The Strain

Ugh, I’m not digging the new opening credits sequence.
Later: the only good bit about the episode was the part with Setrakian, Eph and Eichhorst toward the end, where suddenly Eph’s ridiculously good marksmanship of earlier becomes realistic (at least against a vampire).

The opening credits were almost as awkward as the scene where the military guy had to give Samantha Mathis a stirring speech.

I am sad the kid didn’t die 2 episodes ago when he let the mom in the building.

This show is so ridiculous and awful, and yet I still keep watching it because of evil vampires and The Division-vibe. Eff is a lot better with his natural chrome dome though.

Aside from very little ever making any sense whatsoever (scenes with the Mexican restaurant trying to make home deliveries are really jaw-dropping), the show does a terrible job at even explaining (or adhering to) its own lore. Contact with a single worm is a death sentence and yet characters are constantly frolicking through bodies or just standing around near them; they know UV light is insta-death to the undead and yet they don’t use that knowledge - they could stop the outbreak immediately by just turning every street light into UV - at the very least, they should be soliciting the feds to send truckloads of the stuff, and guard the power plants, and have backup generators for something that important, etc.

Did the show ever even expressly explain that the vampires cannot traverse over water? I know that’s the case from the wiki, and the scene hiring the boat this episode made that a little more obvious, but it’s a pretty damned important detail of the lore and it’s never expressly discussed. Build moats? Why the hell did the Master decide to invade the one place in the US that’s an island where he would be contained?

Bah, it’s such a stupid show that I think to enjoy it you really just have to go with the flow and get some entertainment out of the situations, violence and characters, as it doesn’t withstand even the most superficial scrutiny.

LOL , yet again finding myself saying ‘what Deslock said’!

I had a particularly hard time swallowing junior f issues with Mom, and everyone not wanting to have a frank conversation with him on his misguided views despite the fact his views would put the entire group in danger (and shock did). Which apparently since the writers got away with, was reused proudly on Fear the Walking Dead. Could someone pass a note to hollywoods writers guild to aim a little higher please?

I will also give them credit that the Strain sets a higher bar than either Zoo or Falling Skies did. So there is that, and despite the epic illogical leaps I still find myself enjoying the show. Those two things are keeping me watching it despite the 40% hate I feel for the show.

Watching The Strain makes me feel like F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri in Amadeus, sneaking chocolates from the desert table.

I need to watch Amadeus again, its been too long that I don’t even remember that scene.

Also in this past episode when Rat Man was holding back Vampire Mom , her worms were on his hand at one point, but he didn’t have a wound or opening, so it seems they cannot pierce skin.

Agree with Desslock on pretty much everything. Also, was that a new intro they had on the last episode? I don’t recall seeing it before. It looked liked a really bad set of caricatures intended for a low budget comic book. It did nothing to enhance any expectation that this was supposed to be a scary horror show. It actually made me chuckle more than once.

I think the dumbest logical fault in the entire story so far is that everyone outside of New York and even the officials who are still there (like the congresswoman and police force fighting to retake districts) are still treating this like it’s some disease people get from coming in contact with other diseased people, and not a freaking army of monsters that is being manipulated and controlled by someone or something. If that doesn’t change after this most recent episode, when it was obvious that the creatures had assistance with infiltrating the island and are smart enough to knock out the power before attacking en masse, then it’s an epic writing fail.

The problem is that people in power CAN’T know that this is an orchestrated effort led by “The Master”, because if they did the solution would be immediate and story-ending. As Desslock says, they’d simply ask the rest of the country to ship UV lights by the truckload to NYC, and they’d outfit real US military soldiers with the proper weapons and gear to go street to street eradicating the vampire population. Eventually they’d flush out the Master, and it would all be over.

But how can they ask the rest of the country with the internet being hacked?

Ha, I see that the godawful opening credits from last episode were not repeated tonight.

Later: Actually, a surprisingly decent episode overall. I wonder who sent the vampire horde to the police station (Eichhorst?) and who conked ol’ Setrakian on the noggin. It’s not looking good for Dutch.

