There are times when “The Dark Compass” justifies the decision to time-shift the final chapter of the Dracula story 123 years into the vampire’s future—into 2020, in other words. One of the best comes early, as Count Dracula surveys a random woman’s home, observing that her television and appliances represent luxuries beyond the comprehension of any of his noble contemporaries. “I knew the future would bring wonders,” he says. “I never imagined it would make them ordinary.” It’s one of the vampire’s most reflective moments, even if it is juxtaposed with the woman’s undead husband still crammed into a fridge somewhere in the background. As the subsequent flashback to Dracula’s arrival on the beach makes clear, advanced technology doesn’t flummox the count, as he immediately recognizes the video camera for what it is. He may not be from 2020, but nor is he really from 1897 either, and the time jump helps bring out the fact that he has always been a man—or monster, as the case may be—out of time, relying on his considerable intellect and aristocratic presumption to see him through.
There’s a version of “The Dark Compass” that gives itself over entirely to exploring these ideas, but after that initial section we only get glimpses of how the 21st century reshapes Dracula’s existence. His observation to his lawyer and mesmerized servant Frank Renfield that he never used to have to exercise s is especially tantalizing, as the suggestion there is that Dracula leeches off the strength of those he devours, yet living in the 21st century is so easy compared with the existences of our ancestors that we have far less to offer him as sustenance. Dracula’s most perceptive moments have come when it explores what a vampire is, not in terms of the apparent rules or how it fits in with the folklore but rather what it actually means conceptually. Dracula is a being of immense power, yet all of it comes from what he steals from humanity. Now he finds himself in an era where humans have much the same relationship with the planet itself. Blood is lives, but what value are those lives in a world of easy, empty opulence? No wonder Dracula has to work harder to survive in such a strange land.
To their credit, these are the kinds of connections that Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss excel at making. But “The Dark Compass” illustrates, the trouble is that their various creative instincts, any one of which is promising in isolation, eventually become irreconcilable. The story wants to go down the rabbit hole of translating Dracula to the 21st century, which means piling on lots of ridiculous lore around the Jonathan Harker Foundation. The theoretical value of moving the story to the present day is to do away with all the Victorian context that otherwise needs translating and cut to the heart of the story’s appeal—that was the initial promise of Sherlock, after all—but Moffat and Gatiss have never been able to keep things simple for long. The closest antecedent for this episode is the back half of Moffat’s Jekyll, which similarly takes what had been a focused, intriguing take on the original story and got distracted with conspiracies and secret organizations and just so, so much tangential mythology. In that show’s case, I actually think all that silliness just about worked, as crucially the show was always revisionist. It’s still weird that all these shows pile on complexity even when the ultimate goal is to boil the entire story down to a single profound line—and we’ll get to the question of whether this particular Moffat gambit pays off in a bit—but it’s easier to find such messiness endearing when, like Jekyll, the show is never actually attempting a straight adaptation.
Dracula, on the other hand, still insists on recounting the final section of Bram Stoker’s story. With Jonathan Harker properly dead and Mina Murray left behind in the 19th century, the focus falls instead to the beautiful Lucy Westenra, Dracula’s would-be bride, and her suitors. Well, I say suitors, as there were three of them in the novel, but of these Arthur Holmwood is adapted out—though he might be the vague inspiration for Lucy’s friend Zev—and American cowboy Quincey Morris is reduced to an assholish bit part. That just leaves Jack Seward, a junior doctor whose brief employ with the Jonathan Harker Foundation is what connects Dracula with Lucy in the first place. Much like the previous episode “Blood Vessel” got a lot of mileage out of the mood and atmosphere of a cursed voyage on the foggy seas, “The Dark Compass” attempts something similar with Lucy and her retinue. It’s just now that the setting is the London club scene, with one of the more striking images coming when Dracula first wanders into this alien environment and beholds his ultimate target.
