A now hearty and hale Palmer leads his minion Fitzwillian
to Abraham’s
pawn shop that they took last episode. Fitzwilliam unfailingly says “yes
sir” to every suggestion Palmer has while looking increasingly disturbed. One
question is answered though – Palmer’s ability to touch silver and the way his
image doesn’t vibrate in a mirror shows that he isn’t a vampire.
Palmer doesn’t seem to realise this and he asks Eichorst
when he gets his horrible injecting tongue thing. Palmer was given health, not
immortality. Eichorst also makes the point that there’s a difference between
the random infection they’re inflicting on half the city and the true turning
that Palmer wants (if there was any doubt that Eichorst is a different kind of
vampire). Palmer is not amused by the delay.
Palmer goes on to be creepy by adding Miriam’s heart to
the collection of his own preserved failed organs. Fitzwilliam continues to say
“yes sir” while his face says “ah hell no!”. Palmer also so Ephraim’s broadcast
and now there’s talk about quarantining Manhattan.
And Fitzwilliam tells Palmer no. He can’t defend Palmer any more. He can’t keep making excuses. He can’t be any more complicit (and he accepts his complicity) in this evil. He also finds Palmer’s resurrection unnatural – he leaves, challenging Palmer to manage without him when Palmer mocks the idea that Fitzwilliam can’t manage alone.
Even without Fitzwilliam, Palmer and Eichorst go to see
Secretary Maggie Pearson and Everett, Ephraim’s old boss at the CDC, to try and
convince them not to quarantine Manhattan. She isn’t convinced and isn’t
willing to put her career ahead of the survival of the country and, really,
there’s a limit to how much she is in Palmer’s thrall. So Palmer throws her off
a building.
I’m quite sure that there would be some level of
political consequences for throwing such an important government official off a
building. I’m also pretty sure you can’t just co-opt her power. Is this a
hidden rule of the American government? You kill an official and then get all
the powers of that rank? Some kind of extreme belief in competition?
But apparently so – because Palmer now has the magical power both to make Everett Secretary of Health and, of course, Everett is quite happy to be Palmer’s servant because he just saw him murder someone (rather than summon the secret service the minute Palmer leaves – or before, it’s not like Palmer and Eichorst look that scary).
Our heroes have found a new safe spot (skip over Zack’s
attempted angst dream). Vasiliy, Abraham and Ephraim are plotting (Nora doesn’t
get to plot now? Or Dutch?) and Ephraim has a bit of a tantrum because Abraham
won’t hide and sugar coat things from Zach.
They track down a theatre Bolivar owns and assume the
Master may be there, they check it out through an old speak-easy tunnel. Inside
they find the Master’s destroyed coffin and a pack of vampires. They leave to
get the others, but first Vasiliy removes the sewer manhole covers so more
vampires can’t sneak into the theatre under ground.
They return to Dutch who offers Ephraim (an alcoholic) a
drink… he considers it briefly before pouring it away. He goes to tell the
grieving Nora and adds he daren’t leave Zach alone, because Kelly will be
hunting her loved one. Nora drops more of her history in Argentina into the
discussion and demands Ephraim wake up – there are no safe places, there is no
safety, they can fight or lose. The only way he can have any safety for Zach is
to keep him with him forever.
So they give Zach a silver sword and bring him with them. They head into the tunnel and find the bottleneck Vasiliy created with the open manhole cover – the huge crowd of vampires that are kept at bay by the sunlight which then lets Vasiliy blow them all up
They enter the main theatre and it’s battle time – brief interlude
as Dutch recognises one of the vampires then lots of killing (interlude for
Ephraim thinking he had killed Kelly).
It’s a pretty awesome fight scene with lots of people we recognise – Bolivar, the annoying lawyer, Eichorst. While everyone is battling away, Abraham, Ephraim and Zach make their way up to the top floor to confront the Master. While Abraham decides to dramatically faceoff against him, Ephraim realises it’s a far better idea to break the windows, making the Master cringe back from the sunlight. It provides a necessary distraction because Abraham is way out of his league, is disarmed and knocked across the room like a puppet. As Ephraim confronts him though, the Master runs outside into sunlight
This causes all the vampires downstairs to back off –
literally walking backwards out of the room, as the Master calls them.
Abraham and Ephraim prepare to slice up the writing Master, but he jumps off the roof, manages to crawls away and escape. Sunlight can hurt the Master but it seems it needs a lot to actually kill him
Everyone gathers to repeat the obvious – sunlight is not
a Master killer. Abraham despairs.
They head back to Vasiliy’s, dropping off at Ephraim’s on
the way to get Zach’s asthma medication (a ploy from Zach so he can grab a
picture of his mother. Suddenly Abraham’s advice not to sugar coat seems like
very good advice indeed). Zach and Ephraim leave everyone waiting outside and
hang around the building where Kelly can find them so they can reminisce.
