The Strain S1x13 “The Master”

WARNING! MAJOR SPOILERS!

I think I’ve finally lost my patience with The Strain. Despite Del Toro and David Bradley’s involvement, The Strain has been fairly lacklustre since the opening few episodes. Nothing has really progressed and The Master, the finale, basically felt like a rehash of The Third Rail, proving once again that the series has been given far too many episodes for what it should have and I think I would have enjoyed it a bit more were it say, eight or ten episodes long. There were just too many filler episodes coming out of this series and with episode eight, Creatures of the Night, being the only highlight, it’s no wonder then that I’ve decided that this episode will probably be the last that I watch, so don’t expect any coverage of the second season.

The stage was set for a grand, epic finale that would drastically improve the show and have viewers on the edge of their seats until next season. Yet oddly, it didn’t, with no kickass moments or any hooks that would have me coming back around for more. We’d already seen this episode before essentially in The Third Rail, and whilst it was good to see the Vampire SWAT squad again, theirs and Gus’ thread wasn’t as enjoyable as I expected it could have been.

Once again with this series, the scenes with the villains were what stole this episode for me. They’ve been always good to watch and Eichorst has been great fun, and his conversations with Palmer in this episode were fun to see. Whilst Palmer was healed he wasn’t turned into a vampire, something that he was no doubt frustrated to find out about. This also led to one of the stronger moments of the episode however, during the meeting of the Secretary of Health, whose plan to quarantine Manhattan came far too late and as expected, wasn’t well received, and as a result, she was thrown over a railing. The scene was executed very well and further reinforces my statement that the best bits about this show is when it focuses on the bad guys.

The Master was what we needed the previous episode to be. It would have been the perfect penultimate episode, yet ultimately, came too late. There were too many questions left unanswered and not enough satisfying conclusions for a season finale, meaning that if this was the only season that we would have had of The Strain (it looks to have been renewed for a second one) it would have been another cancelled series to end on a frustrating moment.

It doesn’t look like the heroes themselves have improved at all over the season as well. Normally even with characters who annoy you at first a good TV drama can make you get behind them and even feel sympathetic for them (a good example at this would be Fitz in Agents of SHIELD) but The Strain lacks that. With the characters consistently making stupid and often dumb decisions, it feels like that they’re never really given a chance to show what they can truly do which is a real shame especially when the season has even started to undermine even David Bradley’s character, Abraham.

In conclusion therefore, if you were hoping for a finale that would give the show an awesome direction for Season 2, then expect to be disappointed as it feels way too anti-climatic and has also caused me to finally stop following this series (unless I hear good things from people who I trust about the premiere next year).

Were you left feeling underwhelmed by The Strain’s finale? Or are you eagerly looking forward to season 2? Let me know in the comments below.

(Also, I mentioned this in my review of The Strain this week, but in case anyone is not following that coverage, in terms of reviews, I will no longer be offering coverage of Sleepy Hollow on a weekly basis; instead, I will be covering both The Flash & Arrow, which return this week.)