I am hate-watching, absolutely hate-watching, THE STRAIN, based on novels I enjoyed, a TV series about a plague of vampires with projectile stinger-tongues loose in Manhattan, where literally thousands of people are being murdered or transformed by their rampage on a nightly basis, where the problem is getting worse by literally orders of magnitude on a nightly basis, and which somehow, somehow, manages to drain this situation of all sense of urgency.
The books can be attacked on the same plot points, but they move like action movies, but the TV series keeps pulling back, giving everybody reason to calmly and quietly discuss what’s going on. At a point where the remaining government of Manhattan is reduced to mildly bickering over what they now know to be a vampire plague, the opening of a food distribution center for the citizens who still remain is occasion for a ribbon-cutting and a speech about as stirring as the one Heywood Floyd gives the scientific team investigating the monolith in 2001.
A new character, a young female playwright, is introduced because the evil industrialist is taken by her and hires her to be his publicist, “a great opportunity” in a city where everybody really should be evacuating by the bridges as soon as the sun comes up. She doesn’t behave like she’s under any stress at all. I react more to an oil spill on the other side of the world. Her reaction is more on the level of, “Cool, I have a job.”
Another pair of characters blow up a locker room filled with vampires and celebrate by flirting in a swimming pool. Well, that’s nice for them.
The premise that tension is supposed to build and never let up, except for those occasions where it can be enhanced by brief intervals of calm, is lost. Manhattan, and by extension the world, is under assault by a plague of white worms that turn human beings into disgusting, mindless, phosphorus-shitting, stinger-tongued vampires…and somehow, it’s just “a problem,” generating about as much suspense, outside its occasional impressive setpieces, as a transit strike.
Comment By: John Platt
July 24th, 2015 at 10:17 am
I have decided that The Strain is the CSI: Miami of horror shows.