The year is 2019. Thanks to a massive cloud of volcanic ash covering at least the Western United States, vampires shamble the streets of Seattle in sunlit impunity. At the Seattle Valley General Hospital, a single US Marine (Jonathan Scarfe, Hell on Wheels) stands lonely watch over a woman who has been asleep for three years. According to the doctor turned vampire now ravening in a caged corner of the ward, this woman might hold the secret to saving the world. Of course it’s time for “sleepy beauty” (Kelly Overton, True Blood) to wake up.
The latest offering from SyFy promises us an action filled romp in a bloody post-apocalyptic future filled with two of television’s favorite things: vampires and zombies. Like many of it’s other genre TV offerings, with Van Helsing, SyFy expects us to buckle in for a long ride. The slow burn of old-school post-apocalypse stories is on full display in the two hour season premiere, but with none of the usual contemplation. With the first hour devoted to 2019, and the second to 2016 showing us how our core trio of characters arrived where they are today, it’s hard not to feel like perhaps the show runners (Simon Barry and Jonathan Lloyd Walker, Continuum) are taking themselves a little too seriously. By the time our penniless protagonist is wandering her enormous apartment, a lopsided birthday cake with burning candles in hand, the coming tragedy feels so telegraphed that the tension is gone. Despite it’s best efforts at creating a brand new hook for the apocalypse, it stumbles in the exact manner of some of it’s more expensive and heavily marketed forebears. It’s boring and in TV Land full of options, tedium is a stake to the heart of any brand new show.
There is a nerdy social theory which states that when Republican’s are in power, horror turns to vampires. The Grand Old Party apparently smells of elitism, greed, and hidden agendas. Alternately, when Democrats are on the rise, our terror is directed against the faceless hordes of shambling, mindless, work a day zombies. Perhaps then with our current election cycle, and as everyone claims everyone else’s candidate is the coming apocalypse, it’s appropriate that the vampires in Van Helsing are apparently some kind of vampire/zombie. No stakes to the heart, here a bullet will do. No need for complicated rituals of transference, a simple bite is enough to turn someone into a zompire in mere minutes.
Which is to say, boring though it may be, perhaps the executives at SyFy are on to something. If the theory holds true, we might need a little bi-lateral zompire killing action and Van Helsing, like the worst kind of election, might just be starting slow. Its no Firefly or Breaking Bad, but there’s good precedent elsewhere on television for shambling pilots growing fangs in the end.
