you are not from New York City and have only done a cursory wikipedia search as to what is famous there.  Did you all say the Empire State Building?  Because that’s where The Master big lair is.  It’s played like a giant reveal and concession from Desai, but come on guys you couldn’t have guessed that?  Anyway, this sets up the big plan to nuke the master in motion and everybody goes to NYC except Zach, Desai, and Desai’s wife for some reason who are all locked away back at the resistance HQ.  The Master shows up, and Desai straight up says his wife is the one that gave up the Master’s hideout.  The Master kills Desai’s wife and then brutally smashes Desai’s head to death.  Quinlan takes the armed nuke into the Empire State Building where guess what?  The Master isn’t there.  Whatever are our plucky heroes/heroines going to do?

That’s sarcasm.  If you gave me an outline of the basic events of this episode (location revealed through Zach and Desai, endgame plan is finally put in motion) I probably would have nodded my head and said “yeah that seems like a thing that a normal tv show would do”.  Which is why it’s so, SO frustrating that this show continually makes the dumbest possible decisions to fill itself out.

One more episode.  I can do this.  I think.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 8: “Extraction”, or “Inaction in Action”

Here’s a story about me doing the wrong thing by trying to do the right thing: A couple years ago I was remodeling some bathrooms in transitional housing when I accidentally shot a brad nail (read: very small) into a water supply line behind the wall while trying to nail trim.  I heard the hissing, figured out what had happened, and shut the water off to the building immediately.  Considering there was nobody living in the units in this building and this occurred at 4:00pm on a Friday, the staff of the Transitional Housing and I came to the conclusion that keeping the water shut off over the weekend was the right thing to do.  However, we didn’t account for an expansion tank on the water heater for that unit pushing the water from the hot water heater, all 50 gallons of it, through that little leak over the weekend causing the ceiling below to collapse, cabinets being ruined, and waterlogging the carpet.  This was, to put it bluntly, very bad.

I couldn’t help but think about that unfortunate incident (we replaced everything, it ended up being ok btw) during this episode, because for once this season we had something approaching meaningful pathos and character work!  It just came at the expense of narrative momentum and pacing, which are both qualities we are running out of at a greater and greater rate.

The moment I’m referring to is the long-awaited by some I’m sure reunion of Fet and Setrakian.  Setrakian, as you may recall, had his Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino moment when he kills Eichorst.  This episode picks up almost immediately after that moment where Fet and Quinlan sneak their way into New York City, stash the Nuke, and go to Setrakian’s hideout only to find him in the process of turning, wildly scrawling on pages trying to get the last information he can down before he must be killed.  He inevitably reaches the end of his rope, Quinlan mercy kills him, and we get a, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, genuinely affecting moments where the pairs of Gus with Eph and Dutch with Fet get to grieve, talk about grief, and generally explore their feelings in a way that feels natural, lived-in, and honest to God earned.  I rewound these moments a few times because it genuinely seemed like a different show; the quality of the acting and writing being a marked improvement over basically anything that had happened up to that point.  Hell, even Quinlan gives a pretty decent eulogy at Setrakian’s funeral that taps into Quinlan’s unnaturally long life, Setrakian’s unique tenacity, and moving on to the overwhelming task at hand.  Look, this show is bad but credit where credit is due, these parts are well done.

And yet y’all knew this paragraph was coming too.  There are two main issues with this genuinely good series of events.  One, when we have three episodes left in this series, this turn of events brings our proceedings to a screeching halt and subsequent crawl.  This sequence honestly takes up half of the episode, which you would think would be valuable real estate for a show that has turned the corner and is sprinting (well, relatively speaking) to the finish line but The Strain is nothing if not predictable in it’s padding out of the proceedings.  Remember, this is a show whose first season was people taking seven episodes to turn and whose second season was an old man trying to find a book. Two, right before he dies, Setrakian basically says “Hey guys forget the nuke, you have to separate The Master from his human compatriots and one of you is going to have to sacrifice yourselves at some point”.  The same nuke that Fet and Quinlan (and Charlotte but lol like we’re ever seeing her again) spent the past seven episodes looking for, capturing, and bringing to New York because THAT’S WHAT SETRAKIAN SAID TO DO is now sidelined under the Federal Reserve while our main characters argue about what it is that the old man meant.  The best finales to dramatic shows that I’ve seen (The Shield, Justified, Breaking Bad, in that order, fight me) figure out their Point A, their Point B, and the most logical line to between the two and stride from one to the other.  The Strain is stopping mid-stride and trying to desperately tread water while figuring out where Point B is supposed to be.

