lb_lee | Poutybat Dracula

Mori/Rogan: Guys, we watched Steven Moffat’s 2020 Netflix series, Dracula, we can’t stop thinking about it, and now we’re making it all y’all’s problem.

For context, the only Dracula story we have ever taken in, somehow, is Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, which doesn’t count. Our roomy, however, who got this damned idea of watching it in the first place, has read Dracula and knows the story very well, and I think having the both of us there was the optimal audience combo for being unable to stop thinking about this show.

See, there’s a humility to stories like Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. Nobody walks into a movie like that expecting anything but low-budget cheese. Sometimes, there are movies you expect to be low-budget cheese that through sheer heart or originality manage to be better than you expect, like the Killer Condom. But then there’s Dracula, which HAD a budget, and four and a half hours, and end up being a fractal onion of badness where the more you think about it, the worse it gets, and you find yourself unable to stop peeling it even as it makes you cry, because you have to know how deep the motherfucker goes. We cannot stop thinking about it. We literally went out to a cartoon night with friends, came home, and the moment we burst in the door went “AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT DRACULA!”

Neither us nor roomy realized what we were getting into. We truly came in with no expectations. Yes, I knew Moffat did Sherlock, but he also did Blink, and I wanted to give him a fair shake, and now here I am, unable to stop thinking about Dracula.

So, this series got canceled after three episodes, and each one is... “self-contained” is misleading, but it’s pretty easy to break the show into its three component parts: Dracula in The Castle and The Nunnery, Dracula on a Boat, and Dracula in Modern-Day England.

The first episode is the best, and for the first half or so, I was thinking “hey, this is pretty all right!” You got an English lawyer, Johnny, hired by Dracula because he wants to go to England but doesn’t speak English well and needs an Englishman around to do the paperwork, get eaten, and teach him English. In this telling, Dracula absorbs skills and knowledge through his blood-eating, and it’s truly integrated well into the story; it’s established very early on and adhered to consistently. So the first half of that episode is Dracula breaking this poor English bastard, and it’s truly upsetting and creepy as it very much should be. Because this is the most awful part of Johnny’s life, while for Dracula, this is just a fun way to prep for a trip. It’s not important to him, there’s no glitz or glamour to it, he’s just gaslighting this man and slowly eating him alive, and there’s nobody in this castle to even notice. It’s a claustrophobic, scary story, being trapped in a rich, powerful man’s house, completely under his power in a foreign country, while he does unfathomably awful things. It’s well done!

But then the castle portion ends, and things start to go off the rails.

See, Johnny turns out to be hardier and more clever than Dracula expects. Johnny is determined to escape. And he does! Instead of dying like Dracula expects, he becomes undead—not a vampire but something weaker and unknown, and manages to escape the castle and drag his carcass to a nunnery, where he recounts his story to a nun named Agatha. Even here, the story is still going pretty well; Johnny clearly isn’t well, what he is and what his limits and strengths are is completely unknown, and Dracula clearly still has a strong hold over him. It’s like, what will happen to Johnny? Will he get free? Is Dracula coming to recoup this unusual and thus interesting piece of property? (Yes.)

So Dracula tracks Johnny to the nunnery. And here, at this dramatic peak of the story, Dracula metaphorically pulls out a toboggan, gives a shit-eating grin to the audience, and HURLS himself downhill, gaining steadily more and more momentum while us and our roomy can only look on in open-mouthed horrified fascination.

But before we get into that, we need to talk about Dracula and Agatha.

Dracula is a smarmy smug rich motherfucker who respects nobody’s personal space and acts like the predatory bisexual stereotype. In that first episode, we called him Tommy Wiseau who Fucks. Because oh, he does sure love fucking male characters in dream sequences! He sure does grab nubile young men’s thighs and fellate fingers and blades! He calls Johnny his “bride” and seems to especially like going after engaged or married people! There are constant references to his complete lack of impulse control and gluttony, never being satisfied no matter how many people he eats. (And yes, him eating people is regularly compared to sex—usually through the dream sequences where his male victims dream he’s riding them as he eats them, but Agatha asks Johnny flat-out whether he “had sexual intercourse with Dracula” and he avoids answering, only flashbacks to the dream sequence.) This is a very greedy gluttonous bi Dracula, and in the least charming way. He’s just plain not very interesting, which is a shame, because the show acts like he’s the most charismatic and irresistible manipulator on the planet, instead of that guy you had to waitress for who thought Hannibal Lecter was a role model, tipped like shit, and kept trying to grab your ass.

Because Dracula is the Very Special Boy of this show, he runs into the same problem you get when someone tries to write a genius but isn’t smart enough to truly do so: everyone else has to act like a blithering idiot to make the plot go. When it’s just Dracula and Johnny in the castle, it’s chilling because Johnny is slowly losing his mind and being eaten alive, and you don’t know how much of his perceptions you can trust, and Dracula is also not around THAT often, so his motives are mysterious and his behavior unfathomable. But once we leave the castle, Dracula increasingly takes over more and more of the narrative and the whole thing comes apart. You think, watching episode 1, that Johnny is the protagonist, but he isn’t.

