The Strain (Season 2)

You don't need to be Donald Trump to know that the recent illegal immigrants featured on The Strain will be bad neighbors and worse citizens.  Guillermo del Toro's horror series on FX embodies in trash form just about every one of the Republican party's worst anxieties about undocumented aliens -- and it is probably no accident that the show is produced by a Mexican.  Arriving at our airports and harbors are predatory creatures with noisome habits, an incomprehensible culture, wholly parasitic beings that live by literally sucking the blood of native Americans.  Worse, these predatory zombie-predators carry a variant of Ebola -- they can infect us and transform our bodies into rotting shells for their primary organ, an eight-foot long tentacle of raw gristle tipped with a floral arrangement of meat petals that opens to extrude a sort of stinger that simultaneously infects its victim while exsanguinating him or her.  The zombie-vampires projectile vomit this phallic weapon through their mouths, face- or throat-raping their unfortunate victims.  Infection causes your hair to fall out in patches and, since vampires propagate their kind asexually, through viral infection -- here visualized as wriggling white worms something like animate Udon noodles -- their human genitals slough off.  And here is the worst thing:  Washington is completely oblivious to the threat and has failed to secure our sovereign borders -- the only thing to do is to build a wall and illumine it with zombie-repelling UV lights.  The beleaguered citizenry, abandoned by their government, is mostly left to self-help against the undocumented aliens -- the people of Staten Island and Red Hook do yeomen-work slicing off the heads of the monsters or shooting them in the faces. 

The second season of The Strain is better and more fun than the first season.  The show has abandoned its tedious and pretentious concentration camp flashbacks (the vampires are led by an immortal K-Lager commandant, Eichhorst) and concentrates on the here-and-now.  While the first season of the show mostly featured monsters committing isolated depredations among us, aided and abetted by the super-rich Chairman of the Stoneheart Group of corporations, whilst the local officials, displaying incredible obtuseness looked the other way or even denied the threat, the new episodes content themselves with combat between small groups of humans and the marauding vampires.  The core characters remain, more or less impervious to injury:  Eff, the brave CDC scientist who is laboring, with his girlfriend, to develop a self-propagating infection that will wipe out the monsters, a beautiful female computer expert, who is skilled with weapons and, possibly, lesbian or bisexual, a plucky child continually in harm's way -- he's Eff's son and the subject of a post-human, and extremely nasty, custody fight between father and mother, a ravening vampire who has recruited to her side a swarm of mutant spider children capable of crouching upside down on ceilings.  There is an elderly Jewish concentration camp survivor who periodically imbibes a brew of pulverized vampire-virus worms to rejuvenate his flagging powers --- he's about 100 years old but a mighty swordsman when it comes to hacking off the noggins of vampires.  The best character is a matter-of-fact exterminator who sees the vampires as just another species of rat to be trapped and eradicated -- the exterminator is played by Kevin Durand with tremendous nonchalance and insouciance:  the actor has ice-cold eyes and seems partly inhuman himself (although he's in love with bisexual woman-warrior and computer hacker).  The vampires are led by Richard Sammel, playing the jack-o-lantern-faced and grinning Nazi, palpably distressed when his nine-foot tall Master vomits a endless goopy stream of worms into the mouth of a washed-up rock-and-roller, a musician somewhat like Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson, thus bestowing the mantle of leadership on the entertainer -- poor Eichhorst had hoped that he was the next in line to succeed to the position of the Master.  There's a vicious plutocrat like Donald Trump, who is a lackey to the Master and his familiar -- he's in the good graces of the Master and so he gets to boss around Eichhorst.  In the first series, the plutocrat was dying of something and spent all his time lounging in bed and sneering -- now, he's been rejuvenated and, even, has a perky and beautiful girlfriend, a great improvement in his villainy since last year. 

The Strain has abandoned any pretense to logic and seriousness.  It's just a series of skirmishes between humans and monsters.  The monsters can be killed by the thousands but keep up the assault.  The leaders of the monsters are always lured into encounters with the heroes, but, in those battles, the unerring shot of the good guys falters, and the villains always escape to fight another day.  Zombie and vampire films always start as nasty and serious explication of sexual phobias -- but this can't last, and, as George Romero's movies show, these narratives generally turn into political satire.  As the demagogues give speeches in front of the grisly trophies of beheaded vampires, and as the good citizens of Staten Island arm themselves to "take back their" neighborhoods, the political subtext is not far below the surface.  The Strain is reliably amusing, luridly and implausibly violent, has excellent special effects, and is not too scary -- it's also funny:  what more do you want in a TV show?