The Strain Season Finale Recap ‘The Master’: World War V

The freshman season of The Strain comes to an end as we recap the events of ‘The Master’ where Abraham gets another chance to kill the evil force that’s been haunting him for more than 50 years…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

The first season of The Strain came to an end on Sunday night after what has to be considered in my opinion one of the freshman breakout hits of 2014. The show started slow and required a little bit of patience to get through the first four or five episodes to the payoff that would come later, but thankfully it seems most of the audience stuck around because these last few weeks have been one taut surprise after another and the action has picked up at quite a brisk pace.

The best part about The Strain have been the filmmakers commitment to keeping the show dramatic while never letting up on the horror aspect of the series. Until The Walking Dead started pulling in bigger ratings than the Olympics, no one seemed willing to give a horror show much of a chance on a cable or network TV station. There have been attempts over the years, but rarely is a network invested enough to really push forward or push the envelope as the case may be to bring a really good horror show to the masses. Even pay cable networks have been squeamish on making horror series for the most part although Showtime seems to have found something with Penny Dreadful (and don’t bring up True Blood because that was not in any way, shape or form an actual horror series).

Thankfully, The Strain landed in the capable hands of FX, which might be the bravest and most cavalier network on TV these days. They were the crazy bastards who gave Kurt Sutter carte blanche to go make a show about outlaw bikers with more bloodshed in one episode than the average film about war. They brought back a beloved film like ‘Fargo’ and somehow crafted it into a 10-episode ‘miniseries’ that became one of the best shows of the year. And they were the ones who finally got director/writer Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s vision about the vampire apocalypse off the ground with ‘Lost’ show runner Carlton Cuse at the helm. What resulted were 13-episodes of outstanding acting, dialogue and story telling that captivated audiences for an entire summer.

FX already gave The Strain a second season and that’s something every fan of good TV should be happy about. This isn’t another cop procedural, CSI/NCIS, or medical drama. This is a horror series with three-dimensional characters, trouble lurking just around every corner and a seriously ominous monster hiding in the closet. It’s been gruesome and grave while sprinkled with sarcasm and quick wit. It’s a crackling science fiction show amidst a new wave of capes fluttering in the wind as every other network tries to find the first Dark Knight for television — instead FX has found the next (and possibly superior) Walking Dead instead.

With that tease let’s go ahead and recap the season finale of ‘The Strain’ titled ‘The Master’

If At First You Don’t Succeed

A few weeks back, the group led by Abraham Setrakian were able to find the coffin he built during World War II that would one day become the home to The Master, the vampire responsible for spawning hordes of the undead who are currently overrunning New York City. When the mission failed, they destroyed the coffin but The Master still roams the streets, spreading his disease like spam messages that just magically appear in your email.

The team has to come up with a new plan and quick because The Master is somewhat vulnerable without his coffin to protect him. He has to surround himself with hundreds of dead minions, willing to keep him safe, but that also makes him easier to track. It’s one thing to find a nice cozy hiding place for a coffin, even if it is about 15 feet wide and five feet deep, but it’s another animal all together to have an army of vampires to surround you day and night to make sure you don’t become a crispy critter or decapitated by your enemies.

Vasiliy and Ephraim devise a plan to seek out the spot on the map where they found The Master the last time to see what’s above it that would offer him safety and security away from the daylight. They go on a recon mission to see if they can find his hiding place and sure enough the spot where he’s hiding is the same theater Gabriel Bollivar purchased at the start of the series. The goth rocker turned genital plopping vampire is providing the home base for vampire central and thanks to Vasiliy’s vast knowledge of the underground system in New York, he even knows a secret way to enter the building without raising any suspicions.

On the way out, Vasiliy even opens a manhole cover to bleed sunlight into the tunnels so when they return hours later, the vampires won’t be able to follow them in or out. Smart planning so far, which could only mean disaster later, right?

Halfway There

Last week, Eldritch Palmer — the crusty old billionaire who helped to launch The Master’s wicked plans in New York — finally got a visit from the age old vampire to help him find new health after facing death for the past few months. Palmer’s deal was simple — he helps The Master unleash the greatest plague in the history of mankind and in exchange he would be turned into one of his personal vampire servants. It doesn’t sound great, but Palmer’s vast supply of money couldn’t save his life and this deal with the devil paid off in huge dividends — most notable it kept him having a pulse.

So when The Master arrived and gave him a few drops of his white, ammonia filled blood, Palmer thought this was the moment he would officially be turned. As he finds out this week, that’s not the case so much.

When Eichorst arrives, he has to break the bad news to Palmer — The Master’s blood will give him health and vitality for a little while, but to turn him he has to receive ‘the worm’. Right now, The Master requires Palmer to still walk in the sunlight and do a few more deeds but once his job is complete, he will be turned to vampire and serve as his right hand.