Then there’s Agatha. Agatha is a tragedy. She is supposed to be the genius foil against Dracula, a heretic nun who’s as scientifically minded as someone in her time can be. She wants to know how Dracula works, partly so she can beat him and also because she’s one of those people who just HAS to know why. Now doesn’t she sound interesting? Us and roomy sure thought so! We thought she was the most interesting character in the show! She’s the only one who does things in all three episodes, besides Dracula himself! So we thought she was the protagonist! But no.

So Dracula hits the nunnery. He cannot enter uninvited, and Agatha has trained all the nuns to wield stakes and fight Draculas! We think, oho, what’s going to happen? Will there be battle nuns?!

No. Agatha decides to knowingly leave the undead, not quite sane Johnny alone in a room with his fiancee, who is bleeding due to Dracula attack bat. (The bats and wolves don’t need to be invited in. They are bats and wolves; they don’t speak Human or respect human property law.) Agatha leaves them to do whatever while she comes down to taunt Dracula, open the gate, flick her blood in his face, and inform him that all the nuns behind her have stakes and are trained Dracula fighters.

She leaves the gate open. Nobody closes it. They go to pray, and Dracula sics the wolves on them—wolves all the nuns are already aware of and have seen. All the nuns get massacred. No combat at all. They are a fake out, only existing to make you think they’ll get to do something important. This show is FULL of this, setting things up like they’re extremely important, only to then quickly kill them off or toss them aside like “oh, you thought that was important? Haha, psych!”

Agatha flees into another room with Johnny’s fiancee and seals the doorway with crumbled communion wafers, which Dracula can’t cross. (He also can’t stand crosses, holy water, Bibles, etc., which drives Agatha nuts. “It doesn’t make sense!” she keeps saying, because she’s an atheist nun, and the show keeps amping anticipation that she’s going to figure it out, but even then we knew the writers had no idea and sure enough... but we’ll get to that.)

So Dracula needs an invitation again just for that room. You might wonder why he would bother; he’s reclaimed Johnny, right? Just blow that popsicle stand! But no, Dracula is a drama queen and he wants Agatha now, so he kills Johnny, wears him as a meat suit to get the fiancee to invite him in (even though Johnny NEVER required such things but this is Idiot Land), and once invited rips off his meatsuit and pulls a “here’s Johnny!” End Episode 1.

So yeah, Johnny? Killed off. Sure, he was Dracula’s bride and a heretofore unknown type of undead that Dracula was willing to track all the way to a Hungarian nunnery, but nah, Dracula just kills him to fuck with his fiancee and get Agatha, rather than wait her out or sic a wolf on her. It felt like the show was continually trying to outwit me by subverting expectations of intelligence.

So then we have episode 2: Dracula On A Boat.

According to my roomy, in the book, Dracula gets on the boat, and it arrives a ghost ship. Spooky! That’s not how it goes here. In this one, Dracula elaborately manipulates all these specific passengers to all be on the same boat he is because he wants to eat these people specifically... and then is such a messy eater that they figure him out and kick him off the boat. Dracula poutwalks (not swims, WALKS) across the ocean floor to Englad and when he comes out, surprise! It’s modern day! Why? Tune in next week and find out!

An hour and a half, and that’s what is all comes down to: Dracula gets kicked off a boat and sulks his way onto modern-day England. All the characters? Don’t matter. You never see them again, except Agatha. None of them achieve anything that matters plotwise, none of them really matter as characters, except Agatha. Many of these characters, like the battle nuns, are set up to look super interesting and important, only to get slaughtered and achieve nothing. It’s maddening. None of the loose threads of the episode are dealt with, asides from Agatha. The vampire baby and brides of episode 1? Never spoken of again. Johnny? Dead, his unusual state never commented on again. It isn’t self-contained so much as pointless.

We joke that Valentin is the unsung hero of this show. He is nobody important, a minor character, a crusty old superstitious sailor who figures out fast that there’s a Dracula on board and says “this boat is cursed and I’m leaving, who wants on the lifeboat with me?” And then he just does! He never gets mentioned again, all the “smart” characters scoff and get eaten, and Valentin and his crewmates presumably sail out of the show, back to shore, and live happy full lives free of Draculas and dumbasses. Good for them! Valentin, by saving his unnamed crewmates, is the most effective good guy in the show, the only one who achieves much of anything, and it feels like he only does because the show doesn’t think he’s important... which feels like a weird accidental commentary on the importance of ordinary people. Three cheers for Valentin!