But beyond that one image, this all feels so apart from everything else Dracula is trying to do. That needn’t be the case, as it’s not hard to see how all this could link up with a more recent source of vampire iconography. A lot of “The Dark Compass” feels like it’s wandering in the vague vicinity of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where most of the biggest plot and character beats unfolded at either the local nightclub or the graveyard, both of which Dracula visits tonight. Jack’s staking of Lucy feels particularly evocative, with the vampire crumbling to dust in what very much looks like a 2020 update of the old Buffy effect. I don’t want to oversell any of this, especially since graveyards and stakes have plenty of vampire fiction antecedents, and the Buffy vibe might be entirely coincidental.
Indeed, my real point is that this section represents Dracula at its most muddled, struggling to pull a deeper meaning out of its adherence to the source material despite the fact its interests really seem to have wandered elsewhere. Even Lucy’s transformation, which helps set up the big reveal of Dracula’s great secret, is more powerful in terms of the show’s tangential exploration of undeath as a mysterious condition that afflicts the world. The horror of her situation comes from her being cremated while still conscious, rather than anything all that specifically to do with the count. Her total nihilism and unprecedented willingness to let Dracula feed on her are potentially interesting departures from the book Lucy’s depiction as a paragon of sweetness, as her role here is not as the corrupted innocent but rather as a disaffected wanderer through life. Her life isn’t so different from Dracula’s undeath.
Dracula attempts to wring its big theme out of the story with Lucy, as the combined consciousnesses of Sister Agatha and Dr. Zoe Van Helsing make one last push to deduce just what it is that governs Dracula’s existence. The insistence that all the different rules around direct sunlight, fear of the cross, and requiring an invitation to enter an abode are all manifestations of one unifying thing is pure Moffat gambit, and he and Gatiss try their damnedest to weld that to Dracula’s infatuation with Lucy. The proffered explanation is that Dracula is, at his heart, an ancient warlord who is desperate for the one thing everyone else in his bloodline attained but that he can’t have, which is the honor of a hero’s grave. He yearns for death yet is terrified of it, and so Lucy’s apparent love of death bewitched him. Or perhaps it’s that Dracula is so deeply, innately ashamed of his own continued existence that Lucy’s utter disaffection from any such judgment spoke to him in ways he could not understand.
None of this quite works, at least not in the context of Dracula and Lucy’s relationship. Here the show’s adherence to the source material does it in, as none of this really scans. What works better, as has been the case throughout the miniseries, is the relationship between the count and Van Helsing. Facing her imminent death for the second time in as many episodes, Van Helsing—in Zoe’s body but speaking with Sister Agatha’s voice—offers Dracula the brutal wisdom he has been looking for all these centuries, whether he knows it or not: “You seek to conquer death, but you cannot until you face it without fear.” Her ability to do so, both in 1897 and in 2020, is at the heart of her victory over him.
Again, this doesn’t really land as it ought to. It happens too fast and feels too apart from what “The Dark Compass” has spent most of its time exploring. But it at least keeps the focus on Dracula and Van Helsing, which means even where the writing falls short the show can turn to its actors to try to paper over the cracks. Claes Bang, in particular, does a lot of work with the count’s reactions to Van Helsing’s big speech, as he peels away all of Dracula’s arrogance to reveal the terrified lost soul beneath. Dolly Wells similarly elevates the material, merging her two incarnations of Van Helsing into one, switching accents to bring the story full circle in a way its themes as written can’t manage to. The final image, in which a mutually dying Dracula and Van Helsing lie wrapped in a lover’s embrace inside the sun, is a last, bonkers gesture toward ideas bigger and sillier than Dracula can pull off. “The Dark Compass” ends undone by its unwillingness to pick which one thing it wants to be: an exploration of Dracula in 2020, a faithful if temporally translated adaptation of the novel, or a look at the relationship between the vampire and his hunter. But there’s enough fascinating weirdness in all three strands to at least make it feel worth its failures.
Stray observations
- The gag about Dracula’s name being the foundation’s wifi password was exactly the right kind of clever: A fun observation that’s obvious the second you hear it but not before. Just generally, Dracula contacting the same law firm that dispatched Jonathan Harker to his castle 123 years ago is a fun way to avoid him spending the whole final episode locked up.
