NBC's Dracula: Episode 9, Four Roses.

The three single stems Alexander brings hospitalized Mina are obvious. It’s this episode’s eponymous fourth rose that blooms when Dracula says, “If you’re going to behave like a monster, then I’m going to make you one”, as the story finally has Lucy get turned, but in an act of hatred over the original one of desire. Yet, if you’re going to shoot a bloodletting & bloodgiving scene in a picturesque milk bath chamber you’ve already spent tons making & lighting, use the contrast of liquids, and the blooming infectious cloud of blood permeating the milk in an overhead shot. Instead they chose neck gore over subtle cinematic poetry.

Also this episode continues the trumping up of Lady Jayne’s concerns about an increasing vampire incursion in London. If there’s an epidemic of ghastly proportions infesting the whole metropolis, let’s see the rolling of victims, a pub takeover, dead bobbies as the corpse of authority, or dirty street urchins strewn about like empty bags that were neither cared for by Victorian society alive nor dead ... but they certainly would when they rise undead to feed on them.

Instead we do get one scene of Dracula leading his “relatives in from the continent” to take out some of the lesser known Order of the Dragon, but despite their awesome damask waistcoats, they’re just not-so-elegant hissing monsters sporting unfortunate bulgy mouthed dental prosthesis.

[No, why bother hiring an accomplished professional fangsmith like Dnash, when one can cut corners with huge plastic caps? It’s only a really expensive & risky primetime major network show with tenuous ratings.]

And Mina’s reflection vision of herself as Ilona in the gutter scene, while a good idea, terribly bad execution. With so much sophistication plotted and built one minute, there’s hardly much time wasted in yanking the carpet out from under the same foundations. It’s surely unintended, but at times one feels that there’s a “oh, that’s good enough” ethic that erodes the result.

Plotwise, things only set themselves up for what may just be an anticlimactic end of season: Harker ensconces himself with the Order of the Dragon, continuing to prove he’s the biggest patsycake ever. And in another echo of past things, Mina throws Lucy out of a whole hospital upon Lucy’s passive confession of jerkface Harker’s tryst.

More interestingly, Mina’s modern directness gives Alexander the opening he needs, her admitting to inner knowledge she’s metaphysically connected to lost Ilona, but in a fit of vampire guilt, Dracuxander doesn’t take the opening by finally confessing his love. It’s a great moment hampered by unnecessary restraint, especially since Davenport’s threat’s been removed from the board. Also mentioned by Lady Jayne, the “Sanguine Sanctorum” has been loaned to her team of hunters from the Vatican. Whatever this item is, we’re dying to find out.

And most vengefully rogue, it seems Van Helsing may have injected Browning’s kids with his apothecary jars of Dracula’s blood before deciding to ransom them for £50K (oh, about £21M today!). If the implication of the syringes is correct, the series’ creepiness factor may multiply “‘Salem’s Lot”-style with Browing either getting eaten by his own offspring, or being put in the position of having to drive steaks through their tiny hearts! Well done, Van Helsing!

With Harker’s granting the Order the blueprints to Grayson’s transmitter, it seems hopeless that a big science ending’s going to prevail. Browning’s demands for a catastrophe may happen on both sides, and one has to suppose that a fat cliffhanger full of debris and smoke’s all we’re going to get … unless Dracula placed faux plans for Harker to steal, but that’s probably overthinking it.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

NBC's Dracula: Episode 6, Of Monsters & Men.

Amorphousness makes this episode interesting because after all the unfolding of motivations last show, we're totally engaged in trying to figure things out, even though it's not as hard hitting by comparison.

The introductory sunlit sequence's obviously a dream, which they should've tried harder to conceal, and doesn't make any developmental sense until Dracula's required to attend a meeting in a solarium later. This would be the second dream sequence intro, so writing them somewhere else in the later acts, keeping it more even in tone could play better, and having Myers pull from the dream performance into the real one until the realization that the sun's still not, and will probably never be, a reacquired comfort, might've been better.

