TV Review: THE STRAIN Season 1, Episode 1: NIGHT ZERO

HE IS HERE

This has been the tagline/mantra for the promotional material for The Strain for the past couple months, but who is “HE”? Well if you were hoping to find out in the first episode, you’re out of luck. The pilot for The Strain is good on setting up mood, but light on setting up plot. Things happen and people are introduced, but it feels like we’re dropped in the middle of the beginning. We’re given glimpses of who the characters are, but for the most part it assumes we know who these people are. It’s honestly a little refreshing this way. We don’t necessarily hit the ground running, but at the same time we’re free from a lot of boring exposition and we’re experiencing these events at the ground level with our characters instead of from a birds eye view.

So what is it about? Short answer: Vampires. Longer answer: NEW Vampires. Besides the fact that the vampire mythology in this series is pretty fresh and their biology is pretty unique too, not much is new here, at least in episode one. The show kicks off with a bizarre phenomenon: A plane full of dead people lands at JFK (shades of Fringe anyone?) and it’s up to Ephraim Goodweather and his team at the CDC to investigate! But first… Therapy! A lot of time is spent on the fact that Ephraim’s marriage and family life is on the rocks. Frankly, I thought this took a lot of time out of the episode. It was the thing I was least interested in and we’ve seen characters like this many times before.

The performances are great. I was a fan of Corey Stoll from House of Cards and he’s in top form here, and Game of Thrones/Harry Potter’s David Bradley shines as aged vampire hunter/holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian. Sean Astin is passable as Jim Kent, a pretty thankless role, but there is one scene that implies there is something more to his character, and Mia Maestro does her best in what is essentially just the token female role, at least for right now. The one real standout in the pilot is Richard Sammel who is basically doing his best impression of Inglourious Basterds co-star Christoph Waltz. Here he plays a vampire-type person who is an executive of the clandestine “Stoneheart Organization”. Based on what we see of his character and how he differs from the vampires that come from the plane, there seem to be two different kinds of beings, or at least some kind of hierarchy, but again, since nothing is obvious in this show, it’s all speculation.

Night Zero isn’t a great pilot. It’s got hints of greatness and has a lot of setup, but I fear that it won’t suck in enough people to keep with the show. Hopefully I’m wrong because it does start to pick up after episode two, but unfortunately TV audiences don’t have a hell of a lot of patience these days, and that just sucks.