We've never discussed this show? It seems up our alley.
It ends Sunday (9/17/17), so it's a little late to get into it. But it's based on books written by Guillermo del Toro, the guy who directed Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth and is well thought of in geek circles.
And it's a pretty clever take on vampires, a medical one instead of a supernatural one. In Toro's version, vampirism is actually caused by a parasite, little white worms that infect the host and turn them into eating/breeding machines. All functions unrelated to breeding, eating and eliminating end, all organs related to unnecessary functions slough off, or transform into a singular digestive tract that begins with a "stinger" -- a long, muscular, tongue-like organ that extends from the mouth to suck blood from victims, that also passes on the worms to infect the victim -- and consumes and uses blood, and expels waste, primarily (for some reason) ammonia. Victims become hairless, genital-less, photosensitive and reduced to animal behavior -- except that the worms combine to form a hive mind, controlled from a central vampire who calls himself The Master. (I could have done with a more imaginative, and less B-Movie villain, name). He can guide the hive, and even see and listen through individual vampires (called "strigoi" in the show, which is the Romanian word for vampires).
By the end of the second season, the strigoi have won, and rule the world.
This is a great premise, but my complaint about the show is that it didn't make good use of it. Our central band of fearless vampire-killers do all kinds of really stupid things ("Hey, a dark hole where vampires might live! Let's crawl into it for badly defined reasons!"), and to be honest, should not have survived as long as they have.
Worse, the show had a habit of useless digressions. Even in this, the final season, the plots are sort of meandering. Instead of a sense of urgency, nobody seems to be in a hurry. Get on with it, will you?
They are, after a fashion. Two major characters were killed off last week, this week the scales fell from the eyes of Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (another dumb name, but played by Corey Stoll of Ant-Man fame) over his loathsome son, and there is, finally, a genuine chance of victory. (But the characters still do really dumb things.)
Comments, anyone who's been watching?
Replies
We watched the first season, but it didn't grab us enough to come back for the second. The meandering plots did us in. The only character we really liked was the old vampire hunter who'd survived the concentration camps. I hope he's still around.
This is what happens during Peak TV. This is a show I would have absolutely adored 10-15 years ago, but there's just so many shows to watch now that anything that doesn't fire on all cylinders all the time can get pushed aside.
I've been watching from the beginning but I'm a few episodes behind this season. I agree with pretty much everything you said Cap. Good basic concept that could have been a vampire version of the Walking Dead but instead has become aimless like Revolution. They don't seem to be able to decide what kind of show it is from one season to the next.
The most interesting thing about the show, to me, has been the team of Vampire hunters but they hardly ever actually operated as a team. And Zack is truly loathsome in every way possible. I almost want to switch channels whenever he appears.
I don't mean to sound completely negative. I've liked it enough to keep watching. I'd like to see a strong finish where our heroes achieve some measure of victory since they've basically been losing at every turn since the show started.
The actor who plays old vampire hunter Abraham Setrakian is David Bradley, who also played Walder Frey in Game of Thrones. He had something to do with Doctor Who as well. And if you watch Broadchurch, he was in the first season of that.
The guy who plays Vasilly Fet also appeared in Vikings as a traveler that some mistook for a god.
It is an imaginative concept, but executed less than well. We watched the first season and I think half of the second. My wife didn't like it at all. I had hopes for it but it was so repetitive. I liked special effects just fine but I want good stories to go with it. Heroes constantly doing things that had been proven to be bad ideas gets a little old also.
Well, The Strain ended with a bang and a whimper. The bang was a nuke to kill the bad guy. The whimper was a voiceover happy ending I could have lived without.
Beware, here there be Spoilers.
Now that the ending has arrived, I can adjudge the story as a whole and I'm pretty disappointed overall. Here were some of the things that occurred to me as the credits were rolling:
* After all that business with The Lumen, the good guys didn't even need it. Honest, it doesn't take a 2,000-year-old book to tell you to blow up the bad guy with a nuke.
* Zach's redemption wasn't plausible, but you could see it coming from a mile off.
* Ditto Ephraim's sacrifice. Who DIDN'T guess he was going to take Fet's place? My question leading up to it was how he'd learn to set off the nuclear bomb. Turns out you push a button. Really? It's that easy to set off a nuclear bomb? Bah.
* We did not need a V/O by Fet telling us all would be well, coupled with the implausible re-uniting with Dutch. Seriously, those two had zero chemistry and given their breakup, about minus ten chance of getting back to together. Didn't need it, didn't want, don't believe it. How about ending the show by having the heroes turn toward the hordes of now-leaderless Strigoi and Fet saying, "Looks like we've still got some work to do."
* Why did The Master stay in Manhattan once it was clear the bomb had been brought there? He could lead his worldwide empire just as easily from, say, New Jersey.
* The good guys had a bomb that could conveniently be set for very few megatons or a lot. Why not just set it for "a lot" and skedaddle? Sure there would be collateral damage, but we're talking about the future of the human race. And most humans in New York were collaborators anyway.
* Quinlan sure was ineffective against The Master, wasn't he? Makes you wonder why The Master didn't take him off the board years ago. And after all that build-up to the big confrontation, too.
* That water project sure was convenient, wasn't it? You know, a huge concrete bunker miles underground just perfect for setting off a nuke without any collateral damage. Almost like it was planned that way.
* How come Fet didn't remember the convenient bomb room until the final episode? They've been driving the nuke around for weeks, trying to catch The Master with it, and hiding it in various unsafe locations.
* Once The Master took over Goodweather, he should have instantly been aware of the danger of the nuke, and not let Zach get anywhere near it.
I may be nitpicking because of my disappointment, but I don't think so. These are all the results of bad writing. It doesn't take a genius to see the flaws in the story and to fix them -- editors do that every day. But The Strain trotted out one weak effort after another.
Which is a shame. It had an excellent premise, decent actors and great special effects. This could have been a classic. Instead, the writers let everyone down with plot holes you could drive a truck through. (One carrying a nuke, of course, looking for a convenient bomb room.)
For me, the most entertaining part of this series when we were DVRing it was that it appeared right under The Soup alphabetically. With The Strain under The Soup, I expected the next series to be Just the Broth.
And as for this:
* Why did The Master stay in Manhattan once it was clear the bomb had been brought there? He could lead his worldwide empire just as easily from, say, New Jersey.
Have you ever tried to get a New Yorker to come over to Jersey? It's like you're asking them to go to Mars.
Finally had a chance to binge the last few episodes and I'm pretty much on the same page with everything you posted above Cap. The final episode was extremely forced. I kept feeling like the show was canceled before the writers were prepared to wrap it up so they just quickly threw together a resolution without thinking it through. The Master, who has been clever enough to survive for centuries, suddenly makes one idiotic move after another to the point where he's almost doing himself in? That's not a very satisfying victory. And to have Zach deliver the final blow just added insult to injury. The twist at the end? As soon as Fet started to explain the plan to kill the Master in excruciating detail I knew that there was no chance that it would go down that way.
On the other hand, I'm glad that they at least attempted to wrap up the series without leaving too many threads dangling. Even if we did have to put up with the corny voice over. At least I felt some sense of closure. I would have liked to see Alex survive though. She had quickly become one of my favorites and her death didn't really seem to serve any dramatic purpose.