- As Mark Gatiss’s Frank Renfield points out, Dracula really doesn’t all that engaged with his theoretical plot of world domination. That’s another little detail that could perhaps have been expanded upon, but it feels true with the Dracula story as it is generally told, as you have a character who sure appears powerful and ambitious enough to take over the planet, yet is always too distracted by his next meal.
- The cryptic references to the Jonathan Harker Foundation’s mysterious benefactors are apparently intended as a sequel hook, which presumably would require undoing Dracula’s apparent closing death. Honestly though, I can’t help but assume the unknown power behind it all is Klein and Utterson, the seemingly omnipotent corporation behind everything in Jekyll. Listen, I know I’m obsessed. Doesn’t mean I won’t leave you with one last clip for the road.
Oh yes, that’s the stuff.
83 Comments
The focus, which was so sharp in the first two episodes, was almost totally lost which made the whole thing a bit meandering.I liked the conceit, I liked some of the playing with the lore of Dracula’s weaknesses, and I could stand the Johnathan Harker Foundation stuff even though it was amost totally without cohesion.I just could not get involved with the Lucy plot. At all. I couldn’t have been less interested. Whatever hamfisted point they were trying to make about the Instagram generation was completely garbled exceptionally boring.Bit of a letdown at the end really.Oh, who wrote it again? What exactly was I expecting?
Also:Please seek out the accompanying documentary “Mark Gatiss in Search of Dracula”Like all Gatiss helmed documentaries, it’s thoroughly great.
It is . That and his history of horror series are all excellent!
I loved the series, loved the ending (fight me), and I loved the big reveal about the nature of Dracula’s weaknesses.But yeah, I couldn’t get into the Lucy subplot at all, and the post-cremation rubber suit was jarringly, absurdly bad.
I think the show thought we were supposed to be emotionally invested in Jack’s love for Lucy, despite the fact that the show gave us more reasons to root against it than to root for it.
this 100% this. so on point. such a shame. but again, I think they did a great job the first 2 episodes, let’s not dismiss them as bad writers/show runners. when you look around at the scenario of movies and tv right now…they are pretty good. at least they always try to do something different and surprising. all we got from tv lately is stale 80’s nostalgia
Yeah, I certainly don’t dislike Moffatt in the way a lot of people seem to but there are definitely occasions where he seems very pleased with himself for having thought of something and he totally derails whatever he’s doing by chasing what is often actually quite a bad idea.
I think he is one of those writers that could benefit from a tighter studio system behind, with someone just telling him NO. STOP IT. THIS IS NOT DOCTOR WHO. his Tintin was wonderful, I wish he wrote more for hollywood and less for his friends
I…would thank Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright for Tintin
you are probably right, who knows really, but they are all wonderful. I know Moffat never delivered a clean run, but he sure made some exciting, messy, uneven, surprising stuff even when infuriating (like Dracula). I’d love to see more
Dude, watch Coupling.
Coupling was also fantastic, though a COMPLETELY different type of show.
I found it distractingly goofy that the Jonathan Harker institute was set up, ran for over a century, captured Dracula and then placidly let him go when asked to by his lawyer.
I haven’t finished the episode specifically because of that. It was just too irritating. “Secret Deacula-hunting organization thwarted by a lawyer’s vaguely threatening language” is just powerfully stupid.
Yeah, that was a little eye-roll-y.
Alright guys, we’ve been planning this for over 120 years. We’ve got a secret facility, armed mercenaries, choppers, etc. etc. etc. and we’ve captured the most dangerous supernatural being in all of history… I just hope nobody comes to the front door and demands his release using vaguely threatening legalese.
Although I feel like there’s something very British about that too… I can just picture it as a Monty Python sketch.
But did he ask nicely?!?
Of course he asked nicely…Well did he say please?!?He most certainly did sir…Were his credentials verified?!?!?Twice… sir…Bloody hell! Release the prisoner!!!
Yeah, I watched up to that moment tonight, hit pause, and said, “You know, I’m gonna go check the review of this episode on the AVClub, because if the rest of it doesn’t knock it out of the park, I just can’t watch anything so aggressively stupid.” I genuinely enjoyed the first two episodes too and thought the jump to 2020 had promise.
