If The Strain wants you to know one thing by the end of “Night Zero,” it’s that vampires are just as cool and brutal as those zombies you love so much.
And it works, kind of, if the intended effect is to constantly correct yourself to say “vampires” instead of “zombies,” when you describe The Strain out loud. But the bigger question might be: can Guillermo del Toro, along with source material/ novel co-creator Chuck Hogan, continue to bank on tweaking this typically zombie origin story to work in their favor? Ehhh, maybe.
First off, and you probably already know this, but what we’ve come to know about vampires in the Twilight age is completely thrown out in The Strain. They’ve traded in teenage sparkle lust for good old blood lust. Trying to reclaim Nosferatu coolness by mixing gross-out vamps with a viral epidemic hypothetically sets up enough intrigue for you to stick around. But the pilot episode, that benefitted from FX not having a strict 45-minute drama running time, unfortunately chooses to focus on the human horror instead of the horror of vampires out to destroy humanity.
In this world, vampires exist and are vaguely associated with Nazis (having a character reference another as “the Jew” doesn’t help me not think that), international flights land on-time and the hero Doctor is named Ephraim Goodweather. I’m not even gonna touch on Corey Stoll’s distracting-ass wig, that’s what Twitter is for.
The Strain puts way too weight on the cardboard cut out main characters and you caring about them when, if you’re like me, you wanted more blood-sucking and less of a Crash/Lost mash-up.
Other than seeing a pair of clueless flight attendants, OPENING A LATCH MID-LANDING (?!?!?!) and unleashing something on a packed plane (oh no! whatever will become of that brave little French girl?!) fresh in from Berlin, you’re waiting a good 30 minutes until you’re treated to Bishop’s brutal murder. And the effectiveness of that scene alone, no expository dialogue needed for this vampire-overlord-thing to suck out all his blood and violently bash the shit outta his skull. Then, SMOKE BOMB, it vanishes. You’re almost mad you didn’t see it wreak havoc on that airplane, stocked with stereotypical airplane people you’d never wanna sit next to. But it works because that scene keeps its hooks in you, if anything, to see what will become of everyone who died on the plane if this thing created them.
Bishop, whom you don’t ever get to know more than his John Wayne-ish one-liners (sample: “This plane feels like a dead animal”), is the most shocking scene because you know so little about him – you can’t see it coming a mile away. Unlike like mostly everything else that happened in the pilot, yes – even the morgue scene. How were you not waiting for that to happen? I haven’t even read the book.
When the CDC, curmudgeonly pawn shop owner, evil/immortal billionaires and even Catholic gang-bangers that love their mama start to show up, you can’t help but wonder if del Toro and crew have got some their horror tropes confused.
Why push aside investigating further into the parasitic worms that disgustingly burrow into your skin or the (what I’m assuming is piss/shit – from what I’ve heard about the novel) high levels of “ammonia,” in favor of spending time with Dr. Goodweather – who is channeling some serious Jim Carrey in Liar Liar.
Don’t even get me started on Dr. Goodweather’s CDC co-worker Jim, who turns out to be in on helping aforementioned evil/immortal billionaires, you nearly expected him to wink at the fucking camera when it’s revealed. Then there’s the business of an ominous coffin/box not leaving the airport (which, it does, thanks to Jim), all I can hope is that the coffin-Macguffin doesn’t take up anymore time.
Yet, for every human-character disappointment, there are enough interesting questions to be answered about the vampires. Like, when the little French girl does return home to her Papa, even though she’s been pronounced dead, and doesn’t immediately eat him – you know shit will go down, but when? And, how?
This is when The Strain works best, parsing out nuggets of what’s to come of the viral vampirism, at least they saved all the intrigue for the vampires and not their human counterparts. And now that we literally seem to know our main players about as well they know themselves, can we ditch the human cliches and get back to the more disgusting vampire ones?
That being said though, if this pissing/shitting vampire strain turns out to be descendents of Nazis, I’m out.
Yeah, that’s my limit.
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