By contrast, it's a drenching London rain that segues Mina into disrobing and getting Jonathan into bed with her, which elementally encapsulates their uncertain & soppy engagement. The next morning's pillow talk reinforces that with Jonathan pitching elopement, while Mina majorly calls him for the third time on his motivations for being with her, further proof that he's just not in tune with her, compared to her dance time with Alexander, or even her boho night with Lucy.

Jayne's designs on Alexander play themselves forward with her not-so-subtle girl-on-girl talk with Lucy, which had to be the best bit of interaction this episode, followed by heartbreaker Mina throwing Lucy out for finally confessing her more than sisterly feelings. Characterwise this breaking off could drive Lucy in any number of interesting directions: Make up with droll beard/boyfriend Alistair? Into the arms of deliciously promiscuous Lady Jayne (who perhaps is playing a long game to do so)? Pawned by the Order or catspawed by Dracula? Or maybe even finding the fortitude to still pursue Lucy and convert her to the girlside?

Tension peaks when Van Helsing's about to use his beautiful surgical steel hammer (Hello, NBC online giftshoppe?) on the back of Mina's head for sneaking into his secret lab and finding the inexplicable properties of Dracula's blood, but her humanity stays his hand as she reveals that her mother died of stomach cancer, and she nobly tells him, "I wish to cure death." It's like that moment in "The Fountain" where angry & mournful Hugh Jackman rails against a universal fundamental but can see that it's within his grasp to actually cure death as he similarly declares "Death is a disease, just like any other, and there's a cure. A cure. And I will find it." It may have been to Van Helsing's detriment to spare her as in this version the intellectually unstoppable Mina could figure out where that blood comes from and put it all together before anyone else does. If so, will the scientist in her win and join Dracula to pass out both clean wireless power and grant mankind immortality? (Or will the dead rat she injected with vampire blood escape out into the sewers and accidentally promulgate a plague of undeath the likes of which the world has never seen?!? Aieeeeeee!)

There's a notable match-on-action shot of a real horse being cut to a carousel horse. Also visually, a great electric crucifixion sequence where Alexander's strapped down to the lab apparatus, his heart dynamo defibrillated and his torso charged & jabbed with injection equipment, hearkening to the Spear of Longinus. The inversion's disturbing & grand, with new science given unholy concert to the ancient supernatural. So New Age!

[Master & Servant.] 

Costumewise, there's a callback to all the caped Draculas when Alexander arrives with his greatcoat collar popped up at the solarium, positing perhaps that Dracula may have done it more for unexpected sun protection rather than dramatic menace.

[Daring to touch the Voivode?!? Just kill that Lord Davenport already!] 

Finally we have a great reveal of how duplicitous Dracuxander really is by finding out he originally hired an actress to disinform Jonathan with General Shaw's financial kickbacks, betting on Harker's patriotism to leak it to the press and enjoying scolding Harker for it, and then tying it all up by killing the actress. Mastermind!

While "Of Monsters and Men" played on a less active level, with only three episodes left, the series is going to have to get really ugly really quickly for anyone to have a definitive victory by the end ... unless there's a second season, which ratings are leaving to be equally amorphous. If the show continues to explore roads untaken from the original narrative, use the grander cinematic techniques, and keep the acting stylish but sensible, we could only be so lucky.



While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

The Rita Fragments.

Note to the Editor: There are a couple redundancies in these entries but you've asked for the fragments as is. I thought of editing the similar statements out, but then leaving them shows the persistence of my holding the idea over time in the separate accounts. I'm not sure which is more important, but if as a reader with the editor's eye you find the repetition more obvious than emphatic, let me know & I'll chop the lesser of them out. This is, of course, if you find this whole thing acceptable.

~ gM4

* * * 

From the bookstore forum:

05.13.05 

"haunted when the minutes drag".

So I'm in the can upstairs minding my own business, when the lights turn off. Fumbling about with my pants I get up and cross the room to discover the lightswitch has been moved down, yet the bathroom door is still locked, and of course I am alone. Or was I?



Hearsay has it that when Grant was but a humble grocery store a young lass named Rita tripped and snapped her neck at the bottom of the stairs. Since then Granties have felt her presence, found the phone music turned on in the empty conference room at the end of the hall, and a lucky handful have even seen her standing near the stairs only to vanish an instant later. And very few days go by where someone doesn't misstep on that same fatal staircase and barely avoids history repeating itself. 