This manifests in two deeply silly subplots.  There’s an extended sequence where the party tries to kill two birds with one stone by kidnapping the doctor in charge of the breeding facility (hey remember that guy? Sanjay Desai!) and the Master sending Zach on a mission that only he can accomplish... but doesn’t tell us what it is.  The kidnapping scene is decidedly fine, nothing stands out about it worth reporting.  The Zach plot in this episode is maddening, because go figure.  The maid girl Zach had a crush on that got turned because he’s an angsty possessive teen boy?  She gives him this weirdly long hug before he goes out on his mission and he acts like the Prom Queen just made out with him.  It’s fucking gross.  And the Master’s plan.  Let’s talk about that for a second.  The Shield is probably the best finale of any drama show ever, and what was so remarkable about it was that the writing was on the wall for how it was going to end.  There was really only one way for that show to end and the tension came from figuring out exactly how it was going to go down and who was going to go down with it.  I can’t figure out where in the hell this show is going, what it wants to accomplish, and what the stakes for anybody are.  Why is the Master so insistent on Zach doing whatever it is he’s sending him to do?  Why is Eph suddenly so into avoiding collateral damage when he’s shown no qualms about it before?  How much more is this show going to pad things out to get to their final set piece?

Instead of Setrakian, say, dying in the first few episodes of this season giving clear yet different motivations to the remaining characters his death this late serves as a wrench thrown into things that puts where this story is going into doubt.  We have two episodes left and I feel like literally anything can happen, and that is absolutely not a good thing.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 7: “Ouroboros”, or “Won’t Get Fooled Again”

We’ve been here before.  This show has, time and time again, followed truly execrable, mind-obliterating episodes with episodes that are merely very bad and mind-numbing, making them seem much better in comparison.  Not this time, The Strain, not this time.  On any other show this episode would be considered a bizarre misstep, a failure to stick the landing, or a laughable misfire.  It’s one of the better episodes of the season.  But that doesn’t mean it gets graded on a curve.  It’s important to point out all of the bananas insanity this hour of television provides.

We’ve spent the last two episodes revealing an inane, insulting plan and splitting time between Victorian England and an angsty kid.  The show has remarkably figured out that there are only four episodes left including this one and begins to move towards it’s endgame whatever the hell that is.  This means expediting things that really shouldn’t be as easy as they come across.  Take our cold open for example.  We’ve established that The Master serves as some kind of hive mind to the Strigoi, seeing everything through them and controlling them from wherever he is.  Why then, when Fet and Quinlan land their airplane, are there only two or three vans of Strigoi?  Wouldn’t there be, like, thousands of them at this point?  It’s deeply lazy (and yeah I get it’s probably for budgetary reasons but you mean to tell me they couldn’t find more extras?) and of course everybody dispatches the threat almost immediately.

We get a reunion of Dutch, Eph, and Setrakian, who go out of their way to find... Gus.  Gus, who we haven’t heard from in a while, gives them literally everything they need.  Setrakian chews Gus out for ditching them way back when and Eph is real sad about Zach for some reason.  Gus’ associate, Alonso Creem (God bless Guillermo del Toro and his immaculate ability to name characters the most insane thing possible) didn’t take kindly to Gus giving away all his stuff, so he goes to the Doctor from the Breeding Facility who has been put in charge of finding Dutch/Eph/Setrakian for unknown reasons, and says he has information about the fugitives.

I’m going to stop here and essentially narrate this scene.  Yes, this is self-indulgent and is going to take too long, but there’s honestly so much in this one interaction that I almost don’t believe it happened.  Creem gets brought to the Master, and in a clever move whips out a grenade and pulls the pin.  He rightly points out that he knows he can just get stung and all his information pulled out of him by force, so this is his insurance.  He tries to bargain with The Master and demands some island neighborhood and, I can’t stress enough that this is a real thing he asks for, CONTROL OF THE WHOLE BLACK MARKET.  Now I’m just a humble reviewer of television and am not a criminal mastermind, but even I know that there is no universe that exists where one person runs the entire Black Market.  That’s just... not how that works?  Anyway it’s a bold move and The Master just kinda laughs at him, then does the speedy teleport moving they do now, grabs the grenade, crushes it in his hand, and then gives a shrug reminiscent of Nic Cage in Face/Off before biting Alonso Creem.  It’s... honestly glorious how stupid this looks and how great it is.  DAMN IT I’m getting sucked in, said I wouldn’t do that!

MOVING ON.  This means our big finale of the evening is Eichorst showing up at Setrakian’s place while Eph and Dutch are gone.  He finds Alex and snaps her neck which is just so bitterly disappointing.  She was a legitimately decent character and to have her offed with no ceremony whatsoever is really lame.  Eichorst then kills Gus’ cousin Raul (remember him?) and has Gus on the ropes before Setrakian wakes up and stabs Eichorst with his silver sword.  Oh yeah, silver hurts Strigoi now.  Eichorst pulls the sword out of his own back which he maybe shouldn’t be able to do before biting Setrakian.  But oh-HO Setrakian has taken a bunch of blood thinners which kills Eichorst but not before Setrakian gets in a very weird monologue about pests directed at The Master.  I think it’s supposed to be this meaningful reckoning of two characters who’ve been going at it all series but Eichorst is just taunting him with Jewish and Holocaust stuff and Setrakian comes off like an angry grandpa.  It’s grosser in retrospect and not nearly as meaningful as this show wants.

