Straining Credulity

I never got around to watching the final season of The Strain so I’m rewatching it from the beginning on Disney+, a streaming service that started strong and is already threatening to overtake Netflix and Prime with its dazzling and ever-expanding array of worthwhile content. I remember back in 2014 that as much as I loved the incredibly tense, thrilling and horrific early episodes, the one aspect I struggled with was the believability of some of the plot aspects. Yes, sure, this is a show about a vampire apocalypse, so some might claim that believability isn’t important – but I will never change my stance that there must always be believability, continuity and consistency in any show, no matter how otherworldly its sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural or horror elements.

All of the science behind the parasitic nature of the infectious worms that quickly mutate normal people into bloodsucking monsters is convincing, the lore and mythos of the vampires themselves is all good… but the one aspect I couldn’t quite swallow was how stupid, ignorant, self-serving, and downright reckless the people in charge were who mismanaged the initial outbreak and allowed it to escalate into a full-blown epidemic. It seemed so ridiculous that the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) could be so wilfully ignorant and refuse to make the hard call to lock down New York City while there was still a chance of containment. It seemed so completely unbelievable that doctors and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and scientists and so many others who should know better would be so completely closed off to even considering the possibility that something unprecedented and uniquely deadly was quietly taking place. Surely, I thought naively to myself, in real life no one in such important positions of power would carry on like this, knowing that their actions could lead to the deaths of so many innocent people. But now, seven years later, after living through 18 months of a once in a century (we hope) pandemic, I can see that the only way in which this show’s portrayal of government and public response to a deadly contagion strains credulity is that they weren’t dumb and ignorant and self-serving and irresponsible enough.

The opening episodes of The Strain are some of the best horror I’ve ever seen on not just the silver screen but any screen. It’s genuinely terrifying. When people walk into darkened rooms, you are truly afraid that something horrific is going to happen to them. And it often does. It’s also extremely gory and revolting at times, like when we see the Master for the first time and he rises up, drains his poor victim with his massive snake-like stinger and then smashes his skull into mulch before retreating from view in a truly disturbing, supernatural fashion. Beginning on that plane, which itself is very scary when you think everybody’s dead, the chills and thrills come thick and fast – as do the twists, like Jim turning out to be a traitor. He seems like a decent guy, and yes he’s only trying to help his wife survive her cancer – but after seeing what happened on the plane, for him to still wave that coffin through the security checkpoint was unforgiveable.

The scenes with young Emma, who wakes up as a vampire and comes home to her father, are some of the creepiest. When she’s half submerged in the bathwater and her unwitting father is asking her if she’s hungry, even though you know what’s coming it’s still so frightening and unsettling to witness a formerly sweet little girl transformed into such a hideous creature. One of the most shocking moments comes in the morgue, when the heart that the medical examiner has just placed onto a scale begins beating on its own – and while he’s trying to stop the worms from burrowing into his hands, all of the bodies wake up, surround him, and then feast on him, all set to the tune of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” playing in the background.

As the episodes progress and our two scientist protagonists Dr Ephraim (call me Eph!) Goodweather and Dr Nora Martinez begin to see and understand that what is happening is far worse than a normal contagion – culminating in having to bash the transformed pilot’s skull in with a fire extinguisher as he attempts to latch onto their necks with the massive tendril that now projects from his throat – it is also interesting to watch how the four survivors of the Master’s massacre react in different ways. Sex-crazed goth rock star Bolivar is indifferent by the time his genitalia falls off into the toilet, flushing away his sexuality and succumbing entirely to his new desire to feed on human blood. Dislikeable lawyer Joan Luss is in denial about what is happening to her, but perhaps on some level realises as she allows the nanny to take the children away before she can eat them. The aforementioned pilot of the fill-fated flight, Captain Doyle Redfern, is the most responsible, admitting himself to hospital in the hope of finding out what really happened to his crew and passengers (he isn’t buying the carbon monoxide poisoning cover story being propagated by the powerful people who the Master has in his pocket). But Ansel Barbour does pretty well too, telling his wife to take the children to her sister’s and managing to feed on the dog instead of another human before chaining himself up in his garden shed. His wife, in a moment of madness, sends their abusive neighbour into the shed feed her husband, before hanging herself because she can’t go on without him. Even amongst all of the horror of the transformations into these foul creatures – the most gross depiction of vampires ever conceived – there is plenty of purely human tragedy for us to grapple with as well.

But if there is one overarching theme in these early episodes, The Strain is – beyond the horror – at its heart a cautionary tale. No one is willing to listen to Abraham Setrakian because he seems like a crazy old man – even though he is the only one to have faced the Master in the past and lived to tell the tale. Exterminator Vasiliy Fet, who makes the transition very easily from rat-killer to vampire hunter, attempts to warn his parents to flee New York before it’s too late, but to no avail. The head of the CDC would rather have his best epidemiologist arrested by the FBI than face the truth of the apocalyptic plague he is unleashing by his wilful and criminal negligence. Eph’s wife, who is separated from him and living with another man under Eph’s former roof with his young son, refuses to go to Vermont for the weekend at Eph’s urgings – despite how adamant and scared Eph is – and gets herself and her boyfriend killed as a result, not to mention the dark path it puts her son Zack on as a result. The nanny of Joan Luss’s poor children (now orphaned because Joan’s husband wouldn’t listen to her warnings after returning from overseas) is thrust back into danger because her know-it-all daughter also ignores what she is fervently trying to tell her. Time and time again, people outright dismiss what experts and eyewitnesses are warning them against doing or not doing, and die or get others killed as a result.

I had forgotten all of this, but I’m sure that Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan – the creative masterminds behind this captivating series and the novels on which it is based – are aware of just how accurate and true to life the reactions of their characters have proven to be. They may be grim rather than gratified to be reminded of the scope and scale of the human capacity for wilful stupidity through watching people refuse to heed warnings, follow simple science-based advice and get themselves and others killed as a result during the last 18 months of this pandemic – some even now wearing their anti-vaxxer personal freedom rhetoric as a badge of honour while foregoing the one item that would provide some protection in lieu of getting vaccinated (a mask) – but those like myself who felt that the was unrealistic in its portrayal of people not listening to experts, not heeding the warnings and urgings of their loved ones and generally continuing down self-destructive pathways long after they could see that they were headed straight for the abyss have been forced by coronavirus to eat an entire bakery’s worth of humble pie.