Sunday, November 5, 2017

Van Helsing, Season 2, Episode 5: Save Yourself



For the sake of not dwelling on their pointlessness I’m going to drop in on the side groups first since they’re not actually doing anything

Doc and Axel are still wandering through the wilderness hoping to stumble upon Vanessa. Axel is getting steadily weaker from lack of blood and eventually Doc forces him to feed on her - of course her blood tastes foul but he takes a mouthful. If they don’t find Vanessa soon, Doc will have to kill him. She refuses and he throws all the guild and insults at her, again. And she makes her apologies, again.

Eventually she goes to sleep and has a Vanessa dream, which she then paints in blood. Axel recognises it

While Flesh, Lucky and Mohammed are stumbling around randomly. Despite not knowing where they’re going, Flesh insists they keep moving despite Mohammed’s injuries. They give him cocaine to treat the pain and keep on moving. Flesh has a dream, probably a Vanessa vision, Lucky and Flesh have sex, I wait for these side characters to be relevant.

To Vanessa - and last episode we ended with a big dramatic confrontation with her and Sam. This continues with Sam playing cat and mouse and spooky voice over rather than confronting her directly. It would be frustrating but Sam is really really really good at the creepy so it actually works. While Sam and Vanessa haunt each other, Julius and Mike manage to free all the captives including a deeply traumatised Felix to head back to the camp. Sam escapes and Vanessa helps get everyone back to the camp

She keeps insisting that Sam is her problem though, while Julius wants in on some of this Sam killing action

Everyone’s settled in at the camp but during the night Sam visits to kill and traumatise again. Everyone brainstorms what to do, showing some possible future conflicts as Chloe, the former head of the prison group tries to invoke some authority and is aggressively challenged by a past victim before backing down with Mike stepping in to kumbaya everything. If I didn’t think this group would be irrelevant in the future I’d say it’s a sign of future difficulties

While everyone hunkers down, Vanessa heads out, refusing to stay and rest and eat. She pauses to give Troy some advice on how everyone needs someone which is just ironic. Felix is also there, incredibly traumatised and guilt laden - he wants to help. So Vanessa bites him

Vanessa, please don’t exploit traumatised teens to drink their blood, it’s nasty.

She uses her super powers to catch up with Sam in a church where they have an epic drag out fight. He manages to stab her repeatedly and slowly strangle her - which is when Julius intervenes with a shotgun



Sam does some serial killer taunting about Julius’s mother - and since when does Sam know anything about Julius’s mother? What is this random nonsense? The delay gives Vanessa chance to heal so it’s back to chase and fight and Sam taunting especially about how Vanessa is different, now happily drinking blood

And then he throws himself out of a church window. C’mon, no-one thinks that killed him right? It’s a fall. Since when are vampires killed by falling?

To absolutely no-one’s shock when they take their sweet time getting down (rather than, say, leaving Julius on watch to keep an eye on Sam), he’s gone. But Vanessa doesn’t want to hunt him, instead she’s chasing down her hallucinations/visions that she and the Bite Gang have been having - visions of a big secure door which Julius reveals he’s seen as well. We even have a brief picture of the door - which looks very secure and has “quarantine” written on it

Can we not mess with the quarantine door?

Are we just going to leave Sam to massacre the Johnson’s camp then? Apparently so...

Aaaand Dmitri’s back. Oh joy. Sam was a much much much more scary villain that Dmitri could ever be. Having heard that Anastasie just got squished he decides he needs and army - so he recruits Julius’s old army with some jaw ripping and lots of not very scary roaring.

I just can’t take Dmitri seriously…

At this point the various factions need to unite and we need a focus - visions are a pretty nebulous one but they’ll do, I guess. But Doc, Axel, Flesh and Lucky are seeing increasingly irrelevant and the abrupt end of the Dylan storyline coupled with no actual focus opposition against the vampires has left this season rudderless.