Three episodes left, I have no idea what this show is trying to do, but even in this slightly less awful episode never forget that this show is impossibly dumb.  Don’t get fooled again.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 6: “Tainted Love”, or “Zach Attack”

I’m not a big Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) guy.  I wrestled and played football, two sports built on the foundation of violence, but for some reason MMA was just a step too far.  In the past year however I’ve ended up watching more MMA than I ever have in my life since my coworker and friend is a former boxer and it gives us something to talk about.  One thing I’ve noticed about MMA is that unlike boxing, it’s almost never the big haymaker blow that knocks someone out.  A common sight is one opponent delivering a crushing punch leaving the other woozy, falling to the ground, and the striker pouncing on the prone combatant delivering a volley of quick jabs to the head before the referee can call the fight.

If last week was the monstrous haymaker to send me to the mat this episode was a series of repeated jabs to my face and brain.  This is possibly one of the worst episodes of television I have ever seen where the poor decisions, awful acting, and bizarre choices keep coming and don’t let up for 45 minutes.  It’s emblematic of everything this show does poorly, it’s awful on both the micro level of storytelling beats and the macro level of story structure, and it’s deeply DEEPLY silly.  I can’t even imagine trying to write about every single bananas thing that happened in this episode, but I do want to hit the three main storylines and why they are, in fact, awful.

Our first storyline is Fet and Quinlan trying to get a nuke to NYC.  In this storyline alone we have Eichorst returning from being LIT ON FIRE to have exactly one bandage on his face, suddenly behaving like a teleporting Jason Voorhees, and firing a .50 cal machine gun (which if I’m being honest that last part is pretty cool).  Sure, there’s other things to address like an essential replay of the sniping scenario from the missile silo at the airfield and Charlotte being given an out on this mission and taking it without blinking, but Eichorst in this episode is the height of laziness.  How does he know that the hijackers from last episode are where they are?  Because plot, who cares.  Why is he miraculously fully healed after, and I can’t stress this enough, being engulfed in flame?  Because plot, who cares.  Why is he suddenly able to teleport when literally no strigoi has been able to do this before?  Because it LOOKS KEWL, MANNNNN.  It’s as lazy as lazy gets, and it’s frustrating that this show has no good reason for this because as pretty much every episode has showed, there’s plenty of strigoi around.  You don’t need Eichorst for this, they just added him in because he’s a face and a name people recognize.

Next up is our explanation of why Quinlan is such a humorless asshole: his entire flashback sequence to vaguely Victorian times.  Quinlan is a character that I remember being a thing in Season 2.  This is where I remind you, dear reader, that Season 2 was almost entirely about a man hunting down a book, so you would think that there would have been plenty of time to introduce a backstory and a motivation for this mysterious blandbot, but no this show decides that with five and four episodes left in the whole series is the time to slow things down, take it back in time and... reveal that Quinlan lost people?  People he cared about?  Oh and also that the Master might be his father?  This is failure of showrunning, because like I said you’ve had all this time to flesh this guy out and just haven’t done so.  It also disregards the fact that maybe, just maybe, in the apocalypse everybody has lost someone and this doesn’t make him unique?  I can’t say enough about the idiotic Master reveal, I imagine that the Master is his father in that he turned him into a strigoi and he’s not actually his biological father because that would be beyond the dumbest shit imaginable.  The showrunners have created a world, established rules for this world, and then willfully ignored them for no good reason other than episodes are 48 minutes long and you have to fill them with something because God forbid your self-loathing vampire samurai with a bone handle katana just be cool by existing and not have some moronically not-that-tragic backstory.

All of the above, every single moment, pales in comparison to the main event.  Folks, I’ve casually joked for the last few episodes that “At least we didn’t have any Zach in this episode”.  The Strain heard my hubris, and in my daze from the vampire nazi haymaker pounced on me with a flurry of Justin Bieber haircuts, misogynist teenaged male entitlement, and dialogue pulled straight out of a MRA website comment section.  The romance hinted at in a previous episode between our little shitstain Zach and his maid Abby is now explored because he gives her plums.  That’s it.  He gives her plums, she gives him the quickest peck on the cheek, and suddenly he stalks her into her home, witnesses her giving out the plums to orphan children, and *GASP* sucking face with her boyfriend!  Zach’s response to this is to run off and sulk.  When Abby shows up the next day and rightfully rejects his sorry ass, he says these lines and I swear to God I paused it and rewound multiple times to get the words right: “I was supposed to be your boyfriend!” “I did everything I was supposed to and I gave you all this stuff!” “I’m NOT a kid!”  This is 100% real and I don’t have enough alcohol to burn that out of my brain.  What is infinitely worse than those lines however, is that this is distinctly shot to be sympathetic to Zach, that we’re supposed to feel bad for the kid that nuked NYC over daddy issues and can’t date the girl clearly seven years his senior who also happens to be his indentured servant. It’s gross, but settles my inner debate about whether or not this show understands just how awful Zach is: They clearly don’t and have no idea that writing a piece of shit character and trying to have us feel bad that he can’t leverage being a piece of shit into getting laid is perhaps a poor choice.  It’s a particularly gross, but fitting choice for this show that Zach’s kid strigoi pet bites Abby as a punishment while the Master masquerading as Zach’s mother consoles him, trying to straddle the line of performing comeuppance for the girl who dared to defy Zach and making him a sympathetic character that’s being manipulated against his knowledge.  Fuck off Strain.

