‘Dracula’ Episode 2 ‘Blood Vessel’ sees charming Count toy with his prey while Sister Agatha hallucinates
Where episode 1, ‘Rules of the Beast’, set the stage for a darkly funny horror motif, episode 2 of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s ‘Dracula’ really gets down to business. Titled ‘Blood Vessel’ -- a pun that is too clever by half -- the episode revolves around Count Dracula’s journey to England aboard a ship.
Dracula is the one narrating the tale and to Sister Agatha (Dolly Wells) of all people, while the two spar brains over a game of chess. The guests aboard Demeter (the ship) provide an opportunity to Dracula (Claes Bang) to flex his dark desires more and more, and that too in an almost Agatha Christie-like mystery setting.
He kills the wheelman just to improve his German -- the blood of the victims imbibe him with their qualities. And he does that only to flirt with the Grand Duchess of Bavaria, a woman he had known when she was young.
Of course, he lets her realize that and in the throes of horror, kills her. If there’s anything bad to be said about the vampire, he enjoys playing with his food a little too much.
Thankfully, the shroud is lifted from the weird, cozy camaraderie between Agatha and Dracula and we realize it was Agatha’s hallucination as she lay drained in the ship’s mysterious cabin 9. And that brings the show back to it’s the best character and her attempts to learn about and kill her greatest adversary.
This episode lacks in abject horror as compared to the previous one, but that does not take away anything from the show. Far from it, in the absence of dark, dank castles, we get to explore what the Count is like.
He’s ultimately a gentleman beast -- he charms and seduces. Of course, he ultimately kills, but it is the pursuit that is a work of art. Bram Stoker’s imagination of Dracula was not very different and on that part, Gatiss and Moffat seemed to have kept their promise of not tampering with the story too much.
But what makes their version of the vampire better is simply the dark hilarity of the entire story, a story that may have a nasty end, but one that will thoroughly remain 270 minutes of sheer good entertainment.
‘Dracula’ is available for viewing on Netflix.