The Strain (II)

As I feared, The Strain has deteriorated into a typical Cable TV mini-series -- that is, unconvincing, bloated, and ineptly written.   It is no longer witty, but, instead, merely stupid.  (The last funny thing that happened in this show was two episode ago when a priapic rock star infected by the strain had his penis fall off while urinating.  He displays the mess to his factotum who says:  "You need to see a good urologist about that.") The bane of mini-series in general is their length.  Most of the time, shows of this kind are insufficiently interesting or complex to support eight or ten one-hour episodes.  The Strain is no exception.  The series is now five weeks old and the show is stalled, killing time before it ramps up to its apocalyptic finale.  By the end of the first episode, it was obvious that the parasitic vampires posed a horrific threat, but, of course, the authorities refused to take reasonable action and, even, denied the existence of the monsters.  It's like the refusal of the county officials to close the Chatham and other Cape Cod beaches when the great white shark began eating teenagers in Jaws.  But Spielberg, of course, uses the conflict between those who recognize the danger and those who are motivated to ignore it to propel the plot of his movie for about forty minutes.  In The Strain, there is no middle-section plot except the protagonist's increasingly desperate effort to persuade the powers-that-be that the vampires should be hunted down and exterminated.  (Of course, there are bloody vampire attacks at intervals of about twenty minutes lest the audience lose interest in a story that seems permanently stalled.)  This middle-section lasts about three or four hours and the only thing that happens in this part of the series is the hero hysterically pleading with various indifferent or hostile government and city administrators to take action.  (The subplot involving the hero's child custody battle with his wife has been mercifully put out of its misery -- we can only hope that the annoying wife and her annoying son will be exsanguinated by the vampires as soon as possible.)  By the fifth episode, the principal characters are mostly dispersed and the various narratives are running independently of one another.  Unfortunately, these narratives aren't stories at all -- they are merely situations in which vampires appear and kill minor and extraneous characters.  The monstrous and terrible boss-vampire, "the Master" as he is called, has been offstage for a long time and the show suffers from his absence -- it's tedious to watch his minions predictably slaughtering bystanders, although the special effects are pleasantly horrific and well-crafted.  A Nosferatu-like subplot involving hordes of rats, clever at first and funny, has worn out its welcome.  The vicious plutocrat who has summoned the Master to Manhattan has been semi-comatose, awaiting a liver transplant, for about three episodes and so that character's villainy also has been dormant to the detriment of the show.  Worst of all, the show has now devolved into dramatizing concentration camp scenes -- we see poor huddled Jews in freight cars, Nazis with vicious German Shepherd dogs threatening the inmates, guard beating old men, women and children, smoke stacks gushing human ash and slave labor.  And, as if these poor bastards didn't have enough misery to endure, every night the Master devours one or two of them for supper.  Early in the film it was suggested that the vampires were Nazis.  Now, we are getting the backstory with respect to this notion -- it  turns out that the Lager were owned and operated by vampires.  This is meretricious at best and offensive at worst:  concentration camp references are the last refuge of scoundrels.  The elderly survivor of the Camps, an old man with a silver sword and nail gun that fires silver nails, in other words the vampire-hunter extraordinaire tells his side-kick, the Center for the Control of Infectious Disease doc:  "We must hunt them down.  They are parasites.  Their blood is infected and they will destroy our society.  We must kill them one and all, without exception, man, woman, and child.  Or they will suck out our blood.  They are a disease, a cancer."   Did no one recognize that these lines mimic the Nazi justification for murdering the Jews?  Or is this some kind of a sick joke?