As always with this show there’s so much I couldn’t even cover, such as Eichorst whitesplaining Native American suffering to a Native American Hostage, the worst fight between The Master and Quinlan possible, and Charlotte being the only reasonable person and just jumping ship when she has the chance.  At least we’ll always have this moment:

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 5: “Belly of the Beast”, or “The Frog in Boiling Water”

Are you familiar with the Frog in Boiling Water parable?  The idea is one of gradual realization; a frog thrown into a pot of boiling water will immediately jump out to save itself, but if placed in a pot of lukewarm water that is slowly heated to a boil, the frog will not understand it’s gradually changing environment and boil to it’s demise.  In pop culture terms, think of something like the Sixth Sense.  It’s a movie with a blatantly absurd but intriguing premise and a final reveal that is so slowly built up and hinted at throughout that it casts the entire rest of the movie in a different light.  If the reveal is given to you right at the jump, you might be inclined to reject it sight unseen.  Though he has done absolutely nothing of value since, M. Night Shyamalan presented a masterclass in deftly keeping the viewer in the dark as to his true intentions and lulling the audience into a false sense of security before pulling the rug out from under them.

The Strain, bless it’s poor stupid heart, wants so badly to boil your frog.  It wants so badly to build to this moment at the end of of the halfway mark in it’s final season.  It so badly wants this moment to make you recoil in abject horror at the unfathomable evil it has revealed that you fly back to rewatch the series from the beginning to see if you can spot the clues leading up to it.  However what it has actually done is skip the boiling water altogether and take a blowtorch to you, to us, the poor sap frogs watching this show.

Do you want to know what the big reveal is?  How about you guess what it is based on the last line of the episode, uttered by Eph: “Oh my God, this is the Master’s Final Solution.  We’re not the farmers, we’re the cattle!”  Give up?  For context, here are some things that happen in this episode. 1) A woman flanked by armed guards who are all wearing red, black, and white armbands are shaving the heads of prisoners before shipping them off to an undisclosed location. 2) Eichorst has Setrakian in his capture and only calls him by his holocaust number since, as established ad nauseam in season one, Setrakain was prisoner at the concentration camp Eichorst ran before Eichorst got turned.  3) The cold open has Eph and Alex finding a cell phone with video recorded by a 12 year old girl that some might say serve as a diary before she is captured and brought to “New Horizons”.  And 4) Eph and Alex discover that New Horizons is not the farming camp it was advertised to be, but is instead a concentration camp.

The Strigoi are Nazis.

If you aren’t watching this, I cannot stress enough how painfully unsubtle this is.  This isn’t me using the word Nazi the way so many do to reduce an argument to absurdity, this show is going out of it’s way to draw parallels to and outright copies of Nazis.  In the words of my parents said to me many times, “I’m not mad, I’m just bitterly, bitterly disappointed.”

I’m disappointed because as I’ve been repeatedly pointing out, tentacle faced human eating vampires don’t need to be Nazis to be evil, they’re already pretty evil!  Part of the reason why Nazis were and unfortunately are still such a horrifying group of people is precisely because throughout history they’re neighbors, friends, and family who you would never have guessed harbored such reprehensible beliefs.  Think about any movie or show you’ve ever watched that had Nazis in it.  How many of those shows had the trope of the “Good Nazi”?  Someone just caught up in the movement or “just following orders”?  That particular trope persists because Nazis look just like us and we don’t want to believe that we are capable of such evil.  Making your cartoonish vampires also Nazis both robs the vampires’ crimes of any weight (if they’re already eating people, is it such a leap to camps?) and robs whatever response the very real atrocities of Nazis past and present would have elicited in the viewers of any impact.

I’m disappointed because this reveal, this endgame, is once again played completely straight as a genuine shock to our characters.  I feel like I say this once an episode, but it boggles my mind that these writers honestly believe that in a world where tentacle faced human eating vampires set off a nuclear bomb in New York City and took over the world, people wouldn’t be automatically suspicious or assume the worst about their intentions in regards to the continuing of the human race.  How many times can I be left screaming “WHAT EXACTLY DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN???” after character after character behaves as if they’ve never thought something through in their lives up to that point.  It’s writing that’s either lazy and incompetent on a level reserved for straight to video SyFy channel movies or it’s lazy and cynical in a way that shows how much contempt the writers really have for anyone still watching this trainwreck of a production.

Look, there are other things that happen in this episode. There’s Eichorst revealing that the breeding facility is just there because baby blood tastes the best, there’s flashbacks to Victorian London where mopey strigoi who hunts strigoi Quinlan is solicited by a wealthy woman to turn her brother but he instead turns her, and there’s Fet and the gang getting their hands on the smaller nuclear macguffin to make their bigger nuclear macguffin work.  It’s just hard to get too upset about any of these admittedly crazy developments in an episode where the series showed it’s ass in a way I didn’t think it could.

