All season, The Strain‘s haphazard narrative structure has limited its potential for growth. Although it’s certainly focused on telling the story of viral vampires trying to take over the world, it’s attempts to fill that story with interesting, diverse characters has felt like an ADD child on a candy binge. Every week, the show is rushing through emotional arcs and switching from one character to another at random (dropping some off the map for episodes at a time – where you at, Gus the Not-Stereotypical Latin Gangster?), eliminating any opportunity for the audience to engage with the show’s dramatic rhythms – and if the audience can’t get a grip on what’s important, who is where, and why it all matters, the entire show’s reality begins to fall apart (something I talked about in my review of last week’s episode, “The Disappeared”).
To The Strain‘s credit, “Loved Ones” is an ambitious storytelling choice for the show, paralleling Kelly’s transformation with Eph’s discovery of the aftermath the next day. Unfortunately, it goes about this in the goofiest way possible, refusing to establish any kind of narrative structure to give both story lines any emotional impact. In the beginning of the episode, Eph finds a bloody tissue in Kelly’s car; later in the episode, we find out it’s from Kelly blotting her eye after a vampire worm from Matt’s face wound entered her body. Later in the episode, we watch Kelly suck her babysitter’s family dry, later followed by Eph discovering it, completely reversing the script’s original intentions to engage us in Eph’s discoveries of what his ex-wife left behind her on her way to The Master. When we already know what’s happened, Eph’s discovery of Kelly’s necklace in dead Neeva’s hand is much less powerful: plus on the heels of Eph having sex with Nora in his wife’s bedroom mere hours earlier, it makes it hard to empathize with the character the way the show expects us to.
It’s also worth noting a lame, time-wasting story line with Fet and Velders trying to take down Palmer is interjected multiple times between these scenes, further diminishing their effectiveness as the storytelling equivalent of the musical “call and response” technique. There’s literally no pacing whatsoever to “Loved Ones”, accented by less-than-titillating scenes of Eph Jr. fumbling through Setrakian’s pawn shop wares to find a laptop to try and find his mother.
(off-topic note: boy, does Apple pay for a TON of promotion in this episode to show off their devices working for our heroes – which is funny, since Velder supposedly shut down the communications systems of the entire city… again, the reality of this show is so inconsistent).
Anyway, these scenes with Fet and Velders are emotionally (and dramatically) empty, scenes that take up nearly a quarter of the episode to go nowhere, except that little nugget about Palmer’s assistant getting ready to take out the man who doesn’t realize he’ll never be immortal. This distraction only further marginalizes the real heart of the episode’s script – the transformation of Kelly into a vampire – which itself lacks any kind of impact, since Kelly’s only been on-screen enough for us to know she just doesn’t understand her ex-husband. It almost feels like her infection is a punishment; instead of Kelly dying in an attempt to protect her son or Eph, she is infected because her new boyfriend comes home and attacks her. In essence, she gets infected because she didn’t listen to Eph’s warnings (“He was right!” she tries to scream to Matt early on), and the rest of the episode details her gaining her new purpose in life as The Master’s lackey (which… why is she so special to The Master?), further defining her journey through the series by her approximation to whatever male exists in her life.
There’s really only fifteen seconds of “Loved Ones” that achieves the emotions it aspires to throughout the episode: once Eph’s done crying, Kelly’s done killing, and Dutch is done flipping out about everything, “Loved Ones” hangs on a moment where Eph realizes he has to tell his son what happened to the woman they both love. It’s hard to miss, coming after the eye-rolling acceptance of Nora as Eph’s Forever Number Two, a woman who has become so distracted by her feelings she can only stare at Eph and his hairdo while he walks off to talk to his son. But I digress: Eph’s brief conversation with Zack is a strong moment for the show, one of the rare times the script gives Corey Stoll some room to give his character some nuance, a reminder of what made him the saving grace of House of Cards‘ first season, with his ability to convey such self-disappointment and reluctance to speak the truth, knowing how devastating those words would be to the ones he loved, and to himself. He just can’t bring himself to tell Zack his mother is most likely dead (or more likely, worse than dead) – and though it’s a completely unearned moment given how laughable the set-up for that moment is, it is a faint glimmer of hope among the drab, shadowed-littered landscapes of The Strain.
[Photo via FX]
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