Dracula, the TV series

It's difficult to know where to begin on this one, other than to say it's both very familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. As far as influences go, you can see TV's Revenge (by way of Arrow) and Dark Shadows, the video game series Assassin's Creed, the old pen and paper role playing game Vampire: the Masquerade, vaguely the Bram Stoker original book Dracula, and almost nothing of the many Dracula movies save vulnerability of vampires to sunlight rather than just more limited powers . It's not campy. It's not Angel. It's not Vampire Diaries.

The effort to be mysterious in this one is so successful, that it's difficult for most of the first episode, to understand what's going on, or why anything is happening. There is some specific evidence late in the episode, but the whole thing remains very murky and loaded down with many characters doing things for reasons we're not supposed to know yet. There aren't any heroes here. Very few people who've been introduced can be called anything close to good. Nobody is looking for redemption.

I suppose you could call it the start of a very gruesome story for Halloween, which is probably the reason it premiered so late in the new season. But I'm not sure there is actually going to be much of a story. Oddly you can see several arcs beginning in the episode, but the only story here (Dracula's love life) seems like it's going to be a minor part of the action.

While it's certainly a different take on the Dracula story, it didn't exactly draw me in or make me want to see more to find out what everything means. It wasn't bad, but like SHIELD it lacks focus and enough interesting points to keep people watching. Oddly it's very mysterious without being much intriguing at all. Score for the episode C