"The Strain" Review and Recap: Episode Three "Gone Smooth"

The most recent episode of "The Strain" was on Sunday. I had a lot going on Monday, so this review and recap is a little bit late...

The episode begins with a mysterious figure getting dressed. We see a being that looks remarkably like Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies applying makeup, fake ears, etc. until we have the Eichhorst we all know and loathe. See this here for a comparison. He says the time for charades is over soon and victory is near. We'll see about that, you glorified tick. :)

Meanwhile, while Eph and Nora's CDC boss is being less than helpful as usual, survivor Ansel (the nerdy-looking one who I thought was a bit creepy) is at home with the wife and kids and getting sicker. Bloodshot eyes, ringing in the ears. He won't go to the doctor. And Jim Kent disappears from the CDC to get answers at the Stoneheart Group HQ. There he encounters Eichhorst and is brought back into line when the Nazi vampire offers to ensure his cancer-stricken wife Sylvia is admitted to a drug trial. "You have two bosses now," he warns. Uh oh.

And Sertrakian goes before a judge who cannot pronounce his name properly. Nora, who earlier told Eph Sertrakian knew things, comes in to watch the proceeding. Sertrakian plays the Holocaust-survivor card and the bereaved-widower card. The judge calls him out on the silver sword-cane, which he claims is an illegal concealed weapon. Sertrakian BSes him by promising to have it melted down and replaced with a normal cane. The judge lets him off. Nora tries to speak to him afterward, but when she balks at the idea of killing anyone who has been in contact with the dead passengers and survivors of the plane, he blows her off. Tsk, tsk.

Meanwhile, Eph is at a family court hearing. The judge asks Zach what sort of custodial arrangement he'd like. After himming and hawwing about how he knows his parents want what's best for him, he said he'd rather Eph visit him a few weekends a month. This way, he's not stressed out on top of his stressful job like joint custody would supposedly do. Eph is upset and tries to say that Zach really meant "joint custody" and the judge shoots him down. After the hearing, Eph is really upset. Kelly (his wife) tells him that regardless of what the judge rules, he can visit Zach any time he wants if he just gives her the heads-up first. When Eph insists Zach is the most important thing in his world, Kelly says he should show that with "little things" rather than just saying it. Although there's this stereotype of vindictive ex-wives trying to excise fathers from their children's lives, Kelly is coming off as far more sympathetic and reasonable than the grouchy Eph. Many bloggers have complained about this bit of family drama, but it was actually helpful in humanizing Kelly and painting Eph with some major shades of gray.

Cut to Gabriel Bolivar (who I kept referring to in my notes as "Marilyn Manson"). He's sick. Meanwhile, Eph visits the Frenchman's house and finds a tub full of blood and hair. Something is stalking him. Nora calls him away and we see a vampiric form (probably the daughter) watching him.

Meanwhile, Vasily Fet is making a house call on some influential yuppie whose daughter was bitten by a rat. He catches the rat and exhorts the daughter not to eat in bed (since rats are attracted by the smell of food). While smoking outside the yuppie's building, he sees many rats on the streets. He follows to find them swarming out of a pipe. Something's down there...

Next we see Jim coming home and meeting his wife Sylvia, who's bald from chemotherapy and wearing a head-scarf. She got into the trial. The devil is holding up his end of the bargain so far. Back at the nerdy survivor's house, he's still sick and now his dog is barking at him. He goes into the kitchen and sees a thawing steak--and drinks the blood from it. In front of his horrified wife. Uh oh. And I'm not the only one who noticed something unusual about his tongue...

Bolivar is having a house call from a doctor. He describes ringing in his ears and a voice calling his name. The doctor offers him various prescriptions. Then Bolivar gets up and opens his robe. We don't see what the doctor sees, but said doctor immediately advises him to go to the hospital. Bolivar doesn't want the paparazzi troubles, so the doctor instead offers to get him in touch with a "discreet" urologist who makes house calls.

Back at the pawn shop, Sertrakian hangs up the cane he'd promised to destroy and gets the passenger manifest for the airplane from this hacker girl. He's going to "visit their families" and "pay his respects." Uh oh.

And back at the hospital, Captain Redfern really isn't doing well. Under UV light, his body is alive with the worms. He announces, "He is here."

Back at Eph's former home, Zach is reading about his father's CDC exploits on an iPad. He hears a noise downstairs. It's Kelly, reading through a photo album from happier times. Much sadness and cuddling.

Late at night at Regis Air's headquarters, Eichhorst pays the CEO a visit and kills him, making it look like a suicide. It looks like the "it was carbon monoxide poisoning" charade is going to go on for a little while longer.