Still no Zack this episode, which has to count for something.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 4: “New Horizons” or, “Running in Place”

Once upon a time, yours truly attended a conference for work that involved the CEO of a national non-profit giving an interesting perspective on branding, market shares, and corporate identity.  If that sentence didn’t kill you with boredom congratulations, you’re tougher than I am.  I hadn’t thought about that conference in years until I got to this episode of The Strain because I think the anecdote the CEO gave is completely applicable to the show at hand.  You see, the CEO was talking about this non-profit’s place in the world and he said “Look at big box stores: You have Wal-Mart, who accepted their identity as the cheapest possible depository for household goods, which they price and market accordingly.  Target took the opposite route, marketing themselves as the high-end alternative to Wal-mart, advertising and pricing towards a different type of clientele.  Sears tried to be both things at the same time and is on the brink of bankruptcy.  Be Target or be Wal-Mart, but don’t be Sears.”  Obviously, there are a lot of socio-economic, racial, and ethical questions that come to mind after that analogy, but it’s a solid framework for what we’re talking about in this episode.

I think, using the analogy above, that I’ve figured out the space that the Strain was trying to occupy in the television landscape.  The problem is that it thinks it’s Target when in fact it’s Sears.  The Walking Dead has occupied, for better or worse, the space for the “serious” and “realistic” post-apocalypse monster show where the zombies are secondary monsters to MAN because MAN is the real monster/what society might actually look like in the face of a zombie apocalypse for a solid four years before The Strain ever showed up.  Z Nation (on SyFy, which I cannot recommend enough for it’s sheer gleeful sense of bonkers) has occupied the Wal-Mart space of decidedly B grade camp that uses the background of a zombie apocalypse to create zanier and zanier scenarios that never forget that it’s a show on television that’s supposed to be fun.  The Strain has all of the insane premise of Z Nation with all the melodramatic dourness of the Walking Dead, making it a thoroughly misguided yet ultimately fascinating case study in big budget television failure.

This episode features a lot happening, but nothing really HAPPENING.  We begin this episode with Eph and Alex fighting against the partnership, Dutch in captivity of the Strigoi Breeding Thing, and Gus being still on the show for some reason.  We end the episode with... Eph and Alex fighting against the partnership, Dutch in captivity of the Strigoi, and Gus being still on the show for reasons that are even less clear than before.  Nothing moves forward narratively save for a few reveals that are less shocking in their content than they are in that they played for reveals at all.  Dutch spends this entire episode being coerced into being a mouthpiece for the breeding facility, escapes, then discovers that the Strigoi have some kind of blood processing plant with humans being hung on hooks like cattle (the hooks are prevalent in the title credits but literally who gives a shit) and the babies from the program are being dragged off to... well we still don’t know that yet.  Eph and Alex’s hideout are attacked by Strigoi, they escape, Alex gets drunk and Eph tells her that Zach nuked New York because (his words) “He was mad at me”.  Instead of say, recoiling in horror that any kid could be that angsty and cartoonish, she responds as though that is a completely reasonable thing for a teenage boy to do because again this show has no concept of how awful Zach is or how much we hate him.

All of this is just so damn frustrating because if the show committed to one sensibility or another it would be so much better than it is.  If the breeding facility was played to it’s Handmaid’s Tale style natural conclusion with a sense of callousness and impersonality, it would be a much more shocking and effective sequence.  Instead the horror of a woman forced into a C section and not even allowed to see her baby is played, somehow, as a shocking moment when it should be taken as no great surprise that the tentacle faced vampire monsters forcibly putting women into breeding programs wouldn’t exercise things like common decency.  If Eph and Alex fighting the vampires was played with a little more humor, if the reveal that Zach blew up New York with a warhead because of daddy issues was recognized at face value for how impossibly silly it is, it would be a much more honest show.  Instead the show that can’t decide if Eph is an alcoholic or not decides to believe that what you really care about here is it’s sense of character development.

But none of those jarring tonal decisions encapsulate the Strain’s inability to pick a lane and stick with it quite like our third storyline this episode. You remember Gus? And Raul? We revisit them, because apparently they are running contraband material throughout New York (yes, the same New York that was nuked but apparently suffered no consequences) and are locked in a turf war with a rival criminal faction.  This rival faction turns out to be cops, they have an impossibly stupid shootout, and Gus maybe kinda sorta looks sad about the whole thing for a split second.  I think the point the show is trying to make is “even in the apocalypse human beings are still shitty to each other, scraping and clawing over petty greed.” Which would be fine... if The Walking Dead hadn’t been doing that better longer than The Strain has been on the air.  It tries to put a Walking Dead style emotional impact on a Z Nation throwaway gag.  Z Nation could get away with something like this because it’s a less serialized show that is willing to devote an entire episode to something like this while resolving it at the end, knowing full well it’s going to move past it and never speak of it again.  The Strain tries to cram an emotionally resonant moment into a monumentally unimportant storyline that I’m willing to bet money on makes a reappearance later. This is the kind of thing bad shows do: Take a character no one cares about, give them a storyline that’s never been discussed before and has nothing to do with the greater narrative, have it take up a third of the screentime of the fourth episode of the final season of the show, and have it not pay off in any meaningful way.

