Ten episodes in, and The Strain lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought we’d seen the last of those horrendous eye-worm incidents from all the promos, but here comes poor Kelly Goodweather, fighting her new boyfriend and getting a vampire crawler right into the eye.
Eye virus aside (v-eye-rus?), “Loved Ones” takes Kelly Goodweather—an almost non-character—and attempts to turn her into something exciting, with mixed results. As Eph tries to track her down, we see the last few days from her viewpoint, and the beginning of her transformation. Up until this point, Kelly has basically just been a barrier between Eph and his son Zach, and a way to further Eph’s different stories. But by the end of “Loved Ones,” it seems like Kelly is on her way to becoming one of the show’s primary antagonists.
Kelly’s transformation begins as a mystery, with Eph following her trail, then flashing back to Kelly’s point-of-view to explain the significance of each clue. It’s an interesting idea that sort of works, the only problem is that we’ve seen this exact story over and over again on The Strain. A character we sort of know is attacked by someone they love, then as the victim turns, they go after the ones they love. It’s been the same story since the survivors got off the plane and started to return home. It’s really not much different here, except we know Kelly slightly better.
However, Kelly’s conclusion in “Loved Ones” does have a twist, where she is called upon by The Master, and appears to be one of the few special people he “chooses.” We have no idea why—it doesn’t seem like Eph is really the biggest threat to The Master, but maybe it’s just a way to get into Setrakian’s group. While Kelly’s story has mostly been about custody battles and keeping Eph away, at least she now seems to have something happening to her that is worth the screen time.
On the other hand, let’s talk Zach Goodweather. Man, this is some straight up embarrassing child acting. He hasn’t been all that bad prior to this, but in “Loved Ones” he’s often performing by himself, which highlights some flaws. There’s the scene where he gets frustrated trying to get wifi, and then the scene where he’s watching the incredibly painful birthday video, shot by his now-vampiric mother. All of this made for some very over-the-top deliveries.
Most of the episode is dedicated to Kelly. It feels like a growth episode, an attempt to evolve some of these characters into something bigger. For example, Fet and Dutch try to sneak into the Stoneheart group to fix the hacking problems Dutch started. What this does is takes Fet, a character that was immediately likable, and throws him in with Dutch, a character whose intentions are still largely questionable, in order to make her more palatable. Putting these two together inside the Stoneheart Group immediately makes that plot far more interesting than it has been this entire season, especially by giving Palmer’s assistant-of-sorts Fitzwilliams some actual depth, for once.
“Loved Ones” does a fine job of expanding the storylines for these troubled characters. It’s a nice setup for where the end of the season and next season might be headed, and tells us that some big changes surely on the horizon.
Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.