NBC's Dracula: Episode 9, Four Roses.

The three single stems Alexander brings hospitalized Mina are obvious. It’s this episode’s eponymous fourth rose that blooms when Dracula says, “If you’re going to behave like a monster, then I’m going to make you one”, as the story finally has Lucy get turned, but in an act of hatred over the original one of desire. Yet, if you’re going to shoot a bloodletting & bloodgiving scene in a picturesque milk bath chamber you’ve already spent tons making & lighting, use the contrast of liquids, and the blooming infectious cloud of blood permeating the milk in an overhead shot. Instead they chose neck gore over subtle cinematic poetry.

Also this episode continues the trumping up of Lady Jayne’s concerns about an increasing vampire incursion in London. If there’s an epidemic of ghastly proportions infesting the whole metropolis, let’s see the rolling of victims, a pub takeover, dead bobbies as the corpse of authority, or dirty street urchins strewn about like empty bags that were neither cared for by Victorian society alive nor dead ... but they certainly would when they rise undead to feed on them.

Instead we do get one scene of Dracula leading his “relatives in from the continent” to take out some of the lesser known Order of the Dragon, but despite their awesome damask waistcoats, they’re just not-so-elegant hissing monsters sporting unfortunate bulgy mouthed dental prosthesis.

[No, why bother hiring an accomplished professional fangsmith like Dnash, when one can cut corners with huge plastic caps? It’s only a really expensive & risky primetime major network show with tenuous ratings.]

And Mina’s reflection vision of herself as Ilona in the gutter scene, while a good idea, terribly bad execution. With so much sophistication plotted and built one minute, there’s hardly much time wasted in yanking the carpet out from under the same foundations. It’s surely unintended, but at times one feels that there’s a “oh, that’s good enough” ethic that erodes the result.

Plotwise, things only set themselves up for what may just be an anticlimactic end of season: Harker ensconces himself with the Order of the Dragon, continuing to prove he’s the biggest patsycake ever. And in another echo of past things, Mina throws Lucy out of a whole hospital upon Lucy’s passive confession of jerkface Harker’s tryst.

More interestingly, Mina’s modern directness gives Alexander the opening he needs, her admitting to inner knowledge she’s metaphysically connected to lost Ilona, but in a fit of vampire guilt, Dracuxander doesn’t take the opening by finally confessing his love. It’s a great moment hampered by unnecessary restraint, especially since Davenport’s threat’s been removed from the board. Also mentioned by Lady Jayne, the “Sanguine Sanctorum” has been loaned to her team of hunters from the Vatican. Whatever this item is, we’re dying to find out.

And most vengefully rogue, it seems Van Helsing may have injected Browning’s kids with his apothecary jars of Dracula’s blood before deciding to ransom them for £50K (oh, about £21M today!). If the implication of the syringes is correct, the series’ creepiness factor may multiply “‘Salem’s Lot”-style with Browing either getting eaten by his own offspring, or being put in the position of having to drive steaks through their tiny hearts! Well done, Van Helsing!

With Harker’s granting the Order the blueprints to Grayson’s transmitter, it seems hopeless that a big science ending’s going to prevail. Browning’s demands for a catastrophe may happen on both sides, and one has to suppose that a fat cliffhanger full of debris and smoke’s all we’re going to get … unless Dracula placed faux plans for Harker to steal, but that’s probably overthinking it.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

NBC's Dracula: Episode 8, Come to Die.

Whenever there’s a gun introduced into a vampire story, it’s a groaner since the audience knows a gun's an ineffectual weapon against a vampire*, so when it happens this episode it doesn’t hold any dramatic water ... unless the writers totally surprise you by getting their most gutless character to shoot someone for the vampire!

Finally the all fallout we've been waiting for as the season comes closer to its finale: Harker shoots Davenport! Lady Jayne breaks it off with Alexander (again)! Renfield throws down with Dracula! Jonathan casts Mina off in a final fit of distrust! Lucy’s faux seduction works too well as Harker gives her a go! Van Helsing krampuses Browning’s children!

Out of the above, seeing Renfield dish out tough love to Dracula reverses their usual cinematic relationship again. Renfield actually tells Dracula what not to do, restrains him physically, then stops him by strength of reason.

All this passionate interplay aside, the most clever contribution to the vampire lore was huntress Lady Jayne pouring a flask of holy water down her captives’ throats, and having their mouths erupt in black blood baking soda deathcanoes!

Setwise, while I’d first join many of the Pall Mall clubs to enjoy their furniture instead, one must say the Order Of the Dragon's got beautiful chesterfields in their hideout. Also we spot some really fetching gold rimmed tri-foot teacups!

Visually there’s really not too much experimental or cinematic loanage going on, which is a shame (with the exception of Dracula tossing Renfield into stairs, sort of like Renfield’s death in the 1931 version). Certainly this was a high drama character blowout, but maybe some practical vertigo effects for Harker’s post-murder nausea, or canted whip pans as he runs away from the scene, but instead we only get the usual costume piece camerawork.

It’s all up in the air, and it’ll be thrilling to see where it lands in the next two shows! Anyone care to make some guesses? Odds are Harker redeems himself by pushing Dracula into his power transmitter, which explodes into irreproducible fragments, revealing the still living Browning brats in a sub-basement, giving Harker enough press to permanently blow the lid off the Order in the first viral infowave, gets pardoned, and wins Lucy’s hand back for being the big hero he really isn’t. Yet I really still want to see it go like in my last paragraph of the episode 2 commentary, but I’m thinking the writers can’t see it that world changing “Fight Club” (film, not differing book) alternate history ending, which would more surely secure them a second season. We’ll see what the coffin of television holds in store next week.
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* Yes, there are good exceptions, like Underworld.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Byatt's Ragnarök: re-purposing mythology.

