1.10 Let There Be Light I think the largest part of my resentment comes from the knowledge that there are a lot of very good writers, actors, and directors working in television right now – creative minds struggling under the weight of cancellation-happy broadcast and cable networks for a shot to tell their stories. So to spend months regularly viewing a show that was spared the obstacles that most have to overcome, watching it fail to rise above a level of uneven mediocrity has been fairly painful. That’s not to say it hasn’t had a few good moments or aspects. Looking back over the course of the series, a couple of things have impressed. Likewise, as I’ve pointed out in previous reviews, Lucy, played by Katie McGrath, has been a revelation. I started the show hating her over-the-top flirtation and posing. But as the weeks have worn on, McGrath has slowly peeled away layers of Lucy to reveal a complicated pastiche of loneliness, spite, vulnerability and pain. In this week’s episode, Lucy makes her first appearance as a vampire, and the young woman largely outclasses Meyer’s depiction of the depraved undead. But in a great many ways, it feels like NBC green-lighting this show without the usual pilot process has done it a disservice (compounded, perhaps, by a lack of effort on the part of the creatives working on the series). The moral, of course, is that the struggle to leave the cocoon is part of the maturation process of the butterfly. That in order for the butterfly to be strong enough to survive, it must develop that strength by fighting its way out of the cocoon. In the world of television, this is the purpose of the pilot process. It’s a difficult hurdle to overcome, and most shows will only ever get a single chance to do this. As a result, the producers of a potential series put everything they have into their creative vision from the very start. But Dracula has suffered, from the beginning, from a surprising sort of half-heartedness. It played at the idea of steampunk Victoriana but ended up lacking a coherent visual style. It had a hint of a critique of robber-baron (and contemporary) capitalism, but this never got further than vaguely aligning financial and religious cravenness. It touched on issues around women’s increasing rejection of misogynist circumscription of acceptable female behavior, but largely forgot all about them when they became inconvenient to the storyline. It is, in a nutshell, a tale and a production adrift. It lacks the focus, vision, and inspiration necessary to make such a series work. Which is why I was not terribly surprised at this week’s finale. Several plotlines were finished in Let There Be Light, but few of them in a fulfilling way. Two of the most disappointing were Van Helsing’s vengeance on Browning and the death of Lady Jayne. In the first, Van Helsing turns Browning’s children, lures their father to a ransom drop site, and then set the baby vamps on their father before burning the place down. Granted, he is a man so driven by blinding vengeance that he’s raised the greatest vampire of all time to help him, but in the end, we’re left wondering why all this was necessary in the first place. If all he ever intended to do was kill both Browning and his children, he had no need of Dracula, the “geomagnetic” technology or the daywalker science in the first place. I’m not altogether convinced that this sudden realization wasn’t the reason for the poorly executed scream Kretschmann’s Van Helsing lets loose outside the burning building. In the end, even Meyers became largely unwatchable, and that’s downright shocking. As the weeks have worn on, as his character was supposedly growing inpatient and abandoning his plan in favor of a frontal assault on his enemies, Meyers inversely seems to be losing steam rather than gaining it. The energy of earlier episodes has slowly seeped away, as have his trademark glint and seductive style. As he stands in front of the crowd ready to reveal his technology to the masses (who seem awfully forgetful of the recent “public danger” it posed), there’s little of the showman from the first exhibition in the first episode. He looks tired and resigned. Meyers admitted last year, in an interview with Radio Times, that he was “slightly horrified” that The Tudors had gone four series. He didn’t enjoy “going into work in the same studio with the same people, uttering your lines in the same costume…” But none of that showed in his depiction of Henry. After only ten weeks, however, he seems far wearier of his latest project. He’s certainly done little to promote it since its initial premiere. But I think that’s understandable, given the circumstances. Complain as he might about The Tudors, he was surrounded by actors giving sharp performances, working from a great script, based on a powerful and involving vision. Not so on Dracula. And he must know it. Read Laura’s review of the previous episode, Four Roses, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