When the nicest thing I can say about the episode is “At least it doesn’t have Zach” that’s not a great sign.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 3: “One Shot”, or “Marginal Improvements”

The last episode really struck a nerve with me, in that things only seemed to be able to move forward thanks to “Idiot Plotting”, a trope in which to advance the plot all the characters have to act like idiots.  For a show, again, about tentacle faced vampires, that takes itself as seriously as this one does, it comes off as insufferable.  So imagine my surprise when in this episode, people kind of sort of do things that make sense?  I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

I went on a little too long recapping the plot last episode, so here’s very briefly what happens: Eph’s plot to poison the tankers of blood works, Fet gets into a sniper standoff with the lone remaining soldier guarding the nuclear warhead, and Zach gets to explore the relationship with the maid girl from the previous episode.

So let’s talk about Zach, and about some of the choices this show is making in regards to Zach.  Does the show know we hate him as much as we do?  Are they in on it?  Or are they completely oblivious to how he’s written, directed, and acted and how that might make audiences feel?  The aforementioned shootout?  Right in the middle of it, right as Quinlan (the strigoi who’s a good guy for reasons) is going to put himself in harms way to potentially end the firefight, it cuts to commercial and comes back to... Zach.  I get that in a television show with multiple storylines you can’t just be linear with each one and you have to break it up a little bit, but maybe pick a different time to do so?  The storyline we get with Zach opens with, I shit you not, him feeding a live rat to his pet Cobra because Zach is THE WORST.  Abby (as we learn later is the girl’s name) tries to steal some food from Zach, gets caught by a strigoi, understandably freaks out, and leaves.  Zach chases her down and gives her food and is like “hey whenever you want to come over for food just do it, bring your friends!” and seems legitimately surprised when she’s hesitant at first and a little resentful that he’s living in a penthouse that belongs to the vampires when everyone else is overcrowded and starving.  This is the point at which Zach starts to maybe kinda have the realization that the tentacle face monsters who blew up New York and eat people are, possibly, bad.  Again, I have no idea if this is a course correction by the writers to apologize for how much of an unforgivable shit he’s been this entire series or the groundwork for the most unearned redemption arc in the history of television.

I guess the moral of this episode is I want a violent, gruesome comeuppance for a 13 year old child and that makes me feel very weird.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 2: “The Blood Tax”, or “Raining Dumb”

I’d like to attach a picture here, a picture that more accurately summarizes how colossally dumb this show is better than any words I could ever use: 

That’s our dude Eichorst, the Nazi-Vampire-Right Hand to the Master-Evil Mastermind wearing a cowboy hat Crocodile Dundee said was too ostentatious and sunglasses that can charitably described as belonging to your grandmother that frequented opium dens back in the day.  I have no idea who this guy is he’s talking to, all I know is this is probably supposed to be a discreet meeting and yet if anybody actually saw Eichorst they’d report him to the cops because he just LOOKS like he’s carrying out an apocalyptic plan.  You know what’s not hard to find?  A fedora, or a shepherd’s cap, or literally anything other than what a depressed Louisville housewife wears to the Kentucky Derby.  You know what else isn’t hard to find?  Any pair of sunglasses that doesn’t look like they belong to Bono but for fancy occasions only.  This is a layup that the Strain fires into the second deck.  It’s a little thing, but it’s indicative of how this show can screw up just about anything it puts its mind to.

Keep in mind, this is just in the Previously On segment, we haven’t even gotten to the title credits yet.  But this theme of snatching idiocy out of the jaws of good ideas permeates this episode through all three plots this week, none of which make any God damn sense.  Let’s look at them from least inexplicable to most, keeping in mind they are all inexplicable:

We start of with Gus, the hispanic ex-con with a heart of gold.  Well strike that, we don’t start with Gus, we start with Raul.  Raul is just a guy getting by in the apocalypse, working for the Partnership making the nutrition bars that feed all the humans.  It’s not a great gig but it keeps him alive and sometimes that’s all you can ask for.  It’s a great vignette into what life is like for the layperson in this particular dystopian future.  Which is why it’s so frustrating when Gus shows up, mugs Raul, it’s revealed that the two are cousins, and after the briefest “So how you doin’ man?” in history, Gus demands Raul help him rob Raul’s place of work, placing Raul at great personal jeopardy, all in the name of family.  This raid of course goes poorly and now Raul is on the run with Gus.  This entire plot did nothing but introduce a new character to compliment an existing character and exhibit no agency throughout the entire process.  Raul is less a character than a human who’s main contribution to proceedings is saying “I can’t do that” or “no!”.  Real glad we’re getting introduced to this guy with 8 episodes to go in the entire show.

