As Van Helsing
heads towards its season finale, someone on the writing staff has decided
“let’s really annoy Paul with big shallow hot takes on things that need way
more analysis”
And lo it’s time for
the next episode for this. Now we have Scarlett stranded on an island for some
indeterminate amount of time… long enough for her to do a full Tom Hanks -
Wilson skit. She also shows herself to be not the smartest person around with
her spending a long time making a raft but not checking the island with a
lighthouse for boats
One would expect
boats in such a location
Anbyway she arrives
on shore and manages to catch up with Axel and… ye gods how much time has
passed? What has Vanessa been doing? I mean Axel has travelled from San
Francisco to Denver then to wherever he is now and now Scarlet went from San
Francisco to this island and now wherever Axel is
In the apocalypse.
With apparent hordes of vampires around. In fact, where are these hordes of
vampires? How come travelling is this easy? Even Game of Thrones wasn’t
as fast and loose with distance.
So there’s much
kissing and Axel briefly tries to convince her to move in with him somewhere
and have lots of little ninjas but she insists on going to help Vanessa. Though
Axel adds a little angst to that by asking if Scarlett will be ready to murder
her sister should Vanessa have fallen to the Dark Side of the Force
Road trip time and
along the way they find a pack of day walker vampires which use their new found
intelligence to pull them into a trap. Which would have worked if they weren’t
immortal vampire killers who slaughter them all with ease
Except Axel fires a
shotgun and it misfires and badly burns his face and eyes. Wait, wasn’t Axel
sort of immortal like everyone else? After coming back from being a vampire?
Just like Julius and Phillip? He can be mauled by vampires but this brings him
down?
Badly injured, Scarlett drags him to a random guy who happens to be in the area for help
Said random guy does help despite all her snarling because he’s Super Holy Guy. He is a man of deep and abiding faith who firmly believes in god and everything is god’s will and all you need is prayer - and that includes Axel’s fate when he gets an infection (wait, again immortal guy has an infection? Really?). Holy guy insists on prayer, everything happens for a reason etc. He also walks around the apocalypse with no weapons, he’s a dedicated pacifist who relies on faith to keep him safe.
What a lucky lucky
man. That’s Scarlett’s point of view. But Holy Man invokes faith, telling his
story of miraculously surviving a hurricane. Scarlett is still not a big fan of
this idea because they’re living in apocalypse world and all - which Holy Man
refers to as “god’s discipline”.
Yeaaaahhhhh so
special holy man gets to survive and walk around untouched by vampires, but 90%
of the population of Earth is slaughtered for “discipline”? Yeah, that’s really
really twisted. And part of the utter problem of divine intervention saving you
means there are millions upon millions of other people suffering horrendously
who are somehow unworthy of such intervention. Throw in the idea of god’s
“discipline” causing genocide and I dearly hope a vampire eats the man.
Instead they go
looking for antibiotics (which have a use by date, y’know, so this many years
after the apocalypse may be a bit...ineffective). Along the way Scarlet saves
Holy man’s life (yes he thinks this is divine intervention, of course he does)
and they go to help Axel… except a horde of Walkers appear
Yes, I said Walkers.
Because these vampires act exactly like a Walking Dead horde of zombies and not
remotely like any of the vampires on this show so far. They all walk around
them because Holy man Divine intervention
Uh-huh, Scarlett is actually buying this. Personally I’d be thinking we have another vampire elder here, personally. I mean it makes more sense than random prayer sparing this man and this man only
So they get the pills
back to Axel… but they don’t work. What does work is Scarlett capturing a
vampire and forcing it to bite Axel… which then cures him
Y’know, the immortal
healing stuff has some damn weird rules, it really does.
Axel also tells
Scarlett about his sad dead sister. Whether this adds something I don’t know
In fact can we just
sum up the whole episode like this? I mean “Axel and Scarlett reunite and we
completely screw up the idea of them being immortal” seems like a lot to rest
an entire episode upon. It really does
Oh we also have Phil
and Jolene on their prison bus heading to the prison camp, except the angry
escape attempt by one of their fellow prisoners gets both the guards killed and
the bus crashed - and them free.
Of course they then
have to decide what to do. Jolene wants to go back to find Sarah who she loves,
despite Phillip dropping all kinds of cynicism all over it. He wants to find
his wife so he can apologise since suicide isn’t the way
Jolene assures him he
needs to forgive himself if he wants to be forgiven. Which means we’ve got more
forgiveness being thrown around that is all for the perpetrator but hey, this
is where we are. The conflict is between which way to go - Jolene wants to
return to Sarah in Denver while Phil wants to go find his wife… and they’re
chained together
Except Denver sends
in more guards to bring them home. They strangle one unconscious but Phil
refuses to allow Jolene to kill him. She does use his gun to separate the chain
so they can go their own way
But another guard
appears and despite their begging, despite Phil offering to give himself up,
the guard follows his orders and shoots them since he’s been told to shoot them
on sight. Phil takes the bullets and saves Jolene… before knocking out the
guard. As a wanted fugitive, Jolene agrees to go with Phil to save his wife if
he will help her back to Denver
Ok… but… why send
guards? A bus goes off road in dystopian vampire land I can understand RESCUING
everyone. But if you’re not going to rescue them why hunt them down? They’re
lone humans wandering around dystopian vampire land? Why risk your people’s
lives hunting down people who will likely die anyway?
I feel Van Helsing
is rather losing sight of its own world setting this season