BTW, who’s taking care of the kid again? Did I miss it?

I would recommend that if you’re trying to save the life of a loved one after a gun shot wound has left them at death’s door, you take them to an actual hospital instead of setting up a DIY triage unit in your office foyer.

Another episode filled with win. With Eph and Dutch on sniper duty (LOL, the same Eph who couldn’t hit Eichorst from much closer when he was standing still!) and the other three on book patrol, apparently the kid was left by himself despite the fact that his mommy is still out there looking to snack on him. I loved that the sniper escape plan was to run down 20 flights of stairs before the cops who were right across the street managed to get to the building.

Very convenient that the little boy from the monastery never changed his name or assumed an alias all these years despite holding one of the most important and valuable books in history. My favorite stop on the tour was the first one, Techno + Vampires = Win. I liked Fet’s comment “You have to respect a guy who keeps the party going no matter what!”.

Also, screw hospitals, the place for life-saving emergency surgery is always the penthouse office. Too bad he didn’t think to spring the UV trap right after the Master finished saving little miss no-self-respect. Then they could have ruled together forever without the pesky Master around making demands…

I have a feeling Ray Charles would’ve been a more successful sniper.

I finally caught up so I could read this thread and I am glad to see that I am not the only one still hate watching this show. I agreed with pretty much everything that has been said so far, especially the creepiness of the Coco/Palmer romance and the WTF ridiculousness of the big showdown being pe-empted by a small pile of falling concrete. (Bonus points for Fet telling the workings that he himself was going to be planting bombs at their work site rather than flashing his badge and bluffing his way through.)

I do like the new half-vampire hunter though, and Bolivar is a good upgrade for the master.

They had no choice. Someone left the damn Beaker puppet in the rain earlier this year.

Coco Chanel had to be saved by the master, you know there will be consequences! And at last we see the book is real!

Good episode tonight, complete with flashback sequences to Eichhorst’s pre-vampiric (even pre-Nazi) past. And he’s from Heidelberg of all places! Too bad they couldn’t afford to at least fake a background with the Alte Brücke or the old university building in it (I lived in/near Heidelberg for a total of about a year and a half).

If I did not love to hate it it would feel like I have been watching The Strain, season 2, every night for the past year.

I think the current state of Television owes a lot to HBO and other premium channels. There’s plenty of “same as it ever was” there, of course. But HBO, and then later other premiums, really started to focus on quality programming. Eventually smaller cable networks recognized they could copy this formula. Shorter seasons means you can do more elaborate plotting, have plenty of room to develop characters, and skip all or most of the filler you see in most full-season shows. One assumes that costs are lower, or that money in the budget can be put to other things, or both. “Half”/“Short”/“whatver” season TV has been a boon. There has been a lot of quality programming in this format. Had it been a thing 15 years ago, shows like Firefly and Veronica Mars would have flourished in it, certainly.

So I can’t really figure out how it is that The Strain has managed to go almost an entire season (I have not seen through the 9/20 ep, as my DVR has apparently said “fuck it” and stopped recording shit), especially a short season where there’s little room for filler, and have so little fucking happen. It’s good because I love to hate this show, and this show is an inexplicable trainwreck. It has lost what interesting bits it had in the first season (the collapse, internet hacking aside). It has filled this season with lots of “character drama” that is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Every major plot point in season 2, up to Eff’s botched assassination attempt, has been handled clumsily. t feels like there are a dozen minor plot threads that do nothing except fill space between equally clumsily handled major moments.

How do these things come to be? We may never know. Let it not end.

The glimpse back into Eichorst’s pre-vamp past was interesting. You almost felt sorry for him for a moment, and then they had to have him try to sexually assault Dutch with his vamp eel tongue thing, which was just disgusting and totally gratuitous. The most annoying part was that YET AGAIN Eichorst manages to get away. How many near misses do we have to endure?

There are so many individual aspects of this show that I really like, so it’s mind boggling to me how they manage to take those aspects and somehow create something that is less than the sum of it’s parts. I’ll keep watching though, because vampires, and Gus, and Fet and Dutch, and samurai vampire…