‘The Strain’: A Swift, Bloody New Season
The Strain has always been at its best when it’s about two things: hunting down vampires and letting Corey Stoll’s Ephraim swill gallons of hard liquor to either numb his exhaustion or give him the nerve to continue the hunt. Based on the first three episodes of the third season, which begins airing on FX Sunday night, this may be the most boozy, vampire-y season yet, and therefore possibly its best.
The show — co-created by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, based on their source novels — is cunningly structured to unfold in a TV version of real time: We’re now 26 episodes in at the start of the new season, yet only a few weeks have elapsed since the vampires (known most often here as the “strigoi” or, more frequently in the new season, “munchers”) started attacking, turning humans into long-tongued bloodsuckers. Thus the main characters, led primarily by Stoll’s Eph and David Bradley’s Professor Setrakian, are still coming to terms with the threat, still trying to figure out possible solutions and counterattacks. The effect is to place the characters on the same learning curve as the viewing audience, which creates a strong narrative bond.
Related: ‘The Strain’ Catch-Up Guide: 6 Things to Remember About Season 2
In previous seasons, I was regularly bored whenever the action slowed down and a bunch of scientists started gassing on about how the spreading infection could be contained. By now, however, del Toro, Hogan, and producer Carlton Cuse have streamlined the show, and the new episodes do a lot more storytelling through action. In this, the third season is helped greatly by the expanded role of Rupert Penry-Jones’s Quinlan, a half-vampire who operates as almost a superhero in the fight to find and defeat the big bad villain, the Master (Robin Atkin Downes).
There’s little I can say about the plot of the first couple of episodes without spoiling last season’s cliffhangers, but I will note that Eph’s young son Zach (Ben Hyland) plays an important role. One substantial advantage The Strain has over other monster-invasion series — I’m (not) looking at you, Walking Dead franchise — is that Hogan, before his del Toro team-up, was a superb writer of thriller novels (Prince of Thieves, The Standoff), and he carries that swift storytelling skill over into the scripts he writes or co-writes here.
Even the third episode, which is loaded with a lot of backstory origin material about Quinlan’s past, doesn’t get bogged down. When it’s good, The Strain moves as quickly as those long, creepy tongues that burst out of the strigoi’s mouths to suck your blood.
The Strain airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on FX.
