Lydia West | Through the Shattered Lens

Happy Horrorthon! Part 3!!! Drac is back…..ALRIGHT!!!! So, I decided to break this up and give Part 3 its very own post! Dracula needs to face his inner-self and see what makes him tick and fear. Dracula is in the 21st century in an underground secret lab because…why not?! It kept the story fresh and there’s nothing fresher than seeing a private industry emulate bloated government spending.

He’s not there as long as you’d think because Drac got lawyered up and he fed on Agatha’s descendent, BUT she has cancer and it is poisonous to Old Drac. This creates a good plot twist and has a great payoff at the story’s end. This episode tries to plug in the ideas from the book into this modern twist. However, it wasn’t flawless; the Renfield character never really worked for me because the actor kept playing it for comic relief and thought he was in a Benny Hill sketch. Nina played it well. She represented the Information Age: the veneer of sophistication, but really it is just narcissism with an iPhone.

Nina gets into Drac and claims to not fear age or death, but that’s easy to say when you’re young, hot, and everyone wants to get into your britches. Then, once she got turned into a vampire and was burned into a horrible crisp, she couldn’t get staked fast enough! Nina does do more than just become the world’s greatest Roomba achievement; Nina allows Drac to have a mental breakthrough.

Even though Nina was not really as intrepid about death as she claimed, her purported fearlessness attracted Drac for a reason and Agatha 2.0 was going to find out why! Drac is a Veteran. He wanted to die in battle with honor, but he wasn’t able to do so. His continued existence is his shame. Instead of dying in battle, he feared death, forcing him to live as a monster coward. Therefore, his final act of forgiving himself was to drink the poisoned blood of Agatha 2.0.

Her blood, her love, her life, gave Dracula what he needed- Death. Dracula gave Agatha what she needed: to touch the mystical and, by doing so, she touched the face of God. See, I told you it was a love story.

Happy Horrorthon fellow travelers. It’s been a awhile. I’ve been struggling with engineering classes and it’s been hard to set time aside for this essential part of my life. How does this relate to Dracula? Dracula at its core is an unrequited love story. It drips with sanguine hopes and failed dreams (pun intended). Really, we’ve all that relationship that we really wanted, but it was always doomed, doomed, doomed.

I got to enjoy this mini-series the best way possible: a live tweet with the TSL staff. Back to Dracula, this series was originally broadcast on the BBC. It took Dracula from the past to the present. I have read most of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s kinda boring, which is why the first episode was uneven in terms of excitement because it held close to the book, which was b o r i n g. Part I established Dracula at home. As in the book, he wanted to see the World, meet new and interesting people in England, and eat them.

To whet his appetite and get waaaaay younger, he decided to feast on a lawyer- Jonathan Harker. This Dracula gets all the memories and knowledge from the people he feeds on, which begs the question: Why travel anywhere? Just hang out at a train station and snack on people. Come on, Drac! I did like how the first episode set up the Courtly Love Interest – Agatha Van Helsing; she’s a Nun with ice water in her veins.

Sister Agatha (Van Helsing) gets a visitor at her convent – Jonathan Harker. He looks dead…well undead. He even has a fly crawl across his eyeball without him noticing. Flies buzzing and crawling about eyeballs is a big theme in this mini-series; you just have to get used to it.

Jonathan describes meeting the Count under the presumption of a land holding trans… sorry I dozed off there. The book was a lot like that too. It would have exciting moments and then BAM… Back to the real estate transactions! As Jonathan stays at the Count’s castle, the Count gets younger and he gets older. His lifeforce is drained away. In fact, all of his memories get drained away as well to the Count after one feeding ah ah ah and then two feedings ah ah ah.. Jonathan appears to succumb to the Count and feel nothing, but his resignation is all an act. DUN DUN DUN!

Jonathan is searching for a way out of the castle and it works….kinda. I mean he ends up at a convent and we learn that he’s undead and under the power of Dracula. This is gleaned from Sister Agatha who relentlessly interrogates …well everyone. I wish she were my best friend. She attracts a lot of monsters, but nobody’s perfect.

Unfortunately, Dracula can sense Jonathan and he has pursued him to the convent. This is where Dracula meets the true love of his life Sister Agatha. She’s fearless, smart, and scientific; the opposite of everyone else whom Dracula encounters. Agatha is a force of reason like Dracula is a force of nature. He represents feudalism and magic, she enlightenment and technocratic future. She is what he aspires to be, but cannot. She hopes that in solving the mystery of Dracula she will understand the mystical and develop her elusive affinity with God.

Of course, by getting close to understand Dracula, Agatha inadvertently allows Dracula to enter the convent and eat everyone, including……her and he does it by wearing a dead man’s face. That was awesome! Gotta see it again!

Two and three will post tomorrow!!!!