The Jonathan Harker Foundation is secretly engaged in illegal activities in some manner though, as Renfield noted from his comment about the mercanaries, so if they went to the police or the courts they’d be risking sending themselves to prison. It would have been better for humanity to leave Dracula locked up, but they did have some self-interest in not making a scene.
Which is why you don’t even let Renfield in the fucking door. I’m not up to speed on the UK legal system, but “I got a Skype from some random dude who has no record of even existing” hardly seems to be grounds for a search warrant.
The proper response would have been “go ahead. Get a court to order the release of a man who has no evidence of his existence. Or just tell them he’s a 500 year old vampire because the only scenario there where you don’t end up in an asylum is that they believe you and try him for hundreds of murders.”
Exactly!
Yeah, just a “produce a birth certificate or passport” would suffice. Hell, he never should’ve gotten in the door. “Count Dracula? Never heard of him. Oh, somebody Skyped you? Ha ha, funny. Have a nice day!”
I mean he IS an illegal immigrant ( or at the very least entered the country without a passport or going through customs!
Especially as they had mercenaries…
I agree that maybe this got wrapped up a bit too quickly and neatly – but the lawyer clearly had all sorts of leverage here. The Harker institute appears to be a private organization, and they clearly have no right to hold someone against his will. The fact that he is an immigrant and has no documentation is irrelevant. The lawyer is clearly part of a large and well established firm and he has pretty much inarguable evidence that they have kidnapped and imprisoned a man. The Harker institute is also up to a bunch of shady business. So all the lawyer has to do is call the authorities and they will come release Dracula and probably bring down the Harker institute at the same time.So it made sense to me. It made less sense that they gave Dracula a wifi enabled device, but I confess I laughed out loud at the gag that the password was “dracula”.
I was appreciating the story immensely, especially [SPOILERS AHEAD]…Nuns with wood stakes! “An educated woman in a crucifix”! And then suddenly….millenial hate? Contemporary women are shallow/ignorant/uncaring and apparently do not know how to set parental/wifi controls on a tablet given to a 500+ year old vampire???? Also we lose motivation about something that we have spent generations studying because…we can now talk Dracula to death? Such a great story and potential, squandered because Moffat and Gatiss have their heads in the sand. ugh
It was all going so well, then… ugh.
Alas. I loved the first episode and the second was pretty good, as well, but the third is just such a mess that it pretty much killed my enjoyment. The time skip just ensured that there was far too much time wasted on pointless exposition and too little on the actual story, and everything felt rushed and unfinished as a result. Either the series should have been six episodes or they should have done away with the modern day stuff entirely for the whole thing to work.
Revealing that Dracula was a secret sequel to Jekyll, like Split to Unbreakable, would have made the time jump actually worth it.On the whole, I’m mostly just glad the series gave Dolly Wells a great spotlight, and hope she gets a boost from this. Watch Doll and Em, people!
I can’t remember when I hated an ending of a show as much as this one. There’s been underwhelming or disappointing endings, for certain, tha is the nature of storytelling, but at least usually I can kind of understand what they were going for and often even respect the attempt. Here, though, this was baffling, bad and just gross.Even beyond the Van Helsing shaming Dracula to death, which Jesus Christ, during the first two episodes the show was very clear in its portrayl of Dracula as a monstrous predator. Hell, in the first two episodes they had someone imaging a sexual act with someone else before the Drac reveal, at which point they attempt to reject him unsuccessfully, really drawing that parallel to sexual assault. Furthermore Dracula imprisons Van Helsing to take advantage of her and kills all her fellow nuns in a brutal manner, taking that life she belonged to.So the final moments should of course be a moment of romantic love making between Van Helsing and Dracula, because why not. So either the final moment implies that Van Helsing was content with sharing that amorous moment with the predatory monster she had given her life multiple times to destroy or it was Dracula violating her even in her last breathes, even if it was to commit suicide. Like what the hell, Moffat and Gatiss?