I waffled on who to put second, but I have to go with Dutch.  We presumably haven’t seen Dutch yet, and we open with her getting... some kind of transvaginal procedure explaining her ovulation schedule.  it’s revealed momentarily that she’s in some kind of forced breeding facility, because again apparently this show believes that tentacle faced vampires bent on world domination aren’t evil enough so they have to make it WORSE.  It’s revealed that she got captured after she and Setrakian were away from his apartment, Strigoi invaded it, and then she went in trying to save the MacGuffin Book.  Yes, a show that devoted a whole season to a magical book that did absolutely nothing to prevent the thing it was explicitly introduced to prevent is still somehow a major plot point.  ANYWAY I’m pretty sure this show is trying to do One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with forced breeding programs which, yeah.  The thing that kills me is Dutch, who every time I mention her I’m reminded that she HACKED THE ENTIRE INTERNET OF NYC, has a meeting with the mysterious gentleman in the photo above that’s apparently running the program and he kinda sorta maybe starts to talk to her about how screwed up this thing is... only to say that the people that aren’t on board with it are selfish and this is the future and blah blah blah.  There’s some real, honest-to-god potential in that conversation!  The moral deliberating about doing what you can to survive in a hellish world, even if that means doing evil, is an interesting question!  And yet as soon as this show introduces this, it punts it away and Mr. Mystery Dr. Man reverts to carrying water for the strigoi like they have some kind of moral imperative.  Dutch ends this cringe inducing segment by hatching her escape plan, which involves smuggling her out in a chest freezer breathing through a straw hoping nobody will notice the chest freezer is slightly open, only to hesitate when a fellow prisoner has a miscarriage which leads Dutch to want her friend to get smuggled out in her stead.  This leads to what felt like an eight hour “No YOU go” session until they are all predictably found out.

But the most, and I mean the MOST baffling thing in a deeply silly episode is the story of Eph.  As you may remember, our plucky hero was blown up in a bus but saved by the people blowing up said bus last episode.  Turns out the folks that blew up the bus are part of a larger resistance movement taking potshots at the strigoi while they can and waiting for a better plan to come around.  You would think this would make Eph ecstatic, right?  WRONG.  He spends his entire time with them sulking and being a haughty dick to them for no reason whatsoever.  He ends up saving them from a strigoi attack and afterwards, when they’re trying to thank him, is where the real mind boggling begins.  He basically tells them that they’re not doing anything in the grand scheme of things, that their efforts don’t matter, and that if they REALLY wanted to make a difference they’d do something big like poison the tankers full of blood that he’s discovered.  It is at this point, in one of the most surreal things I’ve ever seen in a television show, that the head rebel looks at him and goes “so why don’t we do that?” and Eph looks at them and goes “My god you’re right, let’s do that!” LIKE IT’S A REVELATION.  There are two explanations for this.  One is that the writers are trying to convey that Eph is such a mopey, self-absorbed sack of bullshit that he’s legitimately never thought of this before.  Two is that the writers realized halfway through writing this episode that they should have had Eph be looking for someone to help him do this all along and convince this motley crew to join him all along, hadn’t done so, and had to scramble to get this to work as their endgame.  Again, this is a layup.  This is easy.  And yet they’ve written it in such an asinine fashion that now everybody looks like the biggest idiots possible.  Earlier in the episode Setrakian mumbles some garbage about how “This is our fault, we as humans lost our way” like the strigoi taking over is some kind of moral failing on the part of humanity.  Setrakian, buddy, I’m going to have to disagree with you on this one: Humanity in this universe isn’t doomed because of some moral failing, it’s because they’re all inexplicable idiots and it’s a miracle they’ve made it this far.

[drthestrainlove]

Episode 1: “The Worm Turns”, or “That’s Not How Any of This Works”

I think the biggest thing about this show for me is how bitterly disappointing it is.  “Guillermo del Toro produces a vampire show set as a zombie apocalypse” should be as easy a slam dunk for my tastes as you can get, and yet this show consistently gets so much wrong at a fundamental level that it’s impossible to view it as anything but a failure.  This first episode is a perfect microcosm of that because there are so many good to great ideas presented here that are just executed so poorly as to render them ancillary to the greater problems of this show.

That’s a lot, and before we can unpack that we need to get through the Previously On segment, which had me laughing out loud for all the wrong reasons.  As mentioned in the previous post, I have not seen the third season and so I have no idea what’s going on going into this season and boy oh boy did I miss some crazy shit.  Eph’s ex-wife and Zach’s Mom got turned into a strigoi, fights Eph while Zach watches, and when Eph kills her (because, you know, she’s a VAMPIRE) Zach shouts “I HATE YOU” and detonates a nuclear bomb that sends America into a post-nuclear stone age.  I had to re-read that sentence to make sure I had typed it correctly because that is absolutely insane.  Humans are now living under the rule of the strigoi under something called “The Partnership” which I think is some attempt at 1984 style corporate dystopia but just comes off as unnecessary, which we’ll get to in a minute. Eph is in Philadelphia monitoring the strigoi, Fet is in North Dakota looking for a nuclear missile, Palmer is now the Master, and Zach under the watchful eye of the Master.

