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Knowing that Vanessa’s loss of control is borne of the abrupt loss of her daughter, he realizes that she needs a friend – not to protect her physically, but to help her work through her suffering. “You can’t kill away the pain of Dylan’s loss,” he tells her. This dehumanizing, close quarters combat necessarily requires the participant to lose control, and Julius understands that unchecked, Vanessa will go too far. Blood flying onto her face and clothing as she wields her hatchet, the comparison to Sam and his baseball bat is clear. What else can we ask of an actor?Įarly in the episode, Julius confronts Vanessa about the fact that she’s dangerously close to spinning completely out of control, and as we watch her savagely butcher a vampire, it’s clear he’s not wrong.
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Examining the full cast of Van Helsing, the fact that I don’t notice the acting may be the greatest compliment I can pay.
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And if there’s anyone better able to portray the deranged lunatic than Christopher Heyerdahl, I’ve yet to see him. I haven’t mentioned the acting the acting much, but Bzhaun Rhoden as Felix has been convincingly intense as the young man whose emotions necessarily run the gamut from sheer terror to unmitigated bloodlust. And while there has been no sign of a conscience, Sam’s cutting out of Felix’s tongue removes any chance that Sam can be talked out of future horrific acts. Will his sick mind literally and symbolically kill Felix so that a reunion with a “punished” Mohamad becomes possible? Though we didn’t know it at the time, Sam has been unable to curb his murderous urges, and now that he’s been turned, he’s afforded the freedom to come out of the shadows with his depraved desires. Does Sam hold Mohamad as responsible as Vanessa, or does he see her, like himself, as the controlling partner. However, it seems unlikely that Sam will forget that Mohamad and Vanessa left him crippled and defenseless on the ground at the end of “Last Time,” and the smiley face painted in blood on Felix’s shirt and the mohawk haircut only complicate being able to predict Sam’s next move. Like Mohamad, there seems to be an air of goodness about him, and while he’s obviously made some mistakes, there is something there worth saving. Joss Whedon explores the notion of the soul and an individual’s core being in both Buffyand Dollhous e, and when we look at Felix, it’s difficult to imagine what crime this young man committed to find himself imprisoned at the facility. It’s easy to feel sorry for Felix after we watch his peers whip him for what they see as a dereliction of duty and then have him fall prey to Sam’s manipulations masked as friendship. But we don’t know Mohamad’s pre-Sam backstory, or in what state of mind Sam found the young man. Is Felix the Mohamad we never got to see – the frightened young man trying to navigate the post-eruption landscape? The Mohamad we meet in the show’s pilot “Help Me” already exudes self-confidence and his relationship with Sam appears on solid footing. Felix recognizes that he is, in fact, a proxy for this person from Sam’s past, but aside from the physical resemblance, comparing the two boys, while fascinating, doesn’t get us much closer to understanding any of the Sam’s we’ve encountered. Felix sits terrified on the bottom of the empty pool, and the long shot accentuates the boy’s isolation as he contemplates Sam’s unnatural fixation on Mohamad. In the opening scene, the camera moves slowly past the bloody corpses Sam left in his wake at the Randolphe Juvenile Detention Center, ultimately focusing on him as he constructs a necklace made of his victim’s fingers. Season two’s fourth episode “A Home” introduces the theme of control, as writers Jeremy Smith and Matt Venables (“Fear Her”) deftly set up a number of well timed parallels to highlight Vanessa’s struggle to retain her humanity and ultimately rebuild her life. Van Helsing Season 2 Episode 4Īs Van Helsing opens, Vanessa and Julius take a break after a one week vampire killing spree, and though she may not admit it, having him by her side is the only thing keeping her from going off the deep end and totally losing herself. This Van Helsing review contains spoilers.
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