The Strain: A Review

I Must say I was very pleased when I saw the notification that The Strain was now available on Hulu Plus. Having defiantly cast aside cable and traditional television several years back, I have been limited in current content and was eager to see this show upon first hearing of its inception, the driving force behind it, acting in the producer capacity if I'm not mistaken, is a director whose work I admire. His name is Guiermo Del Torro (I'm 87% sure I just butchered that spelling). You may know from films like 'Pan's Labrynth', The Hellboy series, and Devil's Backbone (if you've really been paying attention). I believe this show is actually an adaptation to a graphic novel he released some years ago. Anyways, I was mondo psyched to finally get a chance to see it.

As of now, I am three or four episodes in and I must say that it is an odd concuction. Sometimes you can just tell when a show or movie is created by a foreignor. It just seems to have a weird "vibe" about it. Usually this takes the form of the show/movie's sense of humor. To me, that's always been the quicket way to spot a foreign creator. But sometimes you're not alway sure if the humor is intentional. Because, often times, foreign creator's are creating i​​n response to Western content that they, just like the rest of us, have been inundated with since child birth (only add to their experience bad voice over acting and cultural references that they may not always understand). This results in their work coming across as a bit campy or tongue in cheek or self-aware or ironic (insert any word in here except derivitive). There may be an impulse to label this work derivitive but I don't think that works. There's just always something fresh about... fresh but familiar... like looking into the mirror for the first time. Maybe it's an emphasis in an odd place like something we take for granted but a foreignor may not, maybe it's character dynamics with deeper sensibilities (an unexpected benefit to translation)

But I digress, now, back to 'The Strain' and before you refute my premise but stating the obvious (it's an American show now with American writers and American directors) please remember that Del Torro is still the driving force and it is all still based off of his source material. As of now, the show seems to be revealing Del Torro's attachment to particular aspec of the classic work by Bram Stroker, that is the arrival of Dracula in England, because that is basically what we have here only replace freighter ship with passenger jet and replace England with America. Admittedly, that is a particularly compelling part of that story. The conspiracy of mortals to make the transportation possible, the complete annihalation of the crew, and the fact that you now have a group of people who are completely unprepared for what has just arrived on their doorstep.

One thing that does irk me though, and this is something that I see a lot of in horror fiction, is that the word vampire does not seem to be in any of the character's vocabularly. It's like no one has any frame of reference and we the audience seem to be yelling at the screen "It's a vampire you fucking idiot!". I'm not quite sure why writers choose not to acknowledge the fact that what they're preposing to be real actually has a long standing in fiction... do they think that will make it more believable because it actually takes me out of the story everytime when characters act like they've never heard or seen a vampire or zombie before (at least in some capacity).

I also must admit that I am not entirely onboard with this show as much as I thought I would be. However, just like you should never judge a book by it's cover, you should never judge a show by it's pilot. Case in point: Last Man on Earth, the new fox sitcom with Will Forte. Hilarious pilot, felt like a really well made short film, and then it just started going down hill from there... or... well I'm sure there are at least a dozen examples of bad pilots that have gone on to be great shows but my mind is being a little slow right now. So, I'm going to stick with 'The Strain', I'm in it for the long haul and I hope all of you will join me on this journey, just in case it starts getting good I have somebody to rant to ;)

As of now, I'm going to give it 3 and a half stars our of 5... we'll see.