TV Review: THE STRAIN Season 1, Episode 10: LOVED ONES

Alright, we’re in the home stretch. This is episode ten out of thirteen, where most shows start to focus on the endgame leading up to the season finale, this show is just as unfocused as ever.

Tonight’s episode is all about Kelly’s blossoming into vampirehood. In a scene that kind of kills some of the show’s logic, Zach uses the internet to track his mom’s cell phone and Ephraim locates it in the hands of a homeless woman. She agrees to show him where she found her phone if he looks at an infection first. At first I was like “Oh man, she got bit and he’s gonna have to mercy kill her! This is gonna be great!” And then it turns out to just be a burn wound and now this show is playing with my emotions and not in a good way. This leads Eph to discover her car was abandoned which leads to an extended sequence of flashbacks detailing what she’s been up to these past thirty two hours.

She wakes one morning to find Matt in the bathroom and he isn’t talking to her. She doesn’t yet know he’s turned. There’s a weird moment here where Matt approaches her sleeping body, but decides not to drink her blood right then and there. If there’s any reason outside of tension purposes, we don’t know. After a half day at work due to declining attendance she comes home to find Matt has decided to suck her blood after all, but she resists and smashes his head with a frying pan sending vampire juice and worms flying, one of which lands right in her eye. I didn’t expect the scene from the poster to actually happen, but it just happened. Now it’s done. So the newly turned Kelly goes hunting for her son and stops by for a drink with Diane and her son. The scene where she kills them and drains them is legitimately one of the scarier things this show has done, and the later realization that Kelly has turned when Eph finds their corpses is really heartbreaking. The Kelly Saga ends when she meets The Master in the subway and is given immortality. Clearly the fact that he is using Kelly shows that he believes Eph to be a threat.

The only other major subplot is Dutch and Vasiliy’s infiltration of the Stoneheart group. The two of them get stopped pretty quickly and Dutch is taken to see Eldritch who elaborates on his quest to achieve “the ultimate hack”, cheating death. She slugs him in the face, but then his body guard lets her go, despite his warning that he’d kill her, setting up something of a schism within Stoneheart.

Not much else happens in this episode. Eph’s entire plot is him going to where Kelly’s been and always being one step behind. There are some nice emotional moments like when Eph explains to Zach that he’ll never give up looking for her, or Zach watching old videos of her on his phone. This episode seemed like a breather episode, but seeing as last week’s was pretty much a breather too, this felt like too much. There are important things here but a lot felt like filler. We could have used a pop-up from Gabriel, haven’t seen him in a while. Wonder what he’s been up to. Hopefully we’ll find out in the next episode!