And Bolivar isn't looking too good. His eyes are bleeding and even without his Goth makeup, he's looking pale and veiny. Then he goes to urinate and his member falls off. He flushes it down the toilet without a care and then does that creepy eye-blink thing the fully-infected do. And then he turns around and we see full frontal no-genitalia vampire. According to an interview from Del Toro, under that robe he's developed a full-blown cloaca to excrete as he feeds like a tick, so certain parts are rather superfluous now.

The episode ends with Redfern disappearing from the hospital just before they're going to open him up to see what's going on with him. Jim finds him in the basement feeding on blood samples. Redfern attacks him, but the Voice of Evil recognizes him as "Jim" and Redfern backs down. Nora and Eph arrive and Redfern attacks them, revealing the mouth stinger for the first time. Eph beats him down with a fire extinguisher but he gets up to try again--until Eph proceeds to totally destroy his head with the fire extinguisher in the same way the Master did with the man he killed at the airport.

The Verdict: Good episode. Awaiting the next one.

"The Strain" Recap and Review: "The Box"

Just got done watching the second episode of FX's vampire series "The Strain." It's called "The Box" and, surprise surprise, has to do with the big scary box found aboard the aircraft in the first episode.

The episode starts off with Eph, Nora, and Jim checking out the body of the man the Master killed soon after his arrival in New York City. Jim isn't taking seeing a corpse with its head mashed in very well. Our heroes soon find out that the four survivors have been released from quarantine. Eph and Nora keep them from leaving, but lawyer Joan soon has the secretary of health and human services on the phone. Apparently it was carbon monoxide that caused the incident on the plane and it's no longer the Centers for Disease Control's concern. Eph and Nora protest (Eph a bit too much so, grabbing his supervisor by the lapels) and get an involuntary vacation.

We next meet Vasily Fet, a zealous exterminator who praises his cat for bringing him a rat and then shuts down the fancy restaurant where Joan and Marilyn Manson clone Gabriel Bolivar (another survivor released from quarantine) are plotting to sue the airline after discovering a rat in the kitchen. Joan's eyes aren't looking good and she sees blood in her wine glass, so she decides to go home to her husband and kids. Meanwhile, Thomas Eichhorst--studiously staying out of the sunlight--confers with sickly billionaire Eldritch Palmer and then leaves to see "an old friend."

Meanwhile, Gus drops off the coffin in the warehouse like he's supposed to, but nobody is there to get it. It starts to rattle and he does the smart thing--he takes off and runs. Back home to his mother and brother Crispin, who was one of the thugs who tried to rob Sertrakian's pawn shop. He plays nice until Mom leaves for Mass, then beats the hell out of his brother for bringing stolen property home (a clock he and his thug friend stole after Sertrakian took said friend's gun). Crispin berates him for their mother crying every night while he was in prison and asks him how long until he goes back. Gus, meanwhile, wants to return the clock to Sertrakian, which seems to me to be setting up their eventual meeting.

Meanwhile (I really need to stop saying this), Abraham Sertrakian has a visitor in jail--Eichhorst. How he managed to get there without the sunlight doing a number on him is beyond me. He repeatedly refers to Sertrakian by the concentration-camp tattoo on his arm and claims that he's taken Sertrakian's name away from him. He ghoulishly promises that Sertrakian will remain alive to see the world fall and that the Master will be the last thing he sees, all while gloating about the previous owner of the worm-infested heart Sertrakian keeps in his home. Sertrakian asks him why an old friend of his isn't there to share in his glory and then answers his own question by telling him said friend was cut into pieces and is now at the bottom of the North Sea. Eichhorst will be joining him soon.

Even though they're not supposed to be involved in the case anymore, Eph and Nora are examining one of the vampiric worms taken from the airport. They end up seeking out Captain Redfern (the pilot of the plane), who when they tell him something from the cargo is missing immediately guesses it's the box. The box was loaded onto the plane at the last minute by official-looking people he didn't dare question. Redfern isn't feeling well and Eph persuades him to check into the hospital and see a particular doctor. There, his condition takes a turn for the worse, with Eph disbelieving the changes his illness is making to his body until under ultraviolent light he sees the worms under the captain's skin. Uh oh...

Bolivar, claiming the need to get his "pipes cleaned," has an orgy with three groupies. Or he tries at least--one of them pulls out some of his hair and then he bites down on them. It's not a love bite. He orders the three out and then starts licking up the blood, first from his mouth and then from the floor. Uh oh...

The episode is slow and one reason for it being slow is Eph's personal life. He visits his house to find his estranged wife's boyfriend and his son Zach turning his former office into a game room. Eph and Matt are surprisingly civil to one another and Matt even hugs Eph in a surprisingly odd and awkward moment. Eph then goes to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where he confesses to having been sober for just over a year and managing to overcome the temptation to drink after visiting his house where his wife is sleeping with another man. From what I know of the books Eph's familial situation is a major driver of things, but seeing it kind of dragged.