There really wasn’t a satisfying reason given as to why a character like Dracula, who so clearly enjoyed being alive, suddenly decided he didn’t want to live anymore. He completely enjoyed killing all those nuns, and clearly loved torturing all those people on that ship.
“It’s 93 million miles away. It can’t affect you.” Sunlight has no effect on life on Earth?
Between this and the whole “I have cancer, so my blood is bad and poisonous to you” idea, as well as Dracula becoming obsessed with a vain, cynical non-entity such as Lucy, I’m trying to think of a finale that could have shredded itself more. What a waste.
Yeah, this depiction of Lucy was not getting it for me either but she was an important part of the original story, so she had to have a place as a willing victim.
It would have been so much more believeable if her blood was poison to him because of chemo. It is literally poison.
A specific form of leukemia toxic to vampires would have been believable, but the show didn’t spell it out that clearly.
That too!
Moffat just can’t let a female character be some sort of mystery box in service of his male protagonists.
For me, the time jump really didn’t work because it felt like a trick for the sake of a trick. I understand and agree with the reviews points what they were going for and there were moments where it felt like there was this message about Dracula’s evil being timeless. It just really didn’t work, especially because the Jonathan Harker Foundation was so baffling. Like apparently they were just fine with Dracula walking out of there to live his infernal life… because there was a lawyer involved? Which also prevented them from taking further action afterwards?
That shift requires a lot more time to really take advantage of and here it actually hurt the story as they needed to spend so much time in re-establishing everything, and failing with a lot of it, so that it ground everything to a halt. The previous episodes constantly moved forward while this meandered while to suddenly introduce completely new characters and relationships in the final episode.
I loved Dracula embracing/loving modern technology, though. I mean, of course he’s on Tinder. Swipe left, kids, swipe left.
I just love (with all sarcastic emphasis) their desperation that all things tie into one theme and then don’t explain how they actually work. Dracula’s fear of an ignoble death might make sense for how he sees his reflection and fears the cross, sure, and I can even sort of force a connection with the weakness to the sun – but in what way, whatsoever, does it tie into needing to be invited in? Also the reflection rule makes no sense as presented either. He states that the reflection shows what is really there as opposed to perceived reality – hence his old and decrepit appearance. Yet Lucy appears young and beautiful in her reflection as opposed to her burnt exterior and, worse yet, there is a scene where both he and she are in the same reflection and both look like their young selves. It would be one thing if they went with ‘the vampire projects how they see themselves’ as the issue with reflections and Lucy, not yet knowing, still sees herself as beautiful -but that still wouldn’t explain both normal reflections at once.
I got halfway through the third episode and just turned it off. What a waste.
Yeah, as with other Moffat/Gatiss series, you like the early eps better than the later eps.
This was ok, but only because it still had some style. The moment you start thinking about it too much, it falls apart. A shame really. Do these guys keep running out of money, or time, or talent? Maybe a mix of all three.
I’d have given Zoe some unique blood condition linked to Agatha being bitten (blood is lives), and that’s what kills Dracula. But I’ve had 2 hours more to think about the story than Moffat/Gatiss did, so clearly they’re at a disadvantage.
But Zoe wasn’t a descendant of Agatha (she was her great-great aunt IIRC), so the latter being bitten couldn’t create a condition like that, could it?
Really? That’s where your suspension of disbelief ends? ;)But Dracula being killed by cancer, and apparently never ever having bitten a cancer sufferer before… that’s ok?How about, besides the fact Zoe was genetically close enough to look exactly like Agatha, Zoe drank Dracula’s blood, which I think was a first.
Maybe Dracula can’t drink his own blood and that kills him when he willingly drains Zoe. Perhaps add to that Zoe has enough of Agatha’s blood in her such that Zoe hallucinates seeing Agatha, and maybe Dracula has never bitten a relation of a previous victim. I don’t know. I’m sure decent writers could make something of all this.
But cancer? Gimme a break.
