It's the half-way point for the first season of The Strain. Everything starts to come together in "Occultation" while tearing everything in the world apart. An eclipse gives the vampires in NYC a chance to hit the streets to infect a massive amount of people. Eph tells his ex-wife, Kelly and his son, Zach to leave the city, but Kelly's live-in boyfriend, Matt is against it.
Easily, one of the best parts of the episode is the scene between Kelly and Eph and the results of their talk. If you've read the books or the Dark Horse comics, then you know that this family dynamic is very important to the overall story, believe it or not. Eph tells Kelly to leave, and even though they just saw that Eph is wanted by the police, they listen. However, Matt overhears this and calls the FBI on him. The dialogue that follows between Matt and Kelly is fantastic and again, for those who know what's coming, it's a major point in their story line.
While we never go back to Gus and Felix stealing cars, we do get to see the first moments of Gus' rebellion against Thomas Eichorst in this episode. Thomas needs Gus to do another job for him and has Gus' back against a wall. This leads to a team-up with Jim Kent and Gus finds their transporting the dead body of a vampire. It's a good scene and leads up to Gus and Felix having a violent encounter with a vampire.
Everything is so disjointed in this episode, but that's the point. Abraham, Nora, Eph, Gus, and Vasiliy are all trying to work on their own and not accomplishing what they thought they would. This leads these characters to finally realize they need each other and start to come together. Well, not all of them. Vasiliy and Gus are on their own journies for now, but their stories, here are done incredibly well.
Vasiliy Fet becomes a stand out character in this episode. You know, the rat hunter. We get to see a lot about his family life here as he visits his father and they argue about Vasiliy's career choices. However, what really made him standout was his scene where he actually kills his first vampire. He's a stoic and stone-faced character and this episode really had him living up to his comic book counterpart, who is super-awesome.
The only real problem with the episode was that, at times, the special effects, mainly on the stingers, seemed a little unfinished. The lighting on them and textures made it come off a bit more plastic than organic. It was a big problem in the opening with Thomas and his slave in the white room especially.
The Strain continues to be a fantastic seires easily worth your time whether you've read the source material or not. This genre mixing show combines elements of horror, a zombie invasion, vampires, and a viral epidemic. It's wildy original, and this episode really explores a lot of character relationships and asks the question "can they do it alone?"
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