Blood and Fire

I watched the season three finale of The Strain last night and I’m still really angry about it. I know, it’s very relevant to have strong feelings on a mostly-forgotten four season show on FX from 10 years ago. But this is my newsletter. I’m going to use it to talk about what I want. I recognize that a lot of dramatic TV revolves around characters making bad and dumb decisions, but this episode may have one of the worst and dumbest decisions I’ve ever seen. If the show wasn’t so obscure, what happened would be up there with “jumping the shark” as a pop-culture phrase. Instead, it demonstrates what happens when fiction breaks the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

For those unfamiliar, The Strain was a show about a vampire takeover of New York City. It was based on novels created by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. I’ve never read the novels. I remember the show airing (I watched a lot of Justified and The Americans on FX around that time). The only reason I started now is because my wife, who’s a big fan of vampires and zombies, decided to watch it. I didn’t actively join at first, but it’s the kind of fun, pulpy trash TV that I enjoy, so I got sucked in.

The following contains massive spoilers for the show, so if you plan on watching it just go ahead and skip right to the “Now Spinning” section.

One of the main characters, Ephraim Goodweather, is an alcoholic, philandering scientist (but slightly more charming than that implies). He has a kid, Zach, with his ex-wife, Kelly. Kelly gets turned into a vampire early on and spends most of the show trying to get Zach away from Ephraim. Zach spends most of the show being whiny and useless.

The vampires in this show are straight up inhuman monsters, although Kelly is one of the select few that retains some level of consciousness. She puts on makeup to appear human, but Zach has seen her without the makeup. He’s seen her kill people with her proboscis. He’s seen the fucked-up things that the other vampires do. He’s not exactly a babe in the woods here. Still, he believes that his mom can be rehabilitated or cured.

Anyway, she succeeds in kidnapping him at the end of season two, and he spends most of season three playing fetch with a little vampire girl in a room. I think we’re supposed to see it as some sort of character journey for him. We don’t. He just remains impassive.

At the climax of season three, the bad guys have planted a nuclear weapon in the Statue of Liberty to destroy the symbol of American freedom and also blot out the sun. The heroes successfully capture the big bad, The Master, but Ephraim gets injured in the fight. He stays behind to stitch up his wounds while the other main characters go to yeet The Master into the ocean. Kelly and Zach show up to find out what happened to The Master. Kelly sees Ephraim and, predictably, attacks him while Zach cries for them not to fight. Ephraim kills Kelly in self-defense. Relieved, he calls out “it’s all over!” to his son, who, again, was kidnapped by unabashedly evil vampires. Zach looks at him, looks at Kelly’s body as she bleeds white ooze from her neck proboscis, takes out the detonator and triggers the nuke.

He literally nukes the Statue of Liberty because he’s mad at his dad.

Let me repeat that.

This teenage boy, who’s sulky but not established as sociopathic, decides to end the human race because his dad killed his monster mom.

Look, I get it. Kids are dumb. They make impulsive decisions. They haven’t accrued the wisdom that supposedly comes with living a life (although I question if certain individuals that have lived said lives have accrued any wisdom, either, but that’s a subject for another day). I get that the writers needed something big to set up the next season. Still: that’s a bit much.

Characters making bad decisions forms the backbone of a lot of drama. In my comic, WAYPOINT, Claire makes a snap bad decision that sets a lot of the subsequent events in motion. But it’s a small thing. An understandable thing. Setting off a nuclear weapon because your dad just saved you from the mom that tried to eat you a few minutes prior feels forced. Especially when the kid hasn’t had a clear villain arc to that point.

Juggling character journeys can be incredibly difficult, especially in a show with so many overlapping characters and subplots. Lots of note cards on the wall for that one. The writers dropped the ball, and that happens. The kid setting off the nuke could’ve worked! And maybe it did make sense in the book or on those notecards. It surely didn’t play that way though.

I don’t know what it is about writing kids in drama shows but they're always the worst part – Carl in The Walking Dead, Raylan’s daughter in the Justified revival season, Angel’s son in Angel. I’ve written a fair amount of children’s programming. Kids will do ill-advised things, but they’re smart. The problem usually comes when they don’t think about the consequences. If they know what the consequences are – and Zach did – they will generally act in a rational manner. As writers, we need to give them a little credit.

Look, I’ve never been in that situation. I can’t say what I would’ve done. Grief makes people do stupid things. To me, that was a step too far, and it took me out of the show completely. So basically: don’t do that.

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waypointcomic/waypoint-1-4?ref=hotrailstohell.ghost.io

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