VAN HELSING – Season 4 Episode 2 – SPOILERS

Vanessa meets Jack (Nicole Muñoz) and Monica (Tammy Gillis), leaders of a band of survivors. Jack (and a functioning karaoke machine) persuade Vanessa to stay the night. The inference is strong that Jack and Vanessa had sex that night, and there is certainly a strong attraction between the two. (The last time Vanessa had sex was in Episode 1.10.) Jack tries to persuade Vanessa to stay longer, but cannot. It’s not certain just where Vanessa is headed with such urgency, but she found a drawing of a cross in the Van Helsing History of Vampires book that acts like a compass, always pointing in the same direction no matter which way the book is turned. When Vanessa leaves, she gives Jack her sword, saying she just doesn’t need it anymore. (She tells Jack she has had a spiritual awakening. From now on, instead of killing vampires, she will cure them.)

Chad (Donny Lucas) and Tabby (Cassidy Nugent) are the only ones left from the group of survivors that Vanessa first encountered in “A Home” (Episode 2.4), and Tabby has become a vampire. Vanessa turns Tabby human again and leaves the both of them with Jack and Monica.

There is only one gunshot in the entire episode, and it doesn’t hit anyone. (Chad takes a shot at Vanessa because he thinks she’s threatening Tabby.) The lack of gunfire is a commendable departure from the norm on VAN HELSING. There are two other guns in the episode, though.

In Low Town (the rough part of Fort Collins) Lee the Bartender (Ryan Jinn) aims his at a poker player with an eye patch who is threatening Violet (Keeya King) after she won all his money in a game she bought into with a pearl handled Tokarev pistol that allegedly belonged to Putin (presumably Vladimir). She probably took the handgun from her father, and it kind of makes sense that Hansen would collect Putin relics. That bartender later tells Violet that he’ll follow her anywhere. Odds are that when Doc and Julius and Violet escape Fort Collins, the bartender will come along.

When Violet is bitten by a vampire, she discovers that she (like Vanessa) has the power to cure them, but besides herself, only Julius and the ex-vampire that bit her know that she is aware of it. Later, when she is alone, she has a dream where she finds herself in a small, sunny garden next to which is a gate with the letters VH carved above it. As she approaches the gate, she sees Vanessa (whom she has never met) who tells her: “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

Julius gives Doc a sample of Violet’s blood. Hansen finds out about it, and puts Doc in jail to prevent Violet from finding out about her powers, not knowing that she already knows.

Violet draws very well, so she will probably draw the woman she saw in her dream/vision, and Julius will recognize Vanessa’s likeness. Violet might actually be a Van Helsing, but it seems more likely that Dr. Harrison (see Episode 2.10), the guy who created Daywalkers, is responsible for giving Violet her powers, and he must have somehow used Vanessa’s blood to do it. Why Hansen is so attached to Violet is something of a mystery. Why should she be exempted from his ruthlessness?

NOTES

Andrea Ware (Lucky in “Love Bites“) will be Jackboot Tyson in several episodes of SNOWPIERCER, a TV adaptation of Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 film about a highly stratified society in the aftermath of a climate engineering experiment that over compensated for global warming and froze the entire planet. Surviving humans inhabit a train that continuously circumnavigates the globe, powered by a “perpetual motion” engine (which one might speculate draws energy from the earth’s rotation). Aleks Paunovic (Julius) and Vincent Gale (Flesh) are also in the cast. SNOWPIERCER will premiere on TBS in the spring of 2020, and has already been renewed for a second ten episode season. An animated trailer is available on YouTube.

#LegendsOfTomorrow Exclusive: Terry Chen to Play 1990s-Roaming Genghis Khan in Caity Lotz's Directing Debut https://t.co/xIYejqBw1j via @MattMitovich — Michael Ausiello (@MichaelAusiello) August 31, 2019

Terry Chen (Brendan in “Fear Her“) has an as yet unspecified role in FALLING, a film that stars Viggo Mortensen as John, who lives with his husband and adopted daughter in Los Angeles. John’s father Willis (Lance Henriksen), a conservative farmer from the midwest, visits John and his family for an indefinite stay while searching for a place to retire, causing their two very different worlds to collide. Writer/director Mortensen told Tom Grater of Screen Daily how he came to write the story: “Both of my parents were ill. When my mother passed away, I was flying across the Atlantic after the funeral and I couldn’t sleep, I was remembering things she had said that I hadn’t thought of for years. The more I thought about my mother, the more I also thought about my dad, it became a back and forth between two characters and it became fictional, it wasn’t them anymore.” David Cronenberg appears in the film as a proctologist. (Mortensen was Sigmund Freud in Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD.) FALLING completed filming in Toronto in April. No release date has been announced.