After reading trendy Eggers' underwhelming recent essay on the D'Aulaires' childhood classic Norse Gods & Giants (which one already knows is wondrous all-ages magic without his stamp of uninsightful approval), running across celebrated A.S. Byatt doing her take on Norse lore was an offering Nine Worlds better.

Known for one of the most refined epistolary novels, the Booker Prize winning Possession (1990), which will rip your heart out and make it pump tears of saddest sad sadness, one can only imagine the Wagnerian angst & pathos such a talent could lend to the verses of the Gods. Yet the tender Possession and the Icelandic skald Snorri Sturluson's mythopoeic collection are also worlds away from each other, and the gap shows at times.

[Friedrich Wilhelm Heine's "Kampf der untergehenden Götter" (1882).]

In Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), Byatt brings her own modern insights into the built-in eschatology of the Northmen. While she's hardly the first one to do this academically or creatively, having her mind turned toward a personal interpretation gives one surprising perspective on Asgard and its gods. While many dismiss Loki as an antagonist for antagonism's sake (or conversely worship him [semi- or even non-apologetically] as a divine medium of difficult change & transformation), Byatt presents Loki less as a god of mischief and more as an explorer of the patterns found in chaos theory, an outsider by nature of his extremely inquisitive, and possibly superior, mind. This also lets us to see how the higher functioning Odin continues to allow his both disruptive but useful presence as a blood brother and travel companion, as Odin may have more in common with Loki on intellectual levels than the others of his heavenly house. Byatt also puts forward the theory that Loki is part of the original triumvirate who creates man & woman from an ash & elder tree, and specifically is able to contribute to the miracle of mankind by transmuting the tree's sap into blood, making him far more integral to humanity's story. She also explains that Odin ascends to be the ruler over his two man-making peers as he sacrifices himself, his eye, and identity, for ecstatic knowledge.

Byatt also a offers a psychological take on the monstrous wolves who chase the sun & moon across the sky as "wolves of the mind", an ever-present built-in idea of the intellect's potential for self-destruction manifest as the ravening creatures that threaten to swallow the sources of illumination in ourselves & the world. Plus she posits that if the wolves weren't there as the clockwork that drives day into night and night into day, there would be no demarcations of time or season without them, and no universal/internal motivators to keep ourselves achieving instead of descending into darkness or lassitude.

Framing all this re-appropriation of the lore is Byatt herself presented as "the thin, pale child", a nameless girl displaced into the countryside by the Blitzkrieg of World War II (much like a Pevensie of Narnia), with naught much else but a copy of a Norse mythology book to give her some strange & fantastic comfort. The child's voice is hardly that of a child, but of our 75-year-old authoress looking back at herself, and at the Heathen legends that fascinated her far more than the compulsory trips to monotheistic church or a secular schoolhouse.

Outside the lines, Ragnarok succeeds as a commentary of amazement with a wonderfilled personal embellishment, an ambitious filling out of the cosmology. Most inventive is Randrasill, the undersea skeletal analogue to Yggdrasil, her construct equally full of life, giving the reader a deepwater survey of the aquatic legion that surrounds Midgard. Exiled into this world by Odin, Byatt also performs another first by presenting a POV from world serpent Jormungandr, and adding scenes of Loki's fathership in raising his daughter from simple sea snake into an ominous ouroboros.

Less than these two inventions, Byatt lends her explanations to the Baldur story. One always questions that if Baldur's death means the worlds' end, why would the gods make a game of throwing potentially deadly things at him? Yet once the gods come up with it, "Hit the Baldur" isn't just an afternoon novelty but the best-game-ever invented, and they find they can't stop from playing. One also questions why if Frigga went through the trouble of ranging the whole of the Nine Worlds to obtain a promise from everything animate & inanimate, how did mistletoe get neglected? We find that mistletoe appeared in the world just after this infinite contract was closed, that it was still childlike and "too young to make a promise", leaving its innocence open for Loki's manipulation into a weapon.

When Ragnarok does unfold, another in-battle perspective Byatt presents is that Thor doesn't realize he's been poisoned until it's too late, turning to brag to the Aesir that he bested his nemesis and lived, only to fall to the venom on his ninth & very last step.

[Marvel Thor is not amused.]

Vocabulary of note is the repeated use of the fatalistic word "ineluctable", and the admirable neologism "ur-book". ("Ur-book"! Wow!)

Conclusions? Ultimately there's no payoff with the Nazi threat, or the conflict inherent in her Germanic heritage, or a ratification of a Heathen worldview, so the framework for the storytelling's inconclusive as it never comes back around to the pale child who is Byatt in any satisfying way. There could've been a sort of Teutons versus Angles call-forward, an examination of the "wolves" that drive the conflict of war, like natio/tribal fascism, and comment on the necessity of preparation for war, but none of these ideas are ever truly exercised.

Byatt uses parts of Ragnarok as an allegory on our inability to save the world, to change our story, and in her afterword goes so far as to place her interpretation's concern for the world as an ecological one, which is a thoroughly modern use. The disconnect here's evident: Byatt's contemporary purpose is not the timeless purpose of the lore. Not to say that the Norse creation/apocalypse doesn't contain everything (oh it surely does), but the tenuousness of physical existence more reflects man's barely sustainable grasp in a world of forces that defies his daily living with an unrelenting ice & harsh frost that deny him resources and its impact on him, as opposed to his impact on it. If one can bypass this mis-inversion, there's alot of other grand exploration to be had in Byatt's otherwise earnest rendition the Norse lore. Like in Possession, there's a strong lifelong and even more cosmic love here that cannot be denied.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.