Previously on Dracula: Servant to Two Masters.

I hate to say it, but I’m honestly glad that there’s only two more episodes to this season, which is getting more and more ridiculous.

I mean it, it’s a mess. I considered abandoning the project over Christmas break, but then reasoned that with only ten episodes, six down, four to go, I might as well stick it out. I am sort of regretting it now, because getting up to write 500+ words on this every Saturday is becoming something of a chore.

Frankly, the plot is a complete mess, the characters’ motivations and actions are in utter disarray, and I cannot tell you how much the characterisation of the women in this piece angers me.

The entire show would work without Mina, but for the fact that Dracula believes she’s his reincarnated wife and is madly in love with her. She doesn’t drive the plot, the other characters drive her. Everything she does happens in reaction to something either her father, her academic mentor, her fiancé, or her almost-lover tell her. That’s it. She exists in relation to these characters, and she wouldn’t have to be there at all if she weren’t Grayson and Harker’s love interest. That’s it. That’s who Mina is. Every time I think they finally give her some gumption, it’s undercut by something else that reveals her passivity. Dracula is scorned at the fact that she seems to be using her brain to refuse his involvement in her life — and we’re supposed to identify and empathise with him, right? We’re angry at Mina for cutting him out of her life, when all he wants to do is dismantle the Order of the Dragon and get his dead wife back, the poor man. Harker doesn’t believe her when she tells him she’s not having an affair with Grayson — dirty thoughts and dreams and attraction aside, she did nothing that would have crossed the line. Yet, her fiancé — who claims to love her so much and expects her to just take it when he says ‘there should be no secrets between us’ and THEN proceeds to keep secrets from her because, clearly, he’s the one who must handle this on his own — doesn’t believe her. Her father’s the only one who hands some of the agency over to her, who sees the attraction between her and Grayson, and says nothing when both her husband-to-be and the man she’s attracted to appear at her bedside after the attack. He tells her to follow her heart — except we know nothing about Mina’s heart.

She doesn’t get to express it. When Dracula tells her the truth — she’s fucking unconscious! She won’t know any of what he just told her. Dracula, Van Helsing, and Harker are all so damn busy keeping the most important facts from Mina that she’s completely dependent on them for every morsel of information she gets. She can’t follow her heart, because she can’t even make up her mind.

“I belong to you, and you belong to me.”

Very funny. How about the lady gets a say in the matter?

Oh, but of course, because Grayson completely loves her, he’ll probably get the girl in the end, no matter how many times she tells him to go screw himself in the meantime. Reincarnation and all that.

At the same time, Lady Jayne chucks Grayson out of her mansion and gets to show off her awesome huntswoman fighting powers against an equally strong female vampire. All very good. If there weren’t the slight complication that it’s so obviously played that she wants Grayson to leave because she’s jealous of Mina. Just as he predicted, she’s fallen in love with him. A woman, slave to her emotions. When she says, I’ll find Dracula, all I can suggest is she look between her legs. Well, not anymore.

Also, how dumb is everyone on this show? That painting is visibly old, it’s over 300 years old. How can no-one tell that, 10 years ago, this portrait of Mina could not have been painted, because at the time she was about all of twelve and Grayson wasn’t even in the country. 300 YEAR-OLD PAINTING. HELLO. And now that Harker’s shot Davenport dead and Van Helsing has just bloody well kidnapped Browning’s children, the storyline is one complete mess. The show has utterly failed to keep the several narratives, especially the ones of Dracula wanting Mina and Grayson fighting against the Order of the Dragon, balanced in a way that gives the whole storytelling coherence and cohesion. Poke this show with a stick and it falls apart.

Oh, and now Jonathan is so hurt by what he thinks is Mina’s betrayal that he just goes off to shag Lucy. Right. While Mina is thrown completely under the bus and conveniently bound to sickbed and/or unconscious, Harker will draw from this determination and “strength of character” and actually go do stuff. Lovely.

Next: Four Roses.