It was…okay. Faults I can forgive (or at least ignore) in the books are brought to painful light in a tv show, unfortunately. My biggest problem though is that I don’t really like the guy they cast as Ephraim. He just seems…smarmy. Of course, that’s purely a subjective opinion.
I do like the main bad though. They made him sufficiently creepy and otherword-ly even if the CGI that was used to create him seemed a bit lacking at times.
I’ll stick with it as there really isn’t much on tv beyond American Horror Story that actually tries to be horror.
It all comes back to Rice, man. The moment she put pen to paper, the genre was never the same. The first couple were an interesting idea, so I don’t think she’s to blame for what came next. But she was the catalyst. She (unintentionally, I’m sure) opened the flood gate for moping emo vamps that whined about being immortal on every page.
It all comes back to Rice, man. The moment she put pen to paper, the genre was never the same. The first couple were an interesting idea, so I don’t think she’s to blame for what came next. But she was the catalyst. She (unintentionally, I’m sure) opened the flood gate for moping emo vamps that whined about being immortal on every page.
I think I tend to focus on stupid behavior in TV / movies when the story isn’t otherwise entertaining me. Dumb stuff sticks out more if I’m not having fun.
While I talked exclusively about idiotic and unbelievable behavior, the root problem is that I don’t really like the characters, and the story they’re telling isn’t terribly interesting so far. Old-school vampires are so tired at this point that the discovery phase is boring. Dressing up the old school vampires with parasitic worms doesn’t really change much, at least not so far. Nor are the worms a surprise, since they’ve been doing worm-in-the-eye commercials for The Strain for months.
That’s a fair point. She was doing something new and interesting with the vampire genre, doing a vampire point of view novel, and introducing a character who fundamentally didn’t like being a vampire. Compared to prior depictions, Rice’s vampires are very complex people instead of cardboard villains. Yet even if Lestat is a ruthless killer, it’s still true that Louis is at heart a whiny emo. In striving to capture Rice’s runaway success, a lot of writers latched on to that.
It’s clear they’re deliberately going for smarmy and irritating with Ephraim. That’s the very first thing we see about him in counseling, how his wife loves him but can’t stand to be around him, because he’s smarmy and manipulative and doesn’t listen.
Here’s how 90 percent of the population would react on being told they’re going to be an Anne Rice style vampire:
Vamp: You’re going to be strong, fast and able to control others. You’re also going to be immortal.
Human: Sounds good. Let’s do this.
Vamp: There’s a downside though. You’re going to need to drink blo…
Human: Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Let’s get this done. I wanna hit the strip afterwards.
Vamp: But you realize that you’re gonna need human blood to survive, right?
Human: How much is this going to cost, by the way? You take a check?
I love Fred Saberhagen, but let’s be honest about this. You ask 100 random strangers on the street who popularized the vampire as a Coldplay fan and you’re likely to get zero results in the Saberhagen column.
The best, perhaps the only good part of the first book, was the handling of this scenario, which is the opening set piece of the novel. It’s handled as a realistic procedural of a legiticmately creepy event. It was very effective and I remember thinking at the time that it would make for a good movie. And they fucked it up.
That having been said, I like both the fact that we have monstrous vampires and the makings of a large scale plague as opposed to the “handful of vampires terrorizing a town” scenario that we usually get in these sorts of stories. As everyone else has mentioned, the plot holes are large enough to drive trucks through but they’re doing just enough right that I’m willing to roll with the stupidity at least for a little while.
I never had any contact with the pancake makeup set, so I enjoyed Interview with the Vampire greatly when I discovered it in the late 80’s. I wasn’t aware the Saberhagen Dracula books existed until your comment made me search for the association. I’ve read plenty of Saberhagen, just not that.
I enjoy Saberhagen’s Empire of the East books, the Berserker saga, and a few other works, but he can be very uneven. The Holmes-Dracula file and related books did nothing for me, personally.
The main problem I had with this episode is the main guy and Sam are both aholes of the first order. The main guy, well I don’t care what kind of job you have, you could be POTUS and if you can’t make the appointments(on time) to save your marriage then it’s obvious your marriage is not your top priority. That doesn’t make you the bad guy, but trying to play the victim and make your wife feel like she’s being unreasonable for not accepting her second class position DOES make you the bad guy imo. He’s good at his job, so what, lots of people are. Then he was cheating on his wife anyways! Already the bad guys are more likeable than he is and I haven’t even seen them yet.
Sam…what ever the bad guys have on him, he let a deadly unidentified element into a densely populated city. He just chose to kill untold numbers of people, possibly millions, to save whoever he’s trying to save. He KNOWS what he’s doing, as opposed to the gangbanger who may just be transporting cocaine or something for all he knows. The scuzzy gangbanger is a more relateable character than Samwise!
