The Strain: Season One

The Strain has finally come full circle, its nascent days spent as a pitch for a television series only to be rejected and find new life as a bestselling three book series. And now Guillermo del Toro’s vision of the vampire apocalypse is a hit show for the FX network, its first season earning consistent positive reviews and enough of a viewership to garner an order for a second season to begin airing in the summer of 2015.
   
Adhering rather closely to the novel with some minor changes and modifications, the first season of The Strain is something of a slow burn up until the fourth episode, appropriately titled “It’s Not For Everyone,” where a conspiracy to initiate a viral outbreak of vampirism in New York City boils over and the disbelieving heroes, so ensconced in their scientific reason, become fully engrossed in the swiftly growing horror.
   
With minds of the caliber of Guillermo del Toro and co-author of the novels Chuck Hogan shepherding the series, and Lost executive producer Carlton Cuse bringing his show running expertise to the table, The Strain is something of a game changer in cable television history, a vampire series played straight, without humor or romance, focused strictly on the horror generated within the nightmare world.
   
The Strain, while it has its share of first season problems, is one of the better horror series to come along in quite some time, abetted by several key factors, most notably David Bradley as the delightful Abraham Setrakian, a grizzled, cold, and determined vampire hunter with a past connected to the Master, a villainous ancient vampire who, unfortunately, looks like a giant sized version of the infamous Bat Boy from the World Weekly News.

   
Despite such a design misstep, The Strain also features some truly horrific scenes, such as the morgue attack in the premiere episode; the housekeeper’s flight from the house of the vampire Joan Luss (Leslie Hope) with the children in tow; Vasiliy Fet (Kevin Durand) taking care of the problem that Eph Goodweather (Corey Stoll) was unable to address; the unnerving discovery Eph makes in the basement of the best friend of his wife; and the flashbacks to the past of Thomas Eichorst (Richard Sammel) and Setrakian in Treblinka, all making for particularly horrific television.
   
Of note within the world of the first season of The Strain is the gradual progression of despair that builds within Eph as he seeks to keep his son safe while simultaneously searching for the Master and his ex-wife. While the others around him seek to maintain some amount of solidarity within their community in order to combat the oppressive forces around them, Eph has difficulty seeing beyond his own helplessness and ineffectualness, carelessly impelled by the regret and torment he feels over the alcoholism that tore his family apart in the first place. His struggles are exploited by the Master, who tells Eph in the episode entitled “The Third Rail” that he will take everything from the vampire hunter, his wife, his child, his friends, until there is nothing left but despair.
   

This desolation and anguish is further highlighted in earlier episodes when Ann Marie, the wife of evolving vampire Ansel, foregoes her established faith in the Christian cross and feeds a neighbor to her monstrous husband. Soon after, she hangs herself, clutching the rosary, a clear message that these vampires cannot be defeated through individual democratized acts of resistance, but through an enduring community of solidarity and opposition to the growing forces of subjugation.
   
In The Strain, solidarity is achieved through the formation of individuals into a community whereby they not only identify with the victim of the vampire, they take active steps to address and ameliorate said oppression. Solidarity is crucial to any movement against the dark oppression the Master inflicts upon his victims, and individual acts of heroism are muted next to unified cohesive strategies. Setrakian, Eph, Fet, and Nora (Mia Maestro) form a community of faith and action that only fails when solidarity is fractured, represented in the separation of the group both physically and ideologically, agents working individually (as modeled by Eph’s singular obsession with finding his wife) versus together as the stronger singular entity that formed in the final episode of season one. Despite their failure to actually kill the Master, the group survives as a result of the bond forged between them stemming from the oppression that has befallen Manhattan and their loved ones.
   

Despite the cultural connective tissue of the liberation motif, The Strain can often suffer from uneven storytelling and wooden dialogue, problems that increasingly subside as the first season progresses. Of course, many television shows take a little time to find their voice and momentum. Fringe, created by J.J. Abrams, struggled during its first season, trying desperately to avoid the X-Files-light tag, only to become one of the more innovative sci-fi television shows of all time.
   
Again, there has been plenty to love during the first season of The Strain, and, having read the novels, knowing the cataclysmic events that are unleashed and the malevolent depths the novels descend into, it will be interesting to witness how del Toro, Hogan, and Cuse translate such massive and disturbing imagery to the small screen. Until that question is answered, despite its shortcomings, The Strain has served as one of the more original and epic vampire narratives to come around in quite some time.