One staffer gives account of a Darke Man suited up 1940s style with a chilling aura appearing & disappearing in the Kids' room as well.

Would like to suggest that we take these two souls with us when the Grant store moves downtown. Transplanting a small chunk of kids' room concrete & our bottom stair should prove enough to rescue them from oblivion.



The living now number as many as the whole host of history's dead. Despite this, the dead still have the advantage. Anything could have happened to me during those moments in that darkened bathroom after all, but I think Rita likes me. May the Phoenix staffers find equal peace & respect with their hauntings. Otherwise I hear salt or spit sometimes work, but don't bet on it.

Memento Mori ~ 

Sñr Guillermo the IVth



"If you stay in the Center 

& embrace Death 

with your whole Heart 

You will endure Forever." 

~ Lao Tzu 

Tao Te Ching 

ch XXXIII

* * *

From the Dark Diary: 

11/23/01 11:17 pm

It comes together while driving to my girlfriend's like Beethoven's roaring silencio at 29: the rabbi's tapes said that the dead are not to be feared (for the most part) unlike the horror movies would have us believe. Since they've passed into a state of permanence some of their characteristics become fixed. Rita can trip people on the stairs, turn on the music in the back room, and sometimes flick off the lights in the bathroom. The old tenant in my apartment can open cupboards. Angie's milkbottle presence can follow people down the hall and make its presence known. But they repeat these instances over and over again like other ghosts because that's all they can do -- it's the only way left they have to manifest, and it's also how they’re bound. That's why people who are at haunted sites see the same things. Their choice to do otherwise has been taken away, as the rabbi says only the living get free will and choices. This idea makes sense, but the reality's not as rigid as all that. The dead can be malign like Angie's winged hallway wraith, and can affect the living adversely even though their means of doing so might be limited. Your free will also might be the answer to the question "Why do the dead hate the living?" in some cases. They resent us because they can no longer choose, or they resent having to watch some of us make the same mistakes they made and they can no longer affect this, or they wish to thwart us in these choices and hate that they cannot.



Take these theorems and apply them to the vampire: a being has passed into a state beyond death into an immortal coil, but because it lasts forever it must perform a certain action -- feed on the living. That is the vampire's repeated manifestation. In this, the Strigoi has no choice.

* * *

[Not Rita, but some other ghost on some other staircase.]

***

From email: 

Subject: the Seen & Unseen 

Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 16:31:03 -0700 

From: Guillermo the IVth 

Organization: Club Golgotha 

To: "A.G." <--@-----.com>



Bearer of the Spirits A---- ~



It's not just the ghosts; there are things above & below us, infernal & divine. It is written that a third of the angels, a rebellious 133,306,668 of them Fell, leaving their stations as intermediaries from us to god, to think for themselves, to serve and pursue their own desires -- & some still cater to ours but in a different fashion.



Also a balance has been struck in terms of population: the current living equal all the world's Dead, and so now for every one of us there is one of them.



"If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible." -- Talmud, Berakhot, 6.



These and the ghosts and angels (or what we've culturally decided to name them) aren't agents of anything so ordered as karma or destiny, but more interested parties of the Blessed & Damned, either to aid or hinder or just watch. Mine provide protections over & under me, and I'm thankful to be within their aegis because I know they want me to be here, and my sense of permanence reflects their intentions.



Everyone at work trips on the stairs, teetering to repeat that moment where Rita lost her life at the bottom. Does Rita want company? Does she just want to know that someone can be as unlucky as she to suffer such an empty and stupid Death? Or is it not even her, just the echo of the moment reaching to the present? (The last is a theory proposed by some physicists who say places retain intense emotional energies [like alpha waves] that influence the now. But Rita's there -- she turned the bathroom lights off on me once, and every so often I'll go to the conference room and the background music will be on at full blast coming from the phone, but the lights will be off and nobody's there at all. She just wants something to listen to, or someone to come in back and be in the dark with her for a moment.)