Otherwise I think this show looks like good cheesy fun. Those worm thingys are creeping me out.
Good point about Sam. I predicted that he was a mole, but didn’t didn’t really think about the fact he absolutely knew what he was doing. I let the blatant ignorance of the thug blind me to that.
My most recent thought on the show is realizing how stupid the writing was for the medical examiner and the worms. Something unknown killed these people, and he knew it was very likely it was still active. Microbe was the most likely answer, but he was going to be expecting parasites as a possibility. Particularly when he saw growths on the organs. No way he was going to expose himself. Hell, he should have been in a full biohazard suit, since they still thought it might be airborne.
In a reasonable scenario he still dies, since no one expects the walking dead, but the struggle with the worm should never have happened.
I gave up on this half way into the pilot. And since this episode was written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, I officially retract all my poo-pooing about del Toro being personally involved in the writing of the novels. If he can write and direct a TV episode this godawful, I absolutely believe he might have had a hand in Chuck Hogan’s godawful novel. Ugh. What utter dreck, and what especially noteworthy utter dreck for how closely it follows the stupid book.
You know, you watch HBO long enough and you forget what a wasteland the rest of TV can be…
Anyway, regarding my contention that the book never even resolved the premise, I want to take Clanan up on this offer:
Please do! My recollection upon finishing the book is that I felt betrayed because it didn’t adequately explain how an airplane could arrive in the situation set up at the beginning of the book. Namely, that all but a few of the passengers suddenly and quietly died simultaneously, with the plane having taxied over to the side of the runway, and with all of the shades drawn. Please do spoil for me the solution to that premise because hearing about it was what got me to read the stupid book in the first place. :(
Oh, and stick it in spoiler tags because some people in this thread might not have bailed on the TV show yet.
The part that made me think ‘wtf’ about his actions was when he got something on himself(worms) and he removed protective gear, such as it is. He took the glove off “I got something probably deadly poisonous on myself, better expose more skin!”
We know the super-vampire is fast from the video tape, but murdering the traffic control chief took a significant amount of time. The super-vampire can’t kill all 200 people at once, and we’ve established that the victims have time to react. It ain’t peaceful.
This implies the victims were all asleep when it happened. There was plenty of time for the super-vampire to kill everyone on board between the time the plane stopped and the time they opened it. The question is, how?
They made a point of the cockpit door being unlocked when it should have been locked from inside. This implies an accomplice, which could mean a release of gas into the plane.
Alternately, it could imply mind control. That’s a staple of the old-school vampire bag of tricks. Vampire puts everyone to sleep except the pilot. Vampire tells pilot “stop the plane. Open the door. Fall asleep. Forget this ever happened.”
Neither explanation is consistent with the vampire breaking out of the hold. If it or an accomplice can put everyone to sleep, the time to do that is before the vampire wants out of the hold. However, consistency is not a hallmark of this work.
I think the show would benefit greatly from taking a page from House of Cards. Have the Master address the audience directly every now and again. That way he could answer the questions about the plane situation and maybe make some wry commentary about modern life.
The worm eyeball ads have had me thinking about Prometheus for some time. It’s not quite as dumb. Sure, the CDC is sloppy, but they don’t have thugs as scientists, or idiots playing with obviously hostile white wormthings.
However, it’s only the first episode. It may achieve more.
I tought it was every bit as stupid, if not more. After all, they are just misshandling horribly something that killed 200 passengers in a plane in the middle of a great city where millions of lives might be lost. At least the Prometheus crew were like “hell it´s only like 10 of us right? let´s go for broke”.
Everything, I mean everything the CDC guys do here is criminally negligent. Madagascar would have them shot just before closing down everything. And you know how fast they´d do that.
I can handle stupid and plot holes if the story is interesting enough, or the characters are engaging, or I´ve had a couple of drinks. I´m easy. But here, the main dude is an idiot (sign the papers dumbshit, you don´t get to decide if your wife wants to leave your or not, she does), plus he is dishonest “love you baby, course I didn´t tell you I was having an affair with hot assistant”. Surely the writers will justify this bit by explaining it was her wife´s fault, for not supporting the poor hero enough.
Speaking of that, how could a woman understand that a man has to go save THOUSANDS OF LIVES right? dudebrohigh five! And of course despite him being an idiot, she is still pinning for him because women.
When the big bad dementor killed the air controler guy, and then ran away doing his best Dr. Zoidberg impersonation, I was in stitches. Not sure that was the intended effect of that scene but I liked it. Other (many) points of the stupid here have been mentioned before.
Edit: oh god I had forgotten this. Not only is the “hero” a dishonest jerk, who sucks at his job. He also really really sucks at his job. When the mistery old man shows up with full knowledge of every detail of what happened, what does mr. smarty pants do? he sends him away. In The Strain, not only is humanity doomed, they deserve it.