If my biggest criticism of the second season was that nothing really happened in the grand scheme of things this episode is a hard correction in the opposite direction.  There is so damn much that happens in this episode, including:

-Eph getting kidnapped by strigoi only to be saved by freedom fighters that blow up his bus

-Fet getting kidnapped by a group of women who it’s pointed out are all women but that never actually goes anywhere, finding a guy that used to work at a missile silo, and escaping thanks to his strigoi buddy who I had totally forgotten about

-Zach killing a tiger with an automatic rifle in the Central Park Zoo, being chosen as the next vessel for the Master, and getting a cute maid/love interest as a reward for killing said tiger

-Eph beginning an investigation into the clearly evil Partnership corporation because apparently being vampires that eat people isn’t reason enough to be suspicious of them.

From what I can gather the Master has Zach in his endgame plan, which gross but whatever, and to stop them Fet is trying to get a nuke to blow them up while Eph is resisting by being a colossal dick to everyone he runs into.  Which is fine!  This is the kind of gonzo storytelling I would normally fall head over heels for.  And I’d even be ok with it being merely bad!  Some of the most fun shows I’ve watched haven’t been what anyone would call “good” but they’ve been fun as hell.  Where this show runs into its many, many problems is that a) it has no interest in making any aspect of its world cohesive and b) it’s so God damn dour.  The Strain has no sense of fun or self awareness to acknowledge its own ridiculousness and instead demands that you take the story of tentacle mouth vampires overrunning the United States very serious while it tries to sell you on a 13 year old insufferable asshole who is making you want to punch a literal child every time he’s on screen as not just a main character, but I fear the character the whole series hinges on.

Which is where my title for this episode, and really this whole show comes in.  The Strain, despite going out of its way to show you how the strigoi plague spreads at a molecular level in the first season, seems to have no idea how literally anything else in the world works.  Why bother with building a fake corporation to appease humans when you literally run the planet and don’t have to?  Why go out of your way to turn a 13 year old into a sociopath vessel for the Master when he already is one and you’ve established that the Master taking over a body isn’t affected by the memories or personality of the person in the slightest?  Why does nobody talk to each other on this show even remotely how human beings actually behave?  I can’t stress enough just how insanely people act on this show and how human interaction is apparently a thing they only discovered two days ago.

At this point I’m Team Nuke wiping all of these characters off the face of the earth.

[drthestrainlove]

The Strain Season 4 Precap

This is a blog of penance.  Once upon a time, I promised a dear friend that I would complete a recording of a biography of one Ulysses S. Grant.  I did not complete this promise, though I do recommend that you seek out biographies of Grant as he is a fascinating character and everybody should really learn more about him.

But you’re not here for that.  You’re here for Penance.  As punishment for not finishing this biography in a timely fashion, this friend and I have worked out a suitable punishment, one that we hope is suited both for his entertainment and yours.  I will be reviewing, episode by episode, the final season of the FX show The Strain, the vampire/apocalypse show developed by Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro.  My background with the show is that I am a lifelong Guillermo del Toro fan and watched the first season and a half of this show before quitting in disgust.  This is a bad show.  This a show that dragged an entire season out of the conflict inherent in an old man acquiring a book.  That’s the last thing I know about the show before I embark on this journey, I will not be utilizing wikipedia or any other internet source to inform these reviews.

Here’s what I remember about this show.  It’s a show about vampires, albeit ones with giant tentacles for tongues because del Toro.  The first season begins with our hero, Ephraim Goodweather (a name I could not have made up if I tried) who is a recovering alcoholic, shitty husband, ok dad, CDC hotshot.  The vampires, or strigoi as this show insufferably forces you to call them, show up on a plane to New York City.  They are led by a “Master”, who is more a spiritual concept that inhabits hosts than a real thing?  Eph and two other disposable CDC members meets up with a guy named Setrakian, an old man who is constantly telling people that they don’t understand what’s going on despite not actually bothering to explain what’s going on, Fet, a rat exterminator putting on an impossibly bad but oddly endearing eastern European accent, and Dutch, a hacker that hacked the entire internet of New York City.  Another key figure is Zach, Eph’s son.  Imagine the worst child actor you’ve ever seen.  Now imagine that child actor given the dialogue and direction of “Future Men’s Rights Activist” and “Dude Who Unironically Loves Ayn Rand” and you get an idea of how insufferable this kid is.  There is also ANOTHER old guy who is really sick and I can’t remember his name and I won’t be bothered to look it up (ed note: Eldritch Palmer) who is trying to use the vampires to live forever.  Eichorst is the vampire who dresses like a human and says generic evil guy stuff while looking creepy.  There is also an ex-con named Gus, but I remember so little about him that I hope he’s not central to this story anymore.

The first season was the spread of the strigoi outbreak, and firmly established that New York City, at least in this show, is full of the dumbest idiots ever.  Even if the nonsense plot line about the internet shutting down were true you’d think there would be a pretty fast spread of information regarding tentacle mouth vampires spreading through the city.  Season 2 was… a giant waste of time.  I’m not kidding when I say the entire plot of the season revolved around Setrakian getting a book, what should have taken an episode or two is stretched out over the entire season.  I didn’t finish this season because I am a human and there are better things to do with my time than this.  Or at least I thought I did before I started this project.  So help me God, here we go.