And Palmer finally meets the Master. We don't see too terribly much of the vampire overlord beyond his bald white head and his clawed hands, but we do hear him speak. He's rather difficult to understand, which is unfortunate. He's got a deep evil voice (of course), but his words all bleed together.

On the way to the morgue after visiting Captain Redfern, Eph gets a call from the French father whose supposedly-dead daughter returned at the end of the last episode. The father thanks Eph for sending his daughter home, much to Eph's surprise given how the girl was dead. He and Nora go to the morgue to investigate while we see firsthhand just why the daughter has returned--she's now a vampire and when her father tries to retrieve her from her bath for dinner, he gets drained. Soon after, Eph and Nora arrive at the morgue to find it a mess and all the bodies gone. Uh oh...

The verdict: It continues the storyline, but unlike the first episode it's really rather slow. Let's hope the next one is better.

More Thoughts on "The Strain" (SPOILERS)

Now that I've had some time to think (and sleep), here are some more ponderings about last night's premiere of The Strain.

I've only read the first 100 pages or so from the book version,but the part that was the most gripping is the story Abraham Sertrakian's elderly grandmother tells him about a giant who came to Romania. The giant--a young Polish nobleman named Josef Sardu, who suffered from gigantism--is hunting wolf with his father, who has the notion that eating this will cure his son of his sickness. The animals they seek have been displaced from their lairs by something, a something that hunts and kills the other members of the party. Josef, the sole survivor, buries them and goes into the cave to confront what he thinks is something unnatural watching him.

(You can see this part of the story in comic-book form here.)

The premiere episode of the television adaptation is great as it is, but it would have been nice to have that as a prologue just like in the book. Sardu's story could be shown in flashback form much like the comics--both the boy's flashback to his grandmother telling the story and his grandmother's flashback to the events of her childhood and what she imagined preceded them. Then the prologue could end just like the book--Sertrakian and his family are living in territory under Nazi control and have to flee those who would exterminate them just like his grandmother had to flee the monstrosity the once-kindly Josef Sardu became. It would tie in Sertrakian's back-story with the hints we've received thus far about Eichhorst as well.

However, now that I've had some time to think about it, it would be an either-or choice between that prologue and the prologue aboard the aircraft involving the flight attendants. In that respect, the flight attendant scene works better because it introduces Gabriel Bolivar and the little French girl--who will introduce the "dear ones" aspect of the story--and provides the first appearance of the villainous Master in his modern form. One major task of a writer is to "kill your darlings" and I'm sure that story can be told later--perhaps as a nightmare Sertrakian has, or a story he's telling to someone else.

"The Strain" Review and Recap: "Night Zero"

Back when I was a weekly newspaper editor, I visited the library to cover a story and found an interesting-looking paperback called The Strain. I read the first 100 or so pages before more pressing duties called, but I always remembered the book. Now it's been adapted into a television show and going forward, I'm going to recap the episodes for you.

So here goes...

"The Strain" Season One, Episode One: "Night Zero."

The episode begins a narrator discussing hunger and thirst before we see a flight attendant making her rounds as the plane comes in for a landing. I like her--she puts the obnoxious Marilyn Manson-esque shock rocker Gabriel Bolivar in his place and deals compassionately with a young girl traveling alone. Then another flight attendant reports something moving in the cargo area. She goes to investigate and something bursts out of the hold. Soon after the control tower finds the plane dead and uncommunicative on the runway--"like a dead animal." Nice and ominous.

Cut to CDC scientist Ephraim Goodweather, who's undergoing custody counseling with his estranged wife. He self-sabotages a fair bit in the meeting. His wife Kelly comes off as more sympathetic given how Eph is never around. Eph offers to quit his job to save their marriage, but she thinks it's too late for that. She's taken up with a new fellow named Matt, whom Eph had unknowingly met sometime earlier (and exchanges cross words with later on the way out). He arrives at the airport and after some of the other public-safety people try to warn him off, he makes an excellent speech about the nature of a virus that, knowing what I know about The Strain's macro-plot, has got some major foreshadowing going on.

At the twenty minute mark we meet Dr. Abraham Sertrakian, an elderly pawnbroker. Two thugs try to sell him an obviously stolen watch and then try to steal money from him when he's not looking. He deals with them masterfully in a scene that was fun to watch. Upon seeing the news about the dead airplane, he descends into living quarters under his shop where he has an old heart in a jar. He opens the lid and cuts open his finger to drip blood into it--and a bunch of worms emerge from the heart to feed on the blood. This is an awesome introduction.

Thirty minutes into the episode we see Goodweather and Nora Martinez, another CDC scientist, suiting up to enter the plane. Here we learn that Goodweather had been unfaithful with her, but had never revealed it to his wife since she filed for divorce first. They board the plane to find everybody dead--well, almost everybody. If you want a jump scene, the revelation that not everybody on board is dead--including a young man who'd been creepily watching the flight attendants in the prologue--provides this.