The first item on Palmer’s new agenda is to convince the Secretary of Health and Human Services to stop her plan to quarantine New York following Eph’s impassioned plea that appeared on the emergency broadcast network a few days earlier. Before he can call on his ‘old friend’, Palmer realizes he’s going at this alone now for the first time. Mr. Fitzwilliams, who has been his trusted protector since he was a boy, has finally bowed out. He stood idly by and watched Palmer make his deal with the devil, but it upset the natural order of things and he can’t be a part of it any longer. He bows out so when Palmer goes to visit the secretary (who is joined by Mr. Barnes, the head of the CDC), he takes along Thomas Eichorst.

The secretary is unmoved by Palmer’s request to stay the course and not call for this quarantine to happen, but when she seems unwilling to cooperate he just chucks her over the railing and calls it suicide. Barnes is horrified but he knows he’s in trouble as well especially with creepy Mr. Eichorst staring back at him. Palmer and Eichorst question Barnes about his intentions, should he become the new secretary of health and human services. Unlike his predecessor, Barnes wouldn’t call for this ridiculous quarantine and instead would just let the city float into hell because why not?

They seem satisfied with his answer and Barnes is spared.

One other note — considering that Mr. Fitzwilliams already allowed Vasiliy and Dutch to escape the clutches of his employer once before, you have to wonder if he won’t pop up teaming with the good guys in season two?

The Ancients

When last we saw Gus, he was being scooped up and taken by those weird anti-vampire vampires, who appear to be hell bent on stopping whatever invasion The Master is planning right now. This week we finally got some answers as we met Quinlan — the leader of the hooded vampire hit squad — as he did his best to recruit Gus into the gang.

Following some feeble attempts to escape, Gus soon found himself in a gigantic open room surrounded by three vampires tied to moving dollies (or at least that’s what it looked like) as Quinlan explained his cause.

These were ‘The Ancients’ — mythical vampires, who are clearly the power and brain trust behind this particular order of bloodsuckers.

“An ancient truce has been broken. An act of war has been declared. We need a human soldier who can move freely in the daylight. Someone who can use the power of the sun to massacre the unclean.”
~ Quinlan

While he never says it by name, it’s clear The Ancients are pissed that The Master is trying to spread the vampire virus all over the world while breaking a pact that kept the two words apart for centuries. Humans and vampires have always co-existed, most of them just didn’t know about it.

Gus is being recruited as the human to lead their charge during the day when these vampires can’t walk into the light. He will have a chance to avenge the loss of his mother, brother and best friend while making a boatload of cash along the way. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Gus this season, revenge and money appear to be the best way in the world to motivate him. It looks as if the vampire mafia has a new foot soldier.

Battle of Bollivar Theatre

The team arms up to begin the assault on the Bollivar’s theatre with hopes of killing The Master during the attack. Eph doesn’t want to bring Zach out of fear for his safety, but as Nora reminds him, no one is really safe unless they are by your side. Nora found this out the hard way when she watched her mother die despite the fact that she was in a seemingly impenetrable fortress, safe far away from the hordes of vampires invading the city. Nora’s warmth has faded and her healing façade has been replaced by an icy exterior now only worried about getting the job done and getting it done right. She reminds Eph that Kelly is still roaming the streets and the vampires may be lost, but they aren’t incapable of finding home. Kelly will be looking for Zach so he needs to grow up in a hurry and go with them.

Eph has no choice but to agree and Abraham offers the young boy a silver sword built for slaying. Despite the fact that this kid has already endured enough mind numbing insanity for a lifetime in just the last few days falls short on Eph, who just wants his kid to grow up like a normal little boy. He soon realizes this world is anything but normal and if he doesn’t prepare Zach now, he’ll be burying him very soon.

Once they arrive, Vasily has a surprise for the vampires lurking in the tunnel — a couple sticks of dynamite and as he says best ‘boom, boom!’ and those vampires are toast. The team reaches the inside of the building and it appears this final battle will play out on a stage just like it was always intended. When the vampires start to flood in to protect their creator, Vasiliy, Dutch and Nora start the assault while telling Abraham and Eph to go after The Master and end this madness once and for all.

Inside the theater pit, Nora lops off Bollivar’s stinger, but Eichorst arrives in the nick of time and he’s going after Dutch but not without a few punches from Vasiliy first. As much as we all wanted Vasiliy to win this battle, Eichorst is stronger than he’ll ever be and he tosses him aside like last week’s laundry. Still, there’s plenty of fight in Vasiliy and he ends up firing nails into Eichorst’s face, which slow him down considerably.

Upstairs, Abraham, Ephraim and Zach reach the top floor where The Master is hiding. He taunts Abraham with Miriam’s voice calling to him from beyond the grave while calling him ‘woodcarver’ as a sign to his job during the war while building his massive coffin. Finally, The Master shows his face and it doesn’t take him long to dispatch of Abraham’s weak attempts to swing a sword at him. Thankfully, Eph shows up with a much better plan of attack — he and Zach start smashing out the blackened windows to let the light of day shine through. The Master is trapped between the rays of sunlight pouring into the room and with each window broken, the space in which he can operate shrinks more and more.

