![]() ![]() After realising he’s on the back foot, Eph teams up with the only New Yorker even grumpier than he is, Abraham Setrakian (David Bradley), a second-world-war survivor with first-hand experience of the Master and an ancient, ornate sword disguised as a cane. So some of the terror leaches out of The Strain when it becomes clear in the first episode that the epidemic was planned and executed by the Master, a hooded, slithery creature from the Old World who has come to conquer the new, with the help of an ailing NYC billionaire and a meticulous point man (played by the icily charismatic Richard Sammel). Outbreak stories are scary because viruses don’t fight fair – they don’t get tired, they don’t make tactical errors and they don’t negotiate. But the canary team can’t get their big brains wrapped around the concept of a vampire plague quickly enough to prevent it taking hold in the city. Suspecting ebola or worse, the Centre for Disease Control deploys its “canary team”, led by abrasive virologist Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll from House of Cards), who everyone calls Eph (as in WTF). ![]() It’s a gory supernatural thriller dressed up in the blue Hazmat suit of an outbreak procedural – in the run-up to a rare solar eclipse, a transatlantic flight full of dead bodies lands at JFK airport. How cool would it be if there were vampire zombies? That seems to be the pulpy maths behind FX’s 13-part horror series The Strain, which starts its UK run on Watch on Wednesday 16 September at 10pm. ![]()
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