TV Review: The Strain 1×9, “The Disappeared”

This summer’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 is one of the worst offenders I’ve ever seen of plot convenience (as has been detailed over the internet since its Blu-ray release), but in terms of a plot-point-to-runtime ratio, this week’s episode of The…

TV Review: The Strain 1×8, “Creatures of the Night”

If there was any episode of this show so far to mark with a SPOILER ALERT, this would probably be it. That’s my indication of saying this week’s installment of The Strain was actually worth watching to preserve such a…

TV Review: The Strain 1×7, “For Services Rendered”

The Strain’s Episode 7 has the most interesting opening of them all. We see a new guy introduced who doesn’t feel suddenly out of place or forced, but directly related to characters we’ve already seen, namely the lawyer Joan Luss,…

TV Review: The Strain 1×6 “Occultation”

They should have gotten Alfonso Cuarón to direct the opening shot of the eclipse over earth for this episode, but then they would have blown their whole season budget. Remember how with the last two weeks of The Strain I had…

TV Review: The Strain 1×5 “Runaways”

This week’s fifth episode of The Strain suffers from the exact thing I detailed in last week’s recap of “It’s Not For Everyone,” specifically about its attempts to balance so many characters that the episode feels like it is wandering.…

TV Review: The Strain 1×4 “It’s Not for Everyone”

  When this episode began, I wished it featured the episode’s title in its credits as Ephraim Goodweather performed his autopsy of Del Toro’s biological hot mess of a vampire, because calling this episode of The Strain “It’s Not for…

The Strain 1×3 “Gone Smooth”

Now we’re getting somewhere. Where last week we dealt with a slew of cliches, this week’s episode of The Strain gave us some higher quality melodrama, but also successfully fleshed out some vampire moments it had been building up to.…