This episode begins with the opening spiel that really
should have happened about a season ago – Abraham describing how the Strigoi
were now taking over many cities across the world, countries after county
desperately struggling (and also Africa. Which. Is. Not. A. Country.). Now we
finally have a reason to see this as a global threat rather than a problem
confined to just one city
It would also have helped to actually have seen some of
the power apparently being thrown uselessly at the vampires.
Vasiliy is continuing the fight against the Strigoi –
actually putting tracking devices on vampires to try and track their lairs and
see they are continuing to invade the safe zone. Because the vampires are still
attacking places Christine thought were safe and she’s getting increasingly
frustrated and desperate.
The vampires are digging tunnels which shows a disturbing
level of intelligence – and under Central Park there is a huge nest of
literally thousands of vampires – Christine decides they have to target this
nest. That will definitely go wrong. So very very wrong
What may help is Dutch and Ephraim who are now happily
experimenting on strigoi, capturing them, taking them back to the lab and then dissecting
them, torturing them and experimenting on them. The way this is depicted is
interesting – because Dutch and Ephraim are clearly desensitised (and even
damaged, and possibly drunk) to the brutality of what they’ve done. But the
brutality is still clear – they even talk about their experiments as torture. The
starkness does a lot to show these characters
They do discover ways to try and cut off the
communication between the strigoi – which also reduces the vampires to mindless
animals which would give them a huge advantage, especially now vampires are showing
more and more intelligence. Including the aforementioned tunnelling – and a
captured vampire able to pick locks
What the experiments do show is that vampires are very
adaptive. Ephraim’s plague is now, in the words of Dutch “not as bad as herpes”
and even their solution to vampire communication is quickly overcome.
I’m going to scrape up a positive here in a way that
feels terrible but is an indictment of the media that it is noteworthy – both Ephraim
and Dutch mention, in passing, that Dutch is attracted to women. It isn’t – or
shouldn’t – be notable that a bisexual character exists but the media does have
a long history of portraying LGBTQ characters in general and bisexuals in general
with a brief, one line reference, which is never ever mentioned again.
Meanwhile Quinlan and Abraham have kind of made their
peace and continue to read the Lumen – with Abraham hitting on the fact that
the Lumen was designed to be safe from vampires (hence the silver cover) –
which includes invisible writing that can only be read in sunlight. A nice
touch.
The book reveals that the Ancient Egyptians once “destroyed”
one of the Ancients by encasing him in a box of lead and silver, a sarcophagus
he can’t possible communicate or use his power, locking him up forever. Abe
also has a flashback where he sliced off the legs and arms of a strigoi and sealing
him in a box which, apparently, kind of sort of is relevant.
Personally I want to know how, if you can get a vampire
to stay put in a big box, why can you not also stab him with lots of silver? Or
open said box at high noon in the middle of a featureless stone plain?
Anyway, Abe and Quinlan thinks this would be a great plan
to bring down the Master since it kind of stops the crimson worm escaping. I
would quite like to know why, given what has happened so far, they think they
can ever imprison the Master. Though it does give Abe a reason to ally with
Eldritch – for the sake of finding out where the Master is. In exchange for a
dose of the White
Eldritch accepts- because he is that desperate, his
health is failing and Eichorst is repeatedly sidelining him and has even taken
another apparently human minion – Sanjay Desai. Now I do query why a Nazi, a
literal Nazi, has chosen a Man of Colour as his respected minion.
A brief return to some flashbacks we have about Abe
killing another nazi vampire. Part of me thinks this is a little unnecessary.
Do we know Abe is ruthless, driven, obsessed and without limits? We know this –
we saw this repeatedly last 2 seasons. Do we see that Quinlan’s assertion that
hunters are nearly unhinged loners is true – well, yes but did we not already
know this? I think the main element it brought was showing Abe not just killing
vampires, but torturing them brutally, sadistically and without purpose. This
showed Abe at his lowest, this sharply stands next to Dutch and Ephraim’s
experimentation – it shows how much this fight can scar them. For that, it is powerful.
