Warning: Fullfor the episode follow...

What an insane and magnificent episode.

"Something whispered. I listened."

I simply was not expecting an entire chapter devoted to Vanessa and Malcolm's shared history. Flashbacks maybe. Like an episode containing three or four flashbacks to fill in the gaps. But a whole hour devoted to Vanessa and Mina, and then Vanessa's subsequent "illness" that landed her in an asylum? No way. And it was really freakin' cool.And this was the finest work, without a doubt, that I've ever seen from Eva Green. Such a strong, harrowing tale of a childhood friendship torn asunder by a creeping malevolent force. Of course, the full mania of the possession didn't take root until after Vanessa had seduced Mina's fiancé, but it was always there. The doorway had been opened years earlier and a shadow had entered the scene. A sort of permeating darkness that crept over Vanessa the moment she saw Malcolm having sex with her own mother in the hedge maze.And I think that was the absolute scariest part of the episode. The years before Vanessa's stint in the asylum. When she couldn't figure out, specifically, what was slowly festering inside of her. Very Edgar Allan Poe. That sort of vague evil that sits at the bottom of your stomach. With Vanessa describing it as growing up with something "behind my back, waiting for me to turn around."It made it all the more disturbing when, all of a sudden, Vanessa was not herself anymore. And the fact that none of us really knew when or how the demon took hold of her made the entire episode a nightmarish delight. But when she spoke to the asylum doctor about having seen an entire slave ship's worth of people drowning in the ocean, we knew the terror had truly escalated. Was she full-fledged victim though? Later on, when conversing with the devil (in the form on Malcolm) he mentioned that she could have "shut the door" at any time. Suggesting that there had been a part of her that may have welcomed the invasion.Again, there was no forward momentum in any of the main storyline here. Nothing with Ethan, Victor, Dorian, or Caliban. This detour into lavish melancholy was meant to shine a whole new light on the "present day" tale. And the best part was, after only four episodes the show had earned it. And the fact that it had been so patient and restrained with its reveals meant that we could definitely go a full episode without another midnight vampire hunt.Plus, all of this backstory helped clarify the words Vanessa shrieked during the séance in episode two. She had seen Malcolm having sex, and it was with her mother. Peter had died, due to being "beautifully weak," on an expedition with his father. And all of the torment we watched Vanessa endure at he asylum, where she flipped back and forth between catatonia and crazed fits, helped great deal in showing us just how important she is to the story. Why she's the target of Dracula. Why she almost immediately turned into a vessel at the séance. How it came to be that Mina, trapped in between worlds, could seek her out.So how long had Vanessa been with Malcolm on their joint search for Mina? We don't know the exact number of days. Just the hundreds of letters in Vanessa's box. Letters she states (in the letter she's writing that narrates the episode) she'd starting writing to Mina right after she'd recovered from her illness. Which coincides with her own mother's death and the day Mina - or the shadow of Mina - came to visit her on the beach. Which was a cocktail of fiendishness in its own right.Oh, as was the shot of a possessed Eva Green having heaving sex with an invisible entity. One that she perceived to be Malcolm. Again, touching upon the strange trauma that must have occurred back when she spied on him in the maze. A moment that created dire ripples going forward - awakening something in her that, from an allegorical aspect, could be construed as the cliched "dangerous female sexual appetite." A sexist notion that was quite prevalent at the time (still is today, now that I think of it). An idea that actually did get women condemned to mental wards and subjected to cruel experiments.