The darkness of the night leads to new horrors.
What They Say:
Last Rites – Dutch returns with a plan to broadcast Eph’s warning about the vampiric plague; Eichhorst launches his own attack against the pawn shop.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As we get to the second to last episode of the season, which is setting up a lot of the foundation of events to come, The Strain has brought us closer to the Master than I think I would have guessed from the start. While there’s plenty of distaste for the design of the Master, I rather enjoyed the way things played out within his little den he’s been hiding in and we saw how badly the whole thing went down for the group. We also got a really good look at the scale of what the Master is seeding down there with so many of his strigoli about, ready to go out and feed even more to get what they want. It’s definitely the kind of visual that really sets the tone well for what’s going on.
The less spoken of Zack and Mariela’s time in the last episode, the better.
With things having not gone so well, and Setrakian quite displeased by it as he had the Master so close to him, there’s a little bit of a regrouping going on back at the pawn shop. That provides us with a little more time for flashback material as he talks to the remains of his wife in the jar. This time, we get a look at events in 1967 where we see an older Setrakian doing his best to try and find Eichhorst out there in Austria. He’s intense and focused with what he wants to do, but it’s also taken an even more personal tone of vindication since nobody but his wife believes him with what happened. And he’s intent on getting revenge for the lives lost in the camp that all comes down to this. Seeing how intent he is definitely works well, but the knowledge that things will go south in a big way for him, that will last for years, makes it a bittersweet series of events in watching how close he was to having something normal, but his obsession tore it away from him.
It’s almost amusing seeing him going off to hunt Eichhorst and the Master while riding a white horse, but he gets to the place where he thinks he may be. Which requires going down a deep well and into the small crawlspace there that takes him deeper into the world where bad things happen. There’s some good tension to it, though Setrakian at this age feels a touch amateurish in a way with his approach and lack of being quiet and stealthy, but it gets the job done as we see the kind of fear he has in trying to tackle this. The strigoli down there are pretty creepy, but they provide the twist that you have to expect in that the Master has sent others to deal with his wife Miriam instead. He spent so long down there that it turned dark and his way out became lost to him. It’s a pretty cruel moment on Eichhorst’s side, but it fits in with the kind of unbalanced power relationship the two have had since they first met in the concentration camp.
The downtime is useful for figuring out things a bit more, and getting a little problem or two brought to the table in regards to Setrakian’s “senior moment,” we also get the return of Dutch to the pawn shop. Not surprisingly, Fet brings her in. While she doesn’t have any weapons that could help change the narrative, she does have a plan that will help to wake people up a bit more as to what’s going on. With a bunch of ragtag pieces of gear, she intends to take over the Emergency Alert System in order to get Eph on every device out there to talk about what’s going on and provide warning. There’s some amusing dialogue about how useful Eph is with this, mostly from Eph, but everyone else makes it clear that he can do a lot of good in this by getting a warning that at least some people will take to heart.
While Eph does manage to get his message out, it’s not the best message overall since he gets too caught up in the details as you’d expect from a CDC man. But before they can figure out their next move, Eichhorst makes his move against the pawn shop with his thralls in a big way. That has Mariela getting suckered first and forcing everyone to retreat into the basement. Eichhorst is cold with all of thise, but he has his own kind of playfulness about him that’s really comical.
Gus’ storyline this time around doesn’t pick up too much, but it has him doing his best to get ready for what’s out there. That has him going after the guy he dealt with earlier with the car, Creem, and it works out pretty well at first. He gets himself a good array of weapons to have on hand and then some money as well. A lot of money. But he gets more curious and greedy about what Creem is up to with the shipping containers and wants to know what’s out there that’s so valuable. He reaches too far with a guy who is already pretty quick to eliminate problems in his way. When they open the containers since even Creem has no clue what’s in it, discovering that it’s full of strigoli makes for a good action moment, especially since Creem decides it’s a good time to take down Gus as well. It’s a little slow moving at first in some ways, but it works well to show what’s going on. The twist comes when the vampiric hunting unit shows up, kills a slew of them and does a grab and run on Gus for a mystery reason. You gotta feel for Creem at this point.
In Summary:
The emotional component for the episode may be a touch forced in some ways, but we get good things happening here. Setrakian relives his own issues with what happened to his wife after Nora questions him about it and Nora has to go through dealing with her mother. The two are a little more similar than they were before, but we also get some compassion and sadness out of Setrakian that I’m not quite sure I expected would be there. Tying it to the event from his past works well though and it was interesting to get another look at what Setrakian was up to in his quest to find Eichhorst over the decades and to how things came together with what he had left of his wife. The show also finally managed to get a warning out to others that one hopes will have at least a small impact and Dutch is back in the group, for better or worse. Gus’ arc is probably a favorite here just for the weirdness of it but also for the way he gets grabbed at the end and could be brought into something far more dangerous now.
Grade: B+
