TV Review: THE STRAIN Season 1, Episode 6: OCCULTATION

This show is starting to get a little frustrating. Every time I think the show is starting to find it’s footing and picking up the pace, it slows back down again.

Right off the bat, I think this episode has some of the absolute most God-awful acting so far in this series. Not from the regulars though, they were all mostly fine, but everyone else seemed out of place. The FBI agents felt like they barged in from a completely different show. They come in, do their FBI schtick, prevent Eph from being a character in the episode, and then die at the hands of a vampire in the street. Then there’s Matt, the awful new boyfriend to Eph’s Ex-wife Kelly. After seeing Boyhood, the shitty step-dad game has been won, he should just give up. Then we’ve got the worst offender, Nora’s mom. She feels like a character from a Spanish language sketch show. All she’s done so far is make weird vaguely Spanish noises and whine about her daughter. I find this example particularly grating because we’ve seen Gus’s mom already and she’s a nurturing, loving mother and not a screeching stereotype. The writers know how to write Latina mom’s and yet they dropped the ball on this one.

The problem with this episode is not a whole hell of a lot happens. There’s a massive amount of build-up for a solar eclipse throughout the hour, and it happens near the end… and then nothing. It just ends. It did give a vampire or two a little time to roam the streets outside, but it was only for like one scene. The solar eclipse was a huge part of the marketing campaign too. There were commercials being run that were only five seconds long and featured the eclipse scene from this episode, so that was kind of a waste. Maybe it is intrinsic to Palmer and Eichorst’s scheme, but I don’t think they’ve mentioned it and Palmer isn’t even in this episode so it seemed pretty useless.

There were a couple of small things that did stand out. The scene where Vasiliy finds his co-workers have been turned is cool because it’s the first time we see the effects of sunlight on a vampire, and it’s pretty gruesome. There’s also the scene where Abe almost dies fighting the vampires in the basement when he drops his bottle of pills. His comeback is to just set the house on fire and walk away. It shows that he’s not just an old bad-ass, but also he’s still a frail old man. There’s also a quick scene at the beginning that bugs me, where an undisguised Eichorst keeps a man chained in a torture room. He says something to the effect of “You’re gonna need to last me a little longer” and then drinks his blood. If he needed him to last longer, why did he drink his blood right then and there? This show defies logic sometimes. The only reason I bring it up is that there’s an interesting bit where you see junk food wrappers surrounding the bound man. I realized Eichorst is basically feeding him Twinkies and Snickers to spike his blood sugar so his blood tastes sweeter. Our vampire villain has a sweet tooth… err, whatever it is they drink blood with. We also get to see his vampire powers in action when he confronts Gus and his friend in the sewer, so it’s nice to know that they can actually do more than just look menacing.

This episode, save for a few interesting moments, is mostly a disappointing useless episode. This show keeps taking two steps forward and one step back, so hopefully by next week it gets a better grip on where it’s headed.