Trash TV: The Strain Season One
I’ve talked before about my car crash-related brain woes and the many fun and exciting ways it's affected my life. There are a lot of things I can’t do at all anymore, and other things I can only do sometimes. It impacts me in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. For example, all spelling and grammar mistakes and factual errors on this blog are actually entirely due to my neurological condition.
...But in addition to that, I now find it hard to watch TV shows. Keeping track of events within a single episode makes my brain tired, to say nothing of following an ongoing storyline between episodes. That’s why, when I do feel like I want to kick back with a big ol’ glass of water and binge-watch something, it’s usually Trash TV.
Case in point: The Strain.
Based on a trilogy of novels written by Guillermo Del Toro and and Chuck Hogan (in other words written by Chuck Hogan) and running for four seasons on FX, it’s an extremely silly and objectively very stupid show that appears to have been created by throwing fifteen different ideas together with no consideration for whether they make any sense. Thus, the series is simultaneously a medical mystery, a zombie apocalypse story and a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque urban fantasy romp where the bad guys hire a single hacker to paralyze the entire internet and all of New York’s phone systems. Well over halfway into the season a squad of vampire ninjas wielding sci-fi guns that fire silver stakes show up, with absolutely zero narrative or tonal build-up.
There’s a villain named Eldritch Palmer. That’s not some sort of weird nickname. That’s his real name. His parents had the family name “Palmer” and decided to give their son the reverse of the name of a character from a Phillip K Dick novel.
By the way, this isn’t a negative review. The Strain is one of the hokiest shows I’ve ever watched, and I thoroughly enjoyed almost every second of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What’s this thing about?
It starts off with an idea that’s honestly more interesting than anything that comes afterwards: a fully-loaded Boeing 747 touches down on the tarmac of JFK airport and immediately goes dark. The engines switch off, there’s no radio contact, all of the window blinds are down. Fearing some sort of biological or chemical attack, authorities summon Ephraim “Eph” Goodweather, head of an elite CDC unit and alcoholic Divorce Dad, to the scene. Once on the plane, Eph and his colleagues discover all but four of the passengers dead from unknown causes, and the survivors soon begin manifesting alarming physical and psychological. Maybe it has something to do with the elaborately-carved casket full of soil in the plane’s hold?
Meanwhile, an elderly vampire hunter named Abraham Satrakian recognizes what Eph and the government don’t: the downed plane heralds the return of the Master, an ancient vampire who Satrakian has fought unsuccessfully before. The Master has forged an alliance with a dying super-billionare (the above-mentioned Eldritch Palmer) to spread the vampiric curse to all of New York, and then the rest of the world; and with the civil authorities either unaware of the problem or ensnared by Palmer’s deception, it’s up to Eph, Satrakian and a band of unlikely misfits to get their Van Helsing on and defeat the Master.
When it comes to vampire fiction, there are a lot of different kinds (or “strains”, if you will) of vampires to choose from, ranging from your standard Draculas to your Edward Cullens and everything in between. The Strain takes a similar “fuck it” approach to its vampires as it does to everything else, so that we get multiple different vamp varieties drawing from multiple sources of inspiration. The most common vampires are Nosferatu-looking creatures that functionally behave much more like zombies than vampires; your now-standard suave, intelligent vampire that can blend into human society seems to be far rarer (there’s only one in the whole season), and then you’ve got the Master, who cranks the supernatural fantasy vampire trope all the way to eleven.
The Strain does add a few original wrinkles to all of this, mostly in how the vampires feed: instead of just biting their victims, they shoot out a proboscis-like “stinger” that clamps onto their prey’s neck. As well as looking pretty gnarly, this makes the vampires a lot more dangerous, considering that vampirization in The Strain works like a zombie plague: if you get so much as scratched by the stinger, you’re doomed.
You might be thinking that this all sounds a bit over-complex and unfocused, and yes, it is (I haven’t even gotten into the techno-ninjas, who seem to be another type of vampire completely). But that “we’re making this shit up as we go along” aspect is part of The Strain’s charm. You can practically see the plot re-writing itself in order to even the odds for the heroes once the vampires start multiplying in earnest: sunlight and decapitation are the only ways to kill them...but actually any kind of mortal wound inflicted with silver will also do the trick, and wouldn’t you know it, Satrakian has an arsenal of silver bullets...oh but actually vampires are as susceptible to broken bones as humans, so you can just bash their heads in with a crowbar and that will take them out as well.
They also look either spooky or stupid in direct proportion to how clearly you can see them. The Master spends half the series with his face covered by a big flappity hood, save for two sinister glowing eyes, and then he takes the hood off and you find out he looks like this:
He’s kind of hard to take seriously after that.
The plot of season one contains many seasoned tropes that viewers of American TV shows over the last fifteen years will be familiar with. Oh no, someone got bitten by a vampire and now we have to kill them! Oh no, Eph is a Sad Dad whose divorced wife has a new boyfriend! The testosterone-fueled man-contest that ensues from that last point is particularly tedious, and not just because Eph is obviously going to win, both because he’s the protagonist and because his receding hairline is more dramatic.
The plot does do a good job of constantly ratcheting up the tension, though. Long-running or open-ended TV shows have a tendency to maintain the status quo just because it’s easier and cheaper that way, but over the course of The Strain’s first season the entire tone and trajectory of the story shift dramatically, from a small-scale investigation-focused affair to a full-blown action-packed crisis where vampires are roaming the streets every night and New York is beginning to slide into chaotic anarchy (this is indicated mostly by the sound of gunshots and breaking glass playing in the background of every conversation, which gets progressively funnier the longer it happens).
Don’t get me wrong, it’s basically all total nonsense. Eldritch and his Nazi vampire associate (of course there’s a Nazi vampire, we’re not dealing with amateurs here) hiring a hacker to take down the entire internet is a level of brazen stupidity that not even CSI would touch. But I’m pretty sure everyone involved knew exactly how absurd this all is, and when it’s this fun to watch, who cares that it doesn’t make any goddamn sense? I’m fully expecting the vampires to invade the International Space Station next season, and I will be completely on board with that.
My only real knock against this first season is that it ends completely inconclusively, with none of the ongoing plot points resolved. Maybe that’s to be expected from a series that was intended from the start to run for multiple seasons, but the plot very much feels like it was building to some sort of self-contained conclusion and the way the Master just scuttles away from the final confrontation going “by the way sunlight doesn’t kill me lololol” is kind of cheap. I was actually expecting some sort of switcheroo where they kill him, but then Eldritch or the Nazi vampire take over.
Oh, another negative point is that the series contains possibly the most flagrant hispanic stereotype I’ve ever seen on television, in the form of a young hot-blooded criminal who jacks cars and recently got out of prison, but really loves his mamá and her delicious home cooking. At least he gets recruited by the vampire ninjas in the last episode instead of being unceremoniously killed off, which is what I was expecting.