Meanwhile, a tall skinny man whose eyes do some creepy stuff I can't quite describe is coming to meet with sickly billionaire Eldritch Palmer--now that's a scary name there--at the office of the Stoneheart Group. The man--named Eichhorst and obviously German--reveals that the ball is rolling to Palmer and jut before the forty-five minute mark, he drops this lovely bomb. "I miss breathing sometimes."

Back at the New York airport, 48 minutes in, the survivors of the airplane are being quarantined and a huge box carved with images of death is discovered in the cargo. It wasn't on the manifest. Somebody isn't very subtle, now are they? Our intrepid CDC investigators, who went into the plane in full biohazard gear, open the box in the street clothes. We're getting into Darwin Award territory with that one. It's full of dirt.

Native soil? Uh oh. There's a latch on the inside of the coffin too.

And at fifty minutes in, things get real. One of the lead airport personnel starts hearing voices in his head. He wanders off into another room where he finds pools of blood on the floor and something big feeding on something on the ground. When he gets close, it rises to its feet--it's taller than him, tall enough to fit in that box--and rams a proboscis into his throat. The proboscis is full of worms and we see them getting into the man's bloodstream through it. Once it feeds on him, it smashes his head to mush before retreating.

Meanwhile, we see Eichhorst conferring with some thugs, including the two who'd tried to rob Sertrakian. He orders Augustin "Gus" Elizalde to bring something out of the airport, something that has to be over the river before daybreak. He offers to fix Gus's mother's immigration status and his brother's criminal record and Gus, with much profanity and threats, agrees.

Next we see Sertrakian on the move. He infiltrates the airport--now crowded with Bolivar fans--and manages to get to Jim Kent, Eph's assistant, by faking heart trouble. Meanwhile, an unprepared Eph--his boss Everett Barnes let him think he was speaking to the passengers' families only--reveals that most of the people on the plane are dead and there are only a few survivors. One of the passengers, the father of the little girl from the prologue, is upset and slaps him.

At around an hour and eight minutes it, we see the bodies taken from the plane being dissected. They all have incisions on their necks and when they're cut open, their blood is white and foaming. Sertrakian finally encounters Eph and demands the coffin be destroyed along with the bodies of the dead and the survivors. If the coffin is still there they have a chance. Nora is interested--Sertrakian knows a lot more than he should--but Eph isn't. Sertrakian gets arrested.

At an hour and sixteen minutes we meet the worms again. They're in some soil that had come from the coffin. Eph and Nora realize that the worms are the vector for what's killed the passengers and the coffin is full of them. Security cameras reveal the coffin has been stolen--and slowing the footage down reveals it's our huge cloaked friend who's done it. Eph orders trucks, vans, anything big enough to get the coffin out of the airport be prevented from leaving. Meanwhile, Gus leaves the airport with the box. He's stopped by police, whose dogs freak out upon smelling the truck, but upon recognizes the Stoneheart insignia Gus carries, tells Gus to tell them he's through with them before letting Gus and the coffin out of the airport.

Back in the morgue, our friend the medical examiner has opened up the bodies and found they're looking rather different inside. He initially refers to them in the recording as abnormal growths, but amends his statement to call them, "New, fully functional organs." Some movement in the morgue alerts him and he finds a heart he'd removed beating in a metal box. He picks it up, only for worms to erupt from the heart and get onto his hands. One burrows into his flesh and he manages to pull it out with a metal tool--only to be set upon by the reanimated passengers from the plane, who now have proboscises of their own. He's made lunch as "Sweet Caroline" plays in the background.

At an hour and a half in, we see Sertrakian being dropped off in the holding tank at the jail. A man who's clearly been in a fight asks him if he's a librarian--I laughed--and upon seeing his Holocaust tattoo, asks what the "ink" means.  Soon afterward, back at the Stoneheart headquarters, Eichhorst is informed that an old man with a sword was arrested at the airport. He refers to Sertrakian as "the Jew" and expresses surprise he's still doing what he's doing. He then makes some comment about how New York will be purified and Palmer summons his aide to go on a walk with him. A sentimental old man, he wants to go for one last walk around the city before "the fall."

Meanwhile, Gus talks with his mother on the phone as he brings the coffin across the river in his truck. He talks to the coffin and tells it that whatever it is, it's brought him good luck.

The episode ends with Sertrakian--the narrator from the beginning--talking about the nature of love as the father who had freaked out about the possible death of his daughter returns home. He soon discovers his daughter is there and rushes to embrace her. She returns his hug, but we see that her eyes do the same creepy thing Eichorst's do.

Uh oh...

Overall, a well-done first episode to what will hopefully be an excellent series. 8 out of 10.