By peddling a contrived romance, The Strain stumbles towards its season finale

If you were hoping that The Strain would use the penultimate episode of its second season to ratchet up the tension and hurtle towards something meaningful and compelling…then you probably haven’t been watching this season very closely. This has been a season of fits and starts, the narrative a mess of dangling plotlines and filler. There’s been no momentum to the season, no overarching story to latch on to and care about. While the show has done well to bolster its horror elements, smartly indulging in and amplifying Gothic tropes, it’s also continued to peddle half-baked character dramas. Unfortunately, it’s those character dramas that make up the majority of “Fallen Light.”
Obviously every show needs some sort of character development and arc, and The Strain specifically needs it to ground its more ludicrous and campy elements. The problem is that the show consistently fails to create compelling character work, not only from episode to episode, but over the course of an entire season. “Fallen Light” can be separated into four separate storylines, three of which are representative of The Strain’s inability to think long term in terms of character and storytelling. The other concerns Setrakian and his search for the Lumen, a sentence I’m sure I’ve typed in every single episode review this year. If there’s one promising thing to come out of tonight’s episode, it’s that his search is (kind of) nearing its end. Setrakian and Fet meet with Alonso Creem and discuss buying the Lumen. Of course Palmer is still in the game, so they’re going to have to bid on it, meaning that the bidding is delayed for 24 hours until Setrakian can secure some gold. There’s a certain unpredictability to the storyline, as Quinlan is willing to hand over the gold but doesn’t trust Setrakian to deliver the Lumen, so he tells Gus to get the book even if it means killing the old man; more than anything though, this stagnant storyline is nearing its end, and hopefully interesting characters like Quinlan and Setrakian can move on to better things.