If tonight’s first episode of “Van Helsing” is any indication of how the series will progress, I predict it to be a short season.
In this review, I won’t bother with the first few minutes of the show where they have a fast forward flash scene to keep the audience watching. So, here is what we learned in the first episode of Van Helsing.
(Warning Spoiler Alert)
Before the show starts, we read:
2019
Three years since “The Rising” began.
Civilization has fallen.
Vampires rule the streets.
Only whispers of a human savior.
After reading this, I’m assuming that “The Rising” began in 2016 and it is now three years later.
After the flash forward scene, we see a brunette woman lying unconscious on an operating room table. The camera then focuses on a soldier in a separate room, feeding his blood through an IV tube to a female vampire in a cage.
He is talking to the woman, who is obviously a vampire, about how he misses Subway sandwiches and Kit Kat candy bars. So, it is safe to assume he has been there awhile. (I wonder how much they paid for that verbal product placement.)
The soldier then hears some people yelling from outside. As he goes to investigate, we visually learn that he has barricaded himself inside a building with the vampire in a cage and the unconscious woman. As he reaches the front door he refuses to let anyone in until he is given an order to open the door from one of the people outside.
The soldier lets about a half-dozen people into his barricaded building. The person who gave him the order turns out to be a former marine that left that location six months earlier. As the two marines talk, we learn that their mission was to recover a body from that building three years earlier. We then find out that everyone from the mission was killed except for the unconscious woman and the female vampire in the cage. She is kept alive because she is a scientist of some kind.
That same night, some vampires happen to get inside the building. Three of the vampires go into the room where the woman is lying unconscious and one of them bits her. Right away, we see the vampire that bit her have a reaction to the woman’s blood. The bite also awakens the woman where she immediately kills the other two vampires in a bloody fight.
Her fighting skills are that of an expert fighter. Pretty good for someone who has been asleep for three years. You would think that muscle atrophy would have set in after being asleep for three years. But not in her case.
After all the vampires have been killed and disposed of, we then learn that the formerly unconscious woman’s name is Vanessa. She has no memory of “The Rising” and is only interested in finding her daughter.
I found it a bit unusual that she had been asleep for three years but looks perfectly normal. When they show her asleep on the table, I saw no IVs running into her arms. However, I did see a bunch of heat lamps shining on her. At least that is what they looked like. It was a poor scientifically accurate scene to show that they had to keep someone alive for three years. Perhaps they didn’t have the budget for some scientific equipment, even though we learn that the building they are in is an abandoned hospital.
Perhaps Vanessa doesn’t need to eat either. If your asleep, you can’t eat. And with no IV’s in her, how did she get her nourishment. Maybe they just stuck a tube down her throat three times a day for three years. Who knows. This is truly one of the unknown mysteries of the story.
Having no memory of the past three years, Vanessa is told that after a volcano erupted, people started killing each other and turning into vampires. How a volcano of molten lava turned people into vampires is also a mystery. However, if that is what they say happened then we will just have to go with that story. I’m sure some scientist will eventually explain it all to us in a later episode.
The resident marine will not allow anyone to leave the building, including Vanessa. But the second marine manages to get Vanessa alone and offers to help her escape so she can find her daughter.
As the two are trying to escape, the resident marine catches them. As the two marines fight, Vanessa manages to get to the roof where we all see that the entire city looks like it is on fire. Then when both marines and Vanessa are all on the roof, the second marine reveals his real intentions.
It seems that he wants to turn Vanessa over to the vampires, dead or alive. He thinks it will stop the vampires from attacking people in some way. He then says that they did terrible things to his insides, but gave no details. This part of the dialog felt a little forced because all we know so far is that these vampires are a lot like mindless zombies and just go around attacking humans. Perhaps we will find out later. Also, why he is not a vampire after being captured is also a mystery.
Vanessa manages to escape from the marine that wants to turn her over to the vampires. The marine then sticks a large knife in Vanessa’s hand and she uses it to kill the marine, while it is still in her hand, mind you. After she removes the knife from her hand, the wound heals by itself within a minute in front of everyone, showing that she is not a normal human.
Finally, at the end of the show, we hear a voice coming from the area where they disposed all the dead vampires they had killed. We discover that the voice is coming from the vampire that bit Vanessa while she was sleeping, but somehow he is now human again. End of the first episode.
So in short, it seems that Vanessa’s blood can turn vampires back into humans. Great. Now the question is, will the blood of the vampire that was turned back into a human also turn other vampires back into humans? If so then all they have to do is release that one that used to be a vampire back outside. After a few vampires bite him, they will turn into humans and other vampires will bite them until all the vampires are human again.
This reminds me of the movie, “Daybreakers”, with Ethan Hawke. Ethan found a cure for being a vampire, which remained in his blood after he became human. Every vampire that bit him became human and they then carried the cure. Then other vampires fed off those turned vampires, and so on, and so on. We assume that due to this cure, the vampire virus is irradiated.
However, I suspect that only Vanessa’s blood will turn vampires back into humans. Therefore, all they need to do is take a few pints of her blood each day and put it into dart guns. With every vampire they hit with a dart, they will get some of her blood and become human again. Eventually, over time, the vampire problem will be solved.
In my opinion, I see a lot of holes in this story line. If the writers don’t plug them up with some creditable information soon, this series will die after only one season. I hope the second episode will be more revealing.
