In the opening minutes of “Runaways,” the episode encapsulates all of the problems with The Strain. Regina King, who is really slumming it in this show as manager Ruby Wain, walks on her client Gabriel Bolivar, as this show presents him, apparently one of the world’s most popular musicians, drinking the blood of his urologist. Ruby sees this incident and understandably runs away from the action, twisting her ankle, struggling with the horrors she has seen. King in this moment is The Strain in a nutshell: you know there’s great talent there, but right now, it’s limping away from where it probably should be.
“Runaways” is called such due to the fact that potentially interesting threads keep popping up, yet the characters will in fact run away from them. Logically, they probably should, but the fact that the characters are leaving the most exciting moments of the plot does start to get almost laughable by the end of the episode. Especially when they leave horrifying moments without registering just how horrifying what they’ve just seen truly is.
In “Runaways,” Eph watches a “vampire” try to latch onto him with his leeching tongue, he shoots him with silver nails and then watches the vampire get his head chopped off by Setrakian, yet never blinks and chooses to rather focus on whether or not he taped the incident. When presents the incident to the CDC, he runs away from the company, now hiding and taking on the virus by himself.
Later, Joan, the only plane survivor to not go full vampire, is still at the beginning stage of her transformation. When her maid sees Joan’s eyes blinking the opposite way they should be, the maid grabs Joan’s kids before she can suck their blood. They escape, heading to the movies, hopefully to see a better story than they’d get while watching The Strain.
Most egregious is Nora, who is visiting her mother in a nursing home when a vampire attacks several people. Nora is one of only a handful of people who knows not only what they are dealing with but how exactly to stop this incident, so what does she do? She grabs her mother and runs away. Later, when Fet sees a group of vampires in the sewer in his few moments of the episode? He runs away.
Now it’s not just in the present that characters are hiding, as The Strain is introducing flashbacks. “Runaways” goes back to 1944 and shows us Setrakian’s time in a Polish concentration camp. While we do see that he lost many loved ones, some at the hands of The Master, presented as Patient Zero during Setrakain and Eph’s exposition breakfast, and learn that the Nazis were hoarding silver, there’s really no need for it, other than trying and failing at setting up an emotional connection to the show.
At this point, The Strain still feels like all of its characters are puttering around, figuring out what to do next, with only Setrakian having a determined goal in mind. This might have to do with all the characters not having much intelligence between them, considering that no one is all that worried about the entire internet being down for days in New York City or that creatures with exact vampiric qualities are appearing everywhere, yet no one has any idea what to do about them. What The Strain really needs right now is some aptitude and some courage instead of running away and being stupid.
Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.