When the rats return, that’s the true sign of a city recovering.
What They Say:
Quinlan conceives a desperate plan; Eph wrestles with his conscience; Fet undertakes a suicide mission; Dutch and Gus prepare for battle.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The Strain comes to a conclusion with this episode and I find myself very meh about this season in general. While I’ve seen it getting more praise in some ways than the earlier seasons I still found the first season to be the best as it worked the rising tension of what was happening and the cast grappling with the surreal nature of it. This season had some promise but with the expected poor use of Setrakian, a character that died much earlier in the books, the lack of good flashbacks, and the cast spread to the winds with meager motivations for the most part it just felt like it was in the belief that it had another ten episodes to work with after this. Even when things started to ramp up we ended up with more downtime than was good for the pacing and it just drew everything out in an awkward and dull way for a show about the end of the world as a race of vampires took over after a nuclear holocaust.
The cold open gets us into things pretty well with the group in the street protecting the nuke from what’s coming while Quinlan faces off against the horde that the Master set there for him to deal with, which means a quick death for the girl that Zack was mooning over and then a lot of others. The Master is still basically toying with him because he knows it’s not in his best interest to get close to Quinlan but you also know that everything has to be dealt with here and hope for some closure on various character arcs. Because of the way this unfolds it doesn’t take the group long to reconnect, sans Gus and the nuke van, with Fet taking the rest of them with Quinlan to a big hole in the ground where they can store the nuke while planning for things. The hole has a bit of an amusing history that Fet’s able to go into because of his rat catcher days, something that has been sorely missed in this season, but it’s just last minute set dressing for the finale that you know is coming.
Quinlan’s plan comes together pretty quickly as he “sees the end” here in how to deal with things and that has him and Fet putting it together so they can lure the Master down to this area where the two of them will set off said nuke. That doesn’t exactly fly well with Dutch and Eph as Fet makes it clear he’ll be the one to detonate it since a remote detonation obviously won’t work for story points. Fet’s motivation is nicely done as he wants save the city that he loves so much and even Quinlan handles the conversation well because he knows it’s a lot to ask and that Fet is just going to be fully committed to it once he accepts his choice. What’s awkward is the way that Dutch tries to convince him to not do it as she starts talking about how she believes they have a chance and it’s just a bad story point at this point, though Durand does his best to sell it as Fet and continues to have me curious to see what projects he ends up with next.
Of course, with all the drama over what Fet is doing and how others feel about it you know it won’t play out that easily since there has to be a twist to it. The first half sets all of this up well as we get the rest of the survivors to this facility as the strigoi run wild in the street killing everyone. A lot of it is off camera so they can get things in place as scale of events has never been a great part of what the Strain does. But bringing the surviving main characters here and setting up that sense of finality works as well as it can after such a languid season. What throws off this slowly built bit of tension is the flashback sequence that we get so that Setrakian can be in the final episode. I like Setrakian and I like the flashbacks in the show but this just killed what little momentum there was and doesn’t really add all that much overall to it. But it was nice to see Setrakian in better health here than how he was for most of this season.
With the lure having worked and the expected twist in place because of the flashback, the show delivers some decent action even if it feels utterly foolish for the Master to get down to ground level – with Zack – to bring it all to a close. The Master is simply toying with Eph in regards to his son and it just feels so foolish because it’s a distraction from his larger goals of changing the world to his favor. What drives the change for Fet and Eph is that Zack gets caught up in the dive down below and we see Eph taking Fet’s place. While you can feel good that Fet will survive and get to be with Dutch there’s just the problem of more Zack. To be fair, it’s easy to understand why Eph does all of this as a way to bring closure and save his son even if it means killing him and himself, but with Zack just being terrible for so long I really just wanted him to be dead from the actions of the end of the third season and simply not here at all, allowing Eph to be driven by some real motivation of having lost everything to the Master.
The final act is pretty nicely done overall as we get Quinlan going against the Master, brief as it is, by putting him in real peril while Eph tries to recover from the drop from on high. Zack is fully on the Master’s side at this point with what’s been done and that takes on an even darker turn here as the wounded Master is set to use Zack’s body as the proper vessel to move forward with. Putting the moral onus on Zack at this point just isn’t going to resonate for most viewers and his betrayal rings hollow. The foolishness is when we get the Master attempting to devour Zack and turn him that Eph ends up attacking the Master instead of just setting off the nuke. There was no way that the Master wouldn’t survive overall and the need to nuke this to be done with it was a given. Having Zack being the savior in the end, even at the cost that’s put into place, just makes you want to fast forward through it because it just doesn’t work in the slightest.
In Summary:
It’s a rare finale that just doesn’t work for me, or at last with the big key moments, but the Strain really didn’t work for me with its big moment toward the end with the twists put into motion. When you have a character so fundamentally unlikeable and with no real attempt at turning him to the right side earlier, combined with less than stellar acting, turning them to the “hero” on some level won’t cut it. I do like that we get him well and truly taken care of here and that there is a good sense of finality to things. That said, part of me wishes for a series that takes place after all of this to show how the world gets rebuilt and what kind of post-strigoi society would come into place. That would be fascinating as hell to read and explore.
Grade: B-