Kelly vampire appears. Ephraim fires at her and she
calmly leaves. Ephraim has a drink, while Nora tries to stop him.
As they drive away, Abraham has a voice over and we see several fires have started
Meanwhile the vampire hunters who hunt vampires have
dragged Ausgustin far underground. He tries to attack the vampire several times
with his bare hands and gets knocked down easily each time. He runs and ends up
in a creepy huge room with pools of blood on the floor. On three pedestals are
3 naked vampires that the Hunter makes clear are very very important – the Ancients,
though they largely speak through Hunter vampire since the ancients are
insensible and “dreaming”. Hunter vamp tells him a truce has been broken and
they need a human to act during daylight to massacre “the unclean” (hunter
vampire seemed like he was doing ok so far).
That was a decent episode. A nice amount of action and activity.
Everyone getting involved and fighting and doing something to end the big
threat. It was probably one of the better episodes of the season
Even though the action was good, even that was based on
some dubious elements. Why has the Master moved upstairs rather than staying
underground? Why did Abraham & co, after failing the last time they
launched a frontal assault on the Master, basically default to yet another
frontal Assault on the Master? There was no plan – it’s find him and attack
despite repeatedly being shown that they aren’t actually a match for him? Three
times now Abraham has confronted Eichorst and the Master with his sword and
three times they have rather contemptuously batted him aside like a slightly
vexing gnat.
But my main problem was that it was the season finale and
absolutely nothing has changed since the last episode (or the last 5 episodes).
Our grand cliffhanger is that the Master apparently packs SPF200 – no-one even
died! The one interesting element was Augustin and the Ancient vampires and
that was tucked in at the end as some pretence at plot. This wasn’t a finale.
And that’s the problem with the whole show – it has been so wretchedly SLOW.
Week after week with virtually nothing happening – my recaps are actually
really shirt because very little actually happens. They rarely fight or hunt vampires,
they spend a lot of time bickering, there’s a lot of attempts to try and dredge
up some emotional content that just kind of fails to bring anything impactful.
Augustin still hasn’t joined the main group and only recently has his storyline
become relevant. Week after week the gang gathers and argues and achieves
nothing, barely inching towards any kind of goal. It’s not even a desperate
fight for survival because most of the time they could achieve this by hiding
in a basement. The vampires aren’t actively hunting the main gang and the main
gang aren’t going a whole lot to hunt the vampires.
To be fair, I have to say this is directly lifted fromthe book – in fact, it’s probably much faster paced than the book. Yes, the
book is that slow.
While we do have an excellent and rare portrayal of an
active elderly man with Abraham, we equally have Eichorst – the disabled
elderly man willing to literally destroy the world for a cure – and Mirela –
Nora’s mother with Alzheimers who exists to be an immense burden on everyone
else. Other women on the show aren’t great either – Kelly and Nora are pretty
lacking in characterisation or active involvement in the plot, and are there
for Ephraim’s angst more than anything. Dutch is the least appearing of the
main cast – she’s also the show’s only LGBT character – with a past
relationship with a woman, though in the show we only see her flirting with
Vasiliy.
POC have also largely being relegated to side roles –
Nora and her mother have been the only ones in the main group. We have had a
lot of Latino people – and other POC - with Augustin – but they have been with
Augustin which has always been the B plot (or sometimes the D plot) compared to
the rest of the characters; and we’re talking a lot of gang members (with
immigration worries no less), even if they have been heavily humanised. Other
random vampire plot lines have brought us POC servants and Bolivar’s Black
manager – there’s a fair few characters there, but none of them are in major
roles or around for more than 2 or 3 episodes. They’re ancillary to ancillary
characters.
One element that almost interests me is Ephraim. I can’t
stand this character – but he’s also very much a clone of so many characters
especially in dystopians: the straight, white man who leads them all, who knows
best, who dishes out orders and is more than a bit of an arsehole (he reminded
me so strongly of Alan Faragut from Helix). It’s
a cliché. But what is interesting this time is Ephraim is inept. He’s clearly
surrounded by people (well, admittedly other cis straight white men, so don’t
expect it to be that much of a subversion) who are better than him. His
arseholery is shown as just that – Ephraim is unpleasant. It’s not because he’s
tough and forthright, it’s because he’s having a tantrum. For once I feel like
I’m not expected to sign off on or even cheer on this behaviour, but I don’t
like him and the writers EXPECT me not to like him. It’s the first time I’ve
hated a protagonist and I think the show actually expected me to.
So, this has been renewed for a second season – if so it
needs to pick up the pacing. Or watched on fastforward