In my apartment cupboards slowly swing open without aid of my hand, the same shelf has fallen 3 times in the past couple months, and my sugar skull recently split apart for no apparent reason. Maybe the former tenant still doesn't know he had a heart attack here. Maybe he does and he's still angry about it, and this is all he can do. Maybe he just needs some attention from time to time so he can stay.



Poe (the singer) placed samples of her late father's last lectures from tapes that she found in his attic into her songs on her last album, "Haunted", and contrasts them with samples of a little girl's voice that is supposed to be hers. It's clever and creepy at times.



My mother's father, Cippriano, visits her. Alone in bed, she'll feel somebody come to sit down on the mattress but my father's not home. And she has a reoccurring dream that he was buried alive, and is still there in the ground trying to get out. She still dreams this dream after 30 years, and it's something she's learned to live with.



Existence is significantly different for the Dead, with differences in time, thought process, manifestation, need, and these factors as well as our own sensitivity and accessibility determine if and when we can perceive them.



Some metaphysical systems state that our souls suffer a second Astral Death. We stay lost here for a time as ghosts, but post-Death the "silver cord" that binds us to our physicality in life has been severed and in its absence the energy that makes up the Soul, which is now untethered, disperses and we meet a more final oblivion -- unless provisions or circumstances ensure otherwise.



Outside of Chicago there's a small town where lies the tomb of the Massochs, a trio of brothers who were butchers (professional not criminal) early last century. In the 1960s their rest was desecrated when someone broke in and took one of their heads. The culprit was caught and punished, the head returned, but since the event a woman and a decade later a girl were found near the crypt, alive but suffering huge blood loss. Other lesser incidents also occurred: a gang of camping bikers was scared away by someone, a dog was found dead, what appeared to be a gigantic "black worm" flew forth from the keyhole at a ghost hunter.



The property was made private.



In 1998 while visiting Chicago I drove out to Spring Valley near sundown and asked in the town until someone was kind enough to direct me there. Set 30 yards away from a bend in the road sits a group of graves in the wood, the mausoleum being the only above ground gravesite.



Waited two hours until I could barely see in the gloaming darkness.

Near the end of that vigil, the sound of scraping came from inside and for a few breathless seconds my heart stopped. A little later I went back to the car to get some paper and in a slot-like hole in the upper western face of the crypt placed a letter to the Brothers requesting audience, and bloodied the paper so I could later be found.



The pictures I took didn't come out.



These things, the daemons, ghosts, angels, Undead, are inhuman, either more absolute or abstract in existence as we know it, and some possess a supernature and qualities that are transferable. We sense this monstrousness & this is why it's horrifying when we brush up against such things.



Much of post-Death states has to do with power of will, and it is that force, how well one knows themselves and the resulting strength of id that may very well keep us here. Desire to remain lets us remain.



In many ways words, like component in occult ritual, and even as part of creative ritual, lock and capture and embalm the Soul, and the more artful we are in defining ourselves in the medium and Art, the more likely we can endure past Death not only in our works, but even in this life.



We are Touched by Our Dead ~ 

Guillermo 

who courts & is courted 

by the Seen & Unseen

* * * 

Afterword:

10.09.05

Two months ago my co-worker Peter, the man who witnessed the Darke Man in our kids' room so long ago, walked down the back stairs as he has for every workday, six times a day, for 18 years. But that afternoon he fell down from the landing, careening off the handrail, and somehow landed an improbable four feet away from the bottom of the stairs to smack his skull against the corner of a sharp baseboard. When he came to, he cried out for help, and we found him a bloody mess. Disoriented as he was, we called paramedics, but as he slowly collected himself, Peter seemed more embarrassed than anything, even apologizing to the men who came to help him. Something had gone amiss with his knee, and the gash was only superficial. "It was the ghost!" I wrote in his get well card, and after Peter got back a week later, he took a moment to ask me about that when we were alone in the breakroom.



"You really think it was the ghost?!?" 

"Well, no -- I really don't think Rita's that kind of ghost."



Peter laughed, which was what I wanted him to do, but the question was still there for him, scarred into his forehead, marking two moments in time, a piece of misfortune shared, one dead and one spared.

# # #

[Still not Rita, just another haunted staircase.]

#    #    #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.