While waiting in his carriage outside Mina’s place, Grayson remembers the moment where Ilona was taken away from him, a time when a swarm of men infiltrated their chambers and kidnapped her as he tried to fight through them. He’s brought back from his memory when Renfield asks him how much longer he was wanting to sit outside, telling Grayson that he needs to make a choice when it comes to Mina. Either he needs to take her and make her into a vampire, someone to be with him forever, or he must let her go; the problem with those scenarios, Grayson surmises, is that taking her would put him in mortal danger and letting her go would be the end of him.
As Grayson sits out, Mina is in her father’s office and finds the blood that Van Helsing possessed that brought the dead cells back to life in a cabinet with a false front. She fumbles with it, though, when she hears her father coming and though she manages to get the front secured again, she’s faced with questions from him about what’s going on with Harker and what exactly Grayson is to her. Although, she says, Harker is someone she’s known for the entirety of her life and someone with whom she will exchange wedding vows soon enough, Grayson has this magnetic pull over her that she can’t explain. Her father advises her to follow her heart, just as Lady Jayne is mapping out the locations of the four vampires that were exterminated the previous night. The only explanation? Another elder has made his way to London and those vampires were the first of likely many sons and daughters that the Order will have to fight off. Even though the Order thought that the old one had already been killed, Browning gives Jayne the order to go after this new threat and destroy it or face the consequences from the brotherhood.
She does just that by making it to a sort of vampire brothel and cornering one of the female vampires who works there. The two have a scuffle that ends up with Jayne pinning the vampire to the wall with a gun to her head, causing the vampire to confess that the one who called her and all others like her is The Fell One, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula; his goal, and the goal of all vampires, is to bring about the endless night so that they can walk freely and feed as they wish. But before Jayne can get any information about where the nests are, the vampire reaches down and pulls the trigger on the gun, killing herself. Meanwhile, Harker fills a friend of his in on what happened with General Shaw and Grayson, the latter of whom he claims is dangerous and a potential threat to his own life. With Vera Markham not having been heard from in days, Harker’s friend presents him with a revolver with which to protect himself.
Grayson gets another dose of sun serum from Van Helsing, who isn’t exactly enthusiastic about the slayed Scotland Yard Chief Inspector. Grayson claims, though, that he got the information he needed before the man died – that the poisoning was on the order of the Order, meaning that the resonator was not responsible for the mass illness. No matter, because all anyone will remember from and associate with the resonator public demonstration are upset stomachs, vomiting, and quite a bit of pain. Grayson pledges to prove that the technology they have is harmless, just as the Order has begun fretting about the existence of Dracula in London. They all had assumed it was merely a myth or something used to scare others, but Jayne explains that Dracula was indeed a real man – Vlad Tepes, a ruthless warrior prince and a huntsman who was a part of the Order’s high council. However, he defied them, found himself ex-communicated, and was punished by being turned into the demon who continues to wreak havoc all these years later. Jayne believes that Dracula is in the city, considering how her seers and Kruger were both dispatched easily, yet Browning tells her to acquire concrete proof of the elder’s presence in the city.
Harker meets with Mina and tells her about Grayson’s connection to the Shaw slander and mentions the deaths of Lord Laurent and Lord Davenport’s son, the latter making him think that Grayson would do any and everything to get what he wants – including murder. As such, he forbids Mina from