TV Review: THE STRAIN Season 1, Episode 5: RUNAWAYS

There’s a lot going on in tonight’s thrilling hour of vampire hunting, directed by none other than Robocop himself Peter Weller, so let’s get right on to it!

We get a little more story from our survivors here, mostly from Gabriel. His manager (played pretty thanklessly by Regina King) has hired a urologist for his unmentionable issue, although he makes quick work of her and leaves her in a tub of her own blood, and then does the same for the ‘fixer’ she hired to clean up the scene. I like the parallel they make with Gabriel’s character. In his previous life he was addicted to women and drugs. Now that he’s turned, his only addiction is blood. We get a few scenes with Joan, who is “sick” in bed. There isn’t much going on in her scenes, but every time she was on screen with either her kids or the nanny, I kept expecting her to start sucking blood. Even though she never did, the fact that you can tell she thought about it as she sniffed her kids necks really racked up the tension. We also get closure on Ansel’s story as Abe and Eph venture into his house to find his wife has hung herself and he’s locked himself in his shed with his newly vampyric neighbor. Abraham disposes of the two of them quickly.

We finally get a lot of Abraham backstory tonight, as flashbacks detail his time in a Nazi prison camp, trading the horrors of a vampire outbreak for the horrors of war. The camp is run by Eichorst, who only pops up once in the episode, announcing who he is and where they are as the victims get off the trains. Abe and his brother do what they can to survive, but when Abe tells his brother that he saw a cloaked figure killing people in the bunks, he doesn’t believe him until it is too late. Abraham watches in horror as his brother is killed by a figure known as “The Master” and cannot make a sound. It’s a truly distressing scene and really well executed.

Back to the present, Ephraim shadows Abe with a camera as he watches him slay Ansel in the shed. They discuss the need for an army of vampire slayers to help rid the world of the vampire invasion. They also actually used the word “vampire” which makes me weirdly happy for some reason that they decided not to go with the “never-call-them-zombies” route The Walking Dead took. There’s also some really funny banter between Abe and Eph that I’m glad they included to lighten the episode a bit.

There is a very interesting couple of scenes with Nora and her mom at a nursing home. The reason they’re interesting is that I initially thought they were boring. Most of the scenes involved her mom asking her to take her home and Nora’s stock answer would be “This is your home!” At first I was baffled as to why they would tack on another domestic drama in the middle of the series, but then a vampire attacks the retirement home and it genuinely took me by surprise. By having these two characters have a seemingly benign conversation, the show really lulled me into a false sense of security.

The episode concludes with Ephraim delivering the footage of Ansel’s slaying to the CDC and getting the ball rolling on the whole quarantine thing. There’s also a few moments where the ice between Jim and Eph start to melt. Jim keeps saying he never meant to betray him, but Eph insists that if he wants to help, he can just do his job. It’s still frosty, but at least they’re talking again!

This episode had a lot of great moments of tension and definitely left me wanting more. When Abe and Eph discuss the possibility of an army I got really excited about seeing that on the screen. This show is starting to have a vampire like effect on me, I’m craving new episodes now!