Evil Eldritch Plamer is still dying and still not a
vampire
The goodguys return to the pawn shop to mope, especially
Abraham who mopes his way into a flashback to the 60s when a younger Abraham
hunted the Master in Albania, taking his wife Miriam with him (who
believed but still worried about Abraham’s
obsession). This is to show, in case you didn’t guess, how utterly obsessed
Abraham has been with the Master and for how long.
I’m sure we needed a flashback to tell us that.
Ephraim is still the worst person in the world ever and
tries to get everyone to agree how terrible it was that Abraham tried to go
after the whole nest – frankly this comes off less as concern and more as
Ephraim desperately trying to secure leadership again. And Dutch returns to the
shop, having recovered from her hurt fee-fees to flirt with Vasiliy some more.
She has a plan (Ephraim is an arsehole) – she can hack into the emergency broadcast system to contact the whole country through the internet blackout. They can get out a warning. As they set up the system we get some more overt confirmation of Dutch’s bisexuality and more flirting between her and Vasiliy.
After a long, dramatic apology from Abraham for losing control,
Ephraim gets to make his speech about the vampires and showing photographs of
the bodies he’s autopsied.
As they finish the broadcast the porn shop is attacked –
Bolivar (remember
him?) manages to get inside and infect Nora’s mother, Mariela. He’s just
one of a wave of vampires led by Eichorst
The gang barricades themselves in the basement and Abraham reveals he has a secret way out. Nora has a tearful goodbye to her mother before insisting on being the one to behead her. Abraham says goodbye to Miriam’s heart before he leaves as well.
Eichorst arrives to gloat.
Back at team evil, the Master visits Palmer and gives him
his blood. Fitzwilliam finds the then bedridden Palmer active and mobile,
apparently in great health.
Augustin, meanwhile, is acquiring weapons by holding a
guy, Alonso, at gunpoint and stealing his stash of weaponry. He also finds out
that Alsonso is being paid huge amounts to ship containers out of the city.
When he inspects them, he finds they’re full of vampires (unknown to Alonso).
He and Alonso fight the vampires and each other – until the Vampire Hit Squad (remember
them?) arrives. They kill the other vampires, kidnap Augustin and drive
off.
Oh and the rest of Abraham’s flashback – he went out
hunting the Master in the 60s – and he didn’t kill him (shocking). He also,
foolishly, spent so long hunting him he didn’t get home to Miriam before dark -
giving Eichorst chance to turn her. Abraham then killed her and cut out her
heart as a reminder/keepsake/angst trigger. Absolutely all of this was known or
easily inferred before this flashback and I have no idea why it’s here. It
added nothing to Abraham’s story, we already knew the heart was a) from a
vampire and b) from someone he loved and we already knew he’d been pursuing the
Master since the second world war (or could easily infer it). This whole,
extremely long, flashback served only as more filler
Aaaargh, develop Augustin’s storyline! Fight some more
vampires! Do something about the vampires. Show us the dystopia the city is
falling into – Do SOMETHING other than flashback, mope and Ephraim arseholery
There's a reason why my The Strain recaps are so short!
Nora did have a big tragic scene for her mother – but I’m
not impressed or moved. Nora has been completely undeveloped except for as one
of the Ephraim’s love interests (along with the equally undeveloped Kelly) who
occasionally dropped anecdotes about Argentina. And her mother wasn’t even developed that much
– it could be interesting to have an elderly, disabled woman as a character,
but she wasn’t a character. She was a burden. She was there to cause angst and
grief and worry for Nora and give her more of a stake (same as Zack does for
Ephraim) and now she’s dead she ratchets up the grief without her getting in
the way. She’s
a narrative tool, not a person.
And this show does not need any more filler. This show is
crawling along and this is another Manatee-in-Molasses episode. It’s not like
there wasn’t action, but for every moment of action there were 3 moments of
flashback, moping or Ephraim being an arsehole.