This was my read on it, but keep in mind that I haven’t re-watched it.When Dracula bit Zoe at the beginning of the episode and got violently ill, he indicated that knew immediately that it was because she was dying. He knew that because it’s happened before – there’s no way that at some point he didn’t inadvertently feed on a dying person who didn’t look ill – and it was like eating spoiled food.But on the flip side, of course, when he realized that he wanted to finally face death, Zoe’s blood was the way to do it since sunlight and the other “habits” weren’t going to.Vampires dying because they fed on a recently deceased person without realizing it is a long-time part of vampire lore, so that part tracks. At the end of the episode I got the impression that she had died just before Dracula fed on her – because drinking his blood killed her much faster than the cancer would have – which actually killed him rather than just making him barf all over the place.
Damn, now I’d have to rewatch it just to see if that happens. I don’t remember them saying a vampire can die if they feed on the recently dead, or that Dracula’s blood was killing Zoe faster.
I don’t know that they said that drinking the blood of the recently deceased kills vampires, but it’s part of vampire lore. The example that always springs to mind is Louis trying to kill Lestat that way in “Interview with the Vampire.”I could be wrong about Dracula’s blood killing Zoe faster, but that seemed to be the implication; like, (IIRC, please correct me if I have it wrong) she collapsed after drinking it and they showed her immediately afterward in the hospital hooked up to an IV and it seemed like that was what pushed her to death’s door rather than her illness. That is, she knew that she had to go out in a blaze of glory to defeat him, as she needed the knowledge granted by drinking his blood, but that doing so was going to basically put a countdown on how long she had to do it.
It would have made more sense if her blood was poison to him because of chemo. Since it is literally poison.
What a bonkers show. It’s hilarious that the BBC gets period decor and costume exactly right, but their attempts at sleek sexy contemporary set design (the Harker Institute, Dracula’s what? lair? condo? big table room?) almost always look like last decade’s VIP airport lounge designs or rejected Torchwood concept art. I thought the time jump smacked of the need to be clever overriding solid storytelling, but maybe it was worth it for Big Triangle Turntable Room. Also, now I think we’ve earned a moritorium on Sherlock floaty text messages, please.
This is altogether too forgiving a review. The whole thing smacked of some sort of imposed hasty rewrite – clearly there was supposed at some point to be a whole lot more about the Harker Foundation, it’s funding (which everyone keeps mentioning) and it’s nefarious plans (which Renfield keeps muttering about for no reason at all) with the Westenra stuff as a bit of ‘see, we’re still doing the book, sort of’ in the background.I’m guessing it was going to have something to do with weaponising Dracula/the undead in a way that would go horribly wrong (and would probably, knowing Moffatt, have been Dracula’s plan overall – what’s the betting a ‘Mr Brouwer’ would have been among the trustees?) and the Beeb decided they couldn’t afford to stage a zombie outbreak.
Obviously I could be wrong – wasn’t aware they were claiming it as a sequel set-up, but it was suspicious how all that was left of the Harker stuff was just enough connective tissue to bring all the characters together and give Mark Gatiss at least something to do beyond hanging about looking increasingly dishevelled.
So now that Moffat and Gatiss have done Jekyll, Sherlock and Dracula, what 19th century adaption should they do next? I personally think they could make a bonkers Lovecraft story.
I’m not sure Lovecraft has a character who fits their mold, at least not without some significant rewriting. The Moffat/Gatiss protagonist is a brilliant smarty-pants who is in conflict/love with a similarly brilliant smarty-pants. To write one of their shows, you begin with the big locked-room confrontation as they figure which one has truly trapped the other in a web of brilliant deceptions, and then you kind of tack on story around that until you fill the allotted time.Randolph Carter could conceivably be stretched across that Procrustean bed, but most other Lovecraft protagonists don’t really measure up to their standards, especially since the antagonists are monstrous, cosmically vast forces of the unnatural or possibly rats or ghouls.Now, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and that ratiocination…
They’d make Lovecraft the protagonist and have him go through the adventures and horrors he then writes as his stories and you’ll like it, damn it!
They’d make Lovecraft the protagonist and have him go through the adventures and horrors he then writes as his stories and you’ll like it, damn it!
They could adapt Spenser’s the Faerie Queene to the 19th century, and then adapt that to the 21st. You’re welcome.