Agatha, by the way, is Dracula’s blood bag on the boat, mostly kept in a dream where she and Dracula play chess (get it? GET IT?) and match wits. When she finally wakes up, it’s because Dracula’s trying to frame her for his crimes, even though she is obviously dying and can barely stand up, but Valentin’s gone so nobody has any sense on this boat and they decide sure, sounds good. Agatha manages to persuade them otherwise, tries to protect them with Bible pages, but the boat is sans Valentin, so of course they all immediately go “that’s silly, we aren’t doing that” and get eaten. So Agatha tries to blow the boat up, but this is Idiot Land so she gets distracted by the Captain who decides he wants to go down with his ship (why? Dunno!) and HE ends up doing it. Agatha doesn’t even get to kick Dracula off the boat, after all that!

See, when you get a Princess Buttercup, you KNOW she is never going to achieve anything because she looks and acts like the damsel in distress character type. When you get a hard-nosed heretic nun like Agatha, it’s harder to catch, because she looks and acts like she’s going to achieve something, but the story never allows her to. So far, her sole accomplishments are opening the nunnery gates so all her sisters get massacred, saving Johnny’s idiot fiancee by offering herself to Dracula in exchange (something she only had to do because the fiancee stupidly invited Dracula in), and persuading the crew she’s not a Dracula. Even her “victory” at the end of this show is breathtakingly stupid and also not a victory at all! We’ll get to that.

So, episode 3: a Dracula In London.

This is the dumbest episode, which is impressive after Dracula On A Boat. See, it turns out that Dracula managed to seal himself in his coffin and throw himself overboard, thus surviving the boatsplosion. And this is where the show becomes the fractal onion of bad, because the show easily could’ve made this seem sensible with just a few seconds of work! They already had a scene where the sailors look at his box o’ dirt all baffled like; install a latch on the inside, have them note it and look at each other uneasily, and you’re golden! It even gives Valentin a better reason to decides there’s a Dracula on board! Do a quick paint job to make the box look like more durable material than wood, have the sailors struggling and swearing in the background as they lug it up during one of the boarding scenes and there! You have a decent explanation for Dracula’s survival with no additional runtime and easy prop changes. (Also, if you’re wondering why they didn’t toss all the boxes of dirt overboard when they realized they had a Dracula with them... they decide not to. There’s no good explanation.)

So instead of doing something sensible like “Dracula survived but was injured and went into a blood coma until his coffin rotted enough for a fish or something to wiggle in and get et”, no, Johnny’s idiot fiancee apparently went back to England to make an anti-Dracula agency, which she names after him to make you think Johnny’s still alive/undead but PSYCH! This agency finds Dracula underwater, open his coffin knowing he’s a Dracula, and PUT THEIR FINGERS IN HIS MOUTH. Why? Idiot Land. He bites them, they go “oops, our bad, let’s just close this coffin and LEAVE COMPLETELY” thereby explaining Dracula’s poutwalk across the sea floor.

The scene is very pointless but it exists to cover for an even STUPIDER plot development! The agency puts Dracula in a super-solar cell he cannot escape! Yowsa! This looks important and like it’s setting something up, how will he bust out? By mindfogging agency staff? Bribing a mercenary guard? Turning into fog?

Nah! They give him an internet-enabled ereader and the wifi password is Dracula, so Dracula logs in and Zoom-calls a lawyer, which the secret government agency just LETS IN for some reason and go “well shucks, gotta let him go,” and the cell never comes up again. PSYCH! (The lawyer never does anything either, he’s just one of the show runners and named Renfield, ha ha.)

They literally needed an agency scuba diver to shove her fingers in Dracula’s mouth to justify Dracula knowing what a wifi password was so he could call a lawyer and rich his way out of secret jail. This seems to be the scene folks remember as the stupidest, but for me, nothing tops him poutwalking across the sea floor.

And did Agatha become an undead revenant like Johnny? Oh no, she totally died, but because Dracula ate her, she lives on in his blood, so when her descendant at the agency drinks DRACULA’S blood, Agatha becomes her headmate and they try to take him down because she’s dying of cancer! And her great triumphant victory is... telling Dracula that actually he is completely unaffected by the sun and crosses and all that. He can do whatever he wants, could the whole time. She even says, “I WIN” as the music swells and she dies of cancer. Except then Dracula eats her and fucks her because he is just that happy to have seen the sun. THE END.

Both us and roomy were horrified because we interpreted the dynamic between Agatha and Dracula as one of mutual intellectual fascination, but as we sat and picked apart this fucking fractal onion of nonsense, we realized we had erred. Our mistake was thinking of Agatha as an independent character. She was not. Her role in the story was to act as Dracula’s mirror, reflecting his image back at him, showing him off. Her character, her thoughts and actions, all were just a reflection for him. He wasn’t fascinated by HER, he just enjoyed hearing her endlessly talk about how fascinating HE was. Her backstory, how she became a heretic nun, none of that comes up in four and a half hours, because that’s not about Dracula. It doesn’t matter. That’s why they fuck in the end, because her character is whatever makes Dracula go. He is the protagonist, not her.

What a waste.

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What a fascinating nightmare of a show, wow! And admittedly something that sounds extremely Moffat in design and function. Dracula poutwalking across the ocean floor will live in my mind forever after reading this.

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