For more than half of its first season, The Strain has established and reiterated the rules about its vampires/strigoi creatures to frustrating levels. Even though vampire lore has existed for centuries in the universe of The Strain, and the strigoi are practically identical to your typical vampires, the show has dragged its information into the ground. The last new episode “For Services Rendered,” gave us new, unknown information and action, the likes of which we hadn’t seen before, hinting finally at a more exciting direction for The Strain. Well, with “Creatures of the Night,” The Strain finally presents us with a look at what happens when the strigoi infestation gets out of hand in a big way.
“Creatures of the Night” is essentially a bottle episode, with Eph, Nora, Jim and Setrakian breaking their way into a gas station to find supplies, and incidentally running into Fet and hacker Jax. The idea that all of these characters would meet up at just the right moment, in just the right place in New York may seem incredibly silly, but at this point, it just needed to happen.
With this newly created team, the group uses their silver bullets, nails, and UV lights to fight off the strigoi at their gas station base. After one interaction with the strigoi, Sean Astin’s Jim gets one of the vampiric worms under his skin. Once Eph dissects the worm from Jim’s cheek, it is discovered that there are even more worms, which leads to Fet shooting Jim in the head, before things go too far.
Guy Ferland, who directed “Creatures of the Night,” also directed another similar bottle episode for The Walking Dead. As was one of the show’s strongest episodes, “TS-19.” showed the true nature of the character we thought we knew. “Creatures of the Night” pulls a similar trick, where we see that Fet is ready to join the Setrakian team, and willing to do whatever it takes to survive this attack. We also see that many of the people who look like they may have been ready to do what it takes to survive, might be too timid to get into the grittiness of survival in this post-infection world.
With most scenes based on pure action, “Creatures of the Night” does feel like a disappointing Walking Dead episode, but for The Strain it also feels like the first step in the right direction. Hopefully the action will improve from here on out, especially since we’re getting into the part of the narrative where New York City will become overrun. In finally getting the group together, and taking away one of the least interesting characters (buh-bye Jim), “Creatures of the Night,”—in conjunction with last week’s episode—shows us that The Strain is no longer explaining, but is finally showing.
Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.