Modern Frankenstein where the monster is a lab grown genetic experiment.
Did you catch the Frankenstein nod in this episode? “Unscrupulous doctor deployed tanner’s knife”. The answer wasn’t DRACULA IS MY LORD!
I can imagine him doing Wuthering Heights focusing on an over-sexualized Heathcliff character who will look suspiciously like Moffat himself. By the end of the series Heathcliff’s crazy hidden wife will be shown to have superpowers
Well, I guess she’ll have to fuck him then.
Frankenstein right? or possibly something mummy based ( given their love of Hammer stuff , mummies on a train)
They should keep it British if at all possible. But Dorian Grey, The Invisible Man and Fu Manchu are all rather weak sisters compared to the three they’ve done.Maybe Virginia Woolf’s Orlando would work.
I loved Jekyll! It was bonkers.
How is Dracula supposed to die here? Isn’t he committing suicide by drinking poisoned blood? And aren’t the undead unable to die from suicide, hence Harker not dying when he staked himself?
I think “None of this quite works” pretty much sums up this finale. There are a lot of fine moments (and a lot of silly ones), but it just doesn’t come together. That’s too bad, because the first two parts were terrific.
As enjoyable as ‘Jekyll’ was, the Utterson-Klein stuff was a lot of backstory shoved hastily into the last couple of episode and could have been a lot clearer.I would find it hilarious if Gatiss and Moffatt did link up ‘Jekyll’ and ‘Dracula’, plus a few more shows, and essentially pulled off Universal’s Dark Universe on a BBC budget.
Oh, the final couple episodes of Jekyll are a complete mess. But what an entertaining mess, and with the courage of its own batshit convictions!
Hyde, Dracula, Sherlock. I get the impression that at their base level these characters are little more than Moffat’s own alter-egos. Two of the three even look a bit like him. I scoffed at Mandalorian’s season being only 9 episodes long but Moffat’s pulling another ‘Sherlock’ with only 3 episodes to a season, and probably with an extended hiatus between, too.
I thought it was three episodes and out.
Feels like it was supposed to be more than one series like Sherlock but someone got nervous and demanded it be done in three episodes.
The first part of the episode was the weakest moment of the entire series. As soon as we shifted to Lucy, it got a lot more interesting.
I had the opposite reaction. The scenes with Lucy were extremely annoying. Her character was so vapid and unsympathetic you wondered how she had any friends.
I thought they’d go with “Dracula’s persona became an amalgam of all the people he killed”. Since he gains their knowledge, it seems logical that he would start believing all the myths they believed about vampires.
And that’s how he explained his fear of the cross because he’d absorbed so many God tearing peasants.
What’s that? A Moffat/Gatiss joint devolves into a messily overcomplicated pile of tangled plot-threads, omnipotent super-secret organisations, sentimentally effective (yet questionably logical) speeches about love and assorted goo, held together more by the determined self-satisfaction of the writers than anything else? Surely you jest.
This is a D-, and that’s me being generous, because I’m reserving my F’s for fascinatingly awful stuff, and Gatiss and Moffat don’t deserve it… Oh yes, they’ve messed it up once again. After ruining Sherlock with their convoluted and uninspired drivel, they’ve also failed to bring this three-part miniseries to a satisfying finale. By now, it should be clear to everyone with half a brain that Moffat and Gatiss have no idea how to tell a story. Inane clichés, unfunny humour, and far-fetched idiotic ‘twists’ galore. They’ve set up the pieces on the chessboard, and childishly knock it all off the table when they don’t know where to go anymore, and the viewer is supposed to be amazed by their lackluster amateurism.These blatant hacks need to lose their say regarding prestige projects like this, and spend their meagre talent on storylines for cheapo B-movies, where it belongs.
As I said previously, this series would have been much better set up as a 3 parter covering the first 2 episodes, and end on the “it’s the current century” cliffhanger; and hthen spend the second series fleshing out this episode. A least then we might care something for Lucy and nu Harker.
This felt like the weakest part to the whole story because it was all so rushed; it felt like they were trying to cram another few episodes worth of story into one and it just didn’t gel. Plus, Dracula starts as a monstrous predator but ends as a…bemused observer? I get this, in terms of his fascination with the New (new) World and how it works/has changed, but it de-fanged him, if you like. He stopped being scary. But the worst part for me was all the Lucy stuff, since it fell squarely in ‘tell, don’t show’ – or rather, the stuff we did see did absolutely bugger-all to sell the idea that here was a young lady nihilist. The ‘empty hedonism’ angle almost worked, but again it needed more time/space to develop organically and was ultimately rushed. There was a lot to like in all three parts, despite the occasional tilt into anachronistic dialogue/mannerisms and danger of the (very British) archness tipping into smugness (which I think it narrowly avoided). Claes Bang was an excellent Dracula, and Dolly Wells was the perfect opponent. There was a great homage to Christopher Lee’s Count in part one (when Dracula attacks Harker), part two seemed to be setting Dr Sharma(?) up as a recurring/prequel/spin-off character, and this part had a lot of fun with Dracula in 2020.
The ending was bollocks, though. The idea presented in part one about why he fears the cross made a lot more sense!
This series was a lot of fun but the third episode was so out of keeping with the previous ones and the new characters and scenarios were so underdeveloped that it was difficult to maintain momentum. It should have been 4 parts, 2 in the past and 2 in the present. That way we could have developed some connection to the new characters and felt some investment in the Harker Foundation and cancer storylines. As it was, they all were ciphers except for the intolerably annoying Lucy. It was a huge relief when Agatha appeared again; a character we actually cared about. An extra episode would also have given us more of Gatiss’ excellent and hilarious Renfield. I loved that all of his crossword solutions related to Dracula.
Most of the horror of Lucy Westenra was that she was supposed to be a genuinely sunny, happy girl with a good future ahead of her, and Dracula turned her into a slavering child-predator. A bored, nihilistic, go-ahead-and-bite-me Lucy? This sounds like I’d be better off reading some old TPBs of Wolfman and Colan’s Tomb of Dracula.
I don’t think it’s going too far to call the “dusting” of Lucy a Buffy reference given the incredible amount of visual references in the miniseries. I mean Johnathan’s look as a vampire very much recalls the Del Toro Vampire look from Blade 2/Kronos, and the “ripping out of a wolf” is obviously the Howling, right? And then there’s the Lugosi costume, and the initial ancient Drac is straight out of Coppola. Hell, one could even see the time jump and the 3rd act vampire weakness “revelation” as a nod to Dracula 2000. A cleverer mind than mine could probably find quite a few more. The visual style of the thing is really a series of homages.
Does anyone remember how when Harker tried to kill himself but couldn’t, seeing as inability to commit suicide is one of “the rules”? Is that a thing or did i misunderstand what happened?Because Dracula knowingly drinking cancerous poisoned blood to kill himself should count as a suicide attempt. And that means . . . Season Two
I agree with many of the critiques presented in this review, and some that appear in the comments. There are a number of flaws in the series (episode 3 in particular), and they are to some extent the same types of flaws that bedevilled Sherlock.Even so, every episode of this series was a straight A for me. The performances – in particular Bang and Wells – are outstanding. The set design is great, which really enhances the mood and creepy atmosphere. There are genuinely funny moments, and genuinely scary moments. And there are some truly great individual scenes – the bit scored to Robbie Williams’ Angel in episode 3 sent shivers down my spine.Highly recommended.
The ideas this show has about the Undead, namely that anyone can simply be cursed to a conscious rotting for all eternity, is ten times more interesting than anything else the show has to offer. I would’ve watched a whole show about Lucy being stuck as an Undead and having to cope with being unable to die but desperately wanting to. The scene in the graveyard where Dracula says something like there being nine Undead in that graveyard alone was chilling. Let’s get more of that and less of whatever the fuck that bullshit ending was.
Finally watched it. Did anyone else spot that Zoe was in room AD 072? After the the Hammer Horror film Dracula AD 1972 when Dracula is in a contemporary setting?