A little more growing darkness.
What They Say:
Gone But Not Forgotten – A new phase surfaces for the infection and Justine builds a new army while Eichhorst plans a counterattack.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The Strain proved a little frustrating the last time around as the subplot with Angel and Gus in dealing with Gus’ mother was a slog to get through with bad choices made all around. The positive side involved seeing more of what Quinlan and Fet are up to in trying to get Zack back and setup the Master, but damn if they weren’t just bloody stupid at the end. The saving grace for me as a whole was getting the flashback piece with Quinlan’s story. Flashbacks have been a very fun strength with this show and getting back to seeing how his origin worked and how he became newly civilized and tuned as a force against the Master tickled all the right fancies for me. Part of it is that I just enjoy having someone as serious as he is, though he does screw up badly here at the end in a big way for someone doing this for nearly two thousand years.
The cold open for this episode puts Justine on the hot seat as she’s getting interviewed by the seemingly only remaining film crew about the chain gangs that are being conscripted out there. She doesn’t have a clue about it and isn’t a fan of it but the reporter throws a lot at her about it with big accusations. Which she’ll take the fall for since she’s assuming a lot of responsibility in this fight. It’s a short but decent sequence that reinforces just how isolated the city has become and that the nature of who’s in charge continues to change. Of course, there’s more than just the chain gangs out there as we had Eph and his group doing at least some damage before, but these chain gangs are a whole other problem – providing that humanity survives, of course.
Eph thankfully doesn’t try to hide what he’s done when he goes back to where Setrakian and Fet are, and those two haven’t figured out that they haven’t quite won yet either. It plays out as it should with Fet knocking Eph silly and Setrakian kicking him out for what was done. Eph’s been sinking into the bottle for a bit and just continues to do so here, though at least it looks like he might have a drinking partner since Dutch has returned and is just wasted. Again, understandable considering what she’s been through and seen but there’s just an amusing kind of acceptance on Eph’s part over how she is that you have to laugh at it. Dutch did have some good material the last time around as she’s coping with the nature of the world at this point and how some of her friends were handling it but, like Eph, drinking is not going to help in the slightest.
Gus and Angel’s less than interesting adventure in being in a chain gang has them being sent under the city to go through the sewers to clear out the strigoi between their location and One Police Plaza. We get the awkward mix of characters you expect, most of them just red shirts really, with even Gus making it clear to the cop du jour that he’s the only one that will be able to handle this. And that bears out pretty quickly down there, though Angel handles himself pretty well as well. While the Master is out of commission there are still plenty of strigoi out there and their being rudderless doesn’t mean they just sit around waiting for things to happen. And in a way they feel even more dangerous because they’re not working as a group but rather individual dangerous creatures moving of their own weird free will.
Eichhorst, for his part, does try to use them as best as he can at this point, which isn’t easy. With a couple of them being from Justine’s command center, it’s amusing to finally see him doing something big with the tools he has by putting bombs in them so they go to the command center. While the explosion is creepy enough, it’s that they send the worms all over the place with a whole lot of important people being infected by it. Justine just barely gets saved but it’s going to be an event that’s going to set her off even more in stopping all of this. It’s a fun sequence but it’s the kind of thing that Eichhorst and others should have done a lot more of previously in order to secure their position better. It’s used well at this point but it should have been used a whole lot more regularly prior to this, even if it wasn’t a high value target. But this show is littered with really frustrating moments like this where it should have done a lot more a lot better on both sides of the equation.
In Summary:
The Strain doesn’t dig into a lot here overall as it mostly just reacts to what happened previously. Quinlan’s struggling with how the beheading of the Master didn’t achieve the goal he was promised while Fet and Setrakian are just disappointed in Eph and what he did with Quinlan. The small movements we get here are interesting, I even like Justine’s little speech toward the end about how she justifies things, but the big moments are a lot more fun with suicide worms essentially being deployed to strike at what Justine has put together. Eichhorst is looking to find his place in the way things are now but he doesn’t get to really establish himself at this point, instead just reacting to what’s going on and almost coming a little unhinged in a way. It’s not a bad episode but it’s one that for the most part doesn’t make any radical changes but rather works the small stuff.
Grade: C+