Finally, the predator has been turned to prey but Abraham decides to stare at him for a few moments until The Master finally leaps out of the window where he’s bathed in sunlight. His pain cause the vampires downstairs to turn into a robotic trance and quickly back out of the room, putting Vasiliy and the others into safety once more.

With The Master writhing in pain, Abraham again just stares at him until he finally gets ready to strike. He wanted too long because The Master musters the strength to quickly dart off the side of the building, down a wall and into a waiting sewer where he can get away from the sunlight that was about to burn him alive (or dead as the case may be). Abraham and Eph are dumbfounded. Sunlight is supposed to kill a vampire, but The Master was merely tortured by it and didn’t go up in flames or turn to ash as they expected.

Abraham: “What he did, I did not know he was capable of doing. I was wrong.”
Ephraim: “If sunlight doesn’t kill him, what does?”
Abraham: “We’re lost.”

A couple of points about this scene — first off, Abraham is a noble warrior but he’s also pushing 80. As much as the team wants him to live out his life’s ambition of finishing off The Master, maybe he wasn’t the best choice to lead the charge? Also while I certainly enjoy David Bradley’s acting and Abraham has a character, it seemed almost poetic that after outfitting the next generation of vampire hunters that he would shuffle off this mortal coil this episode. Abraham fought his war decades ago and came up short and when the enemy reappeared, he was just too old to fight it any longer. It seemed almost like the right time for him to die so that the rest of his army would be even more empowered to avenge him and finish the fight that he started.

Maybe it’s because Abraham’s passing was so widely predicted that the show runners went in the other direction believing that was the better course of action. I saw it more like a ‘Obi-Wan/Darth Vader’ moment where killing Abraham would have only passed his convictions onto Eph, Vasiliy and the rest of the group. Then again, maybe not?

Deflated and Defeated

The Master got away again and this time the group has no clue where to find him. They go back to Vasiliy’s with their tail between their legs when Zach starts to have an Asthma attack so they have to go back to his old house to get his inhalers. Once inside, Zach’s uneasy breathing goes away and Eph realizes that his son is faking. Why would he risk returning to the house where his mother/vampire might be lurking?

To retrieve a family photo album so everything’s not lost.

And like clockwork, from the shadows lumbers Kelly just outside the door waiting for her husband and son to return home. Eph tries to put a bullet in her, but instead just wings her shoulder as she turns and walks away while her son bawls into his father’s coat. When the rest of the team rushes in to see what happened, Eph takes down a bottle of whiskey sitting in the cupboard and despite Nora begging him to stop, he washes down his day of loss and regret with his first swig of alcohol in years. Everything that’s happened already would have pushed most men off the wagon weeks ago, but this was the final straw that sent Eph back to the bottle.

I thought it was a nice touch making the ‘soldier’ vampires mostly mindless killing machines but still attached to what made them human. From the onset of the show, Abraham warned that the vampires would go after what they loved most when they turned, and time after time it just kept playing out like that. These vampires aren’t thinking or problem solving. It’s a primal instinct buried deep in their collective psyche to go back to the thing they know best in this world. And kill them.

Finally, the group exits and at this point in the day they are whipped. The Master got away. Kelly got away. The quarantine isn’t going to happen. And they aren’t sure where to go next.

The Strain has already been renewed for season 2, which serves good news for anybody that became a fan of the show in these last 13 weeks. The series started out with political and governmental intrigue, which eventually evaporated into an all out war of the supernatural on the streets. If I have hopes for the second season, I do want to see more of the powers-that-be get involved once this plague spreads and it can no longer be ignored. It doesn’t have to be as grand as say World War Z with international involvement because I enjoy the focus of our small little band of vampire hunters, but the overlying threat of military action is a nuance I’d like to see explored further.

Also, I’m hopeful that this double take on hunting down The Master doesn’t become a theme each season. Eventually, The Master will be captured or killed because I highly doubt the show is being set up with a grim ending. That said, the video game format of Abraham, Ephraim and the team going after The Master, Castlevania style, will eventually wear thin if that’s the only plot that develops. Something tells me that’s not the case, and The Strain will return with the same dire consequences of the first season and maybe even a time jump is possible so we can live by the words echoed by Abraham at the close of this episode.

“Too long I’ve lived, too much I’ve seen. This planet, our host once so wild and unknown, we’ve mapped it, paved it, arranged it on a grid. Never imagining something else was watching us. A creature even more ruthless and more predacious that we are, eager to exploit the very infrastructure we so obligingly arranged. Is the war already lost? Are we destined to be cattle for monsters? Or now that the enemy has finally shown his face, do we have a fighting chance? The world today is not what it was one week ago. What will it be one week from now? One month from now? Nothing is written that cannot be changed. It is a small world after all. We made it that way.”
~ Abraham

All I know is we are a year away from The Strain returning and that’s a sad prospect because television on Sunday nights will be a lonely place without it until next summer when the show returns.

Check out the best photos from the season finale of ‘The Strain’ titled ‘The Master’

[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”1″ gal_title=”The Strain Season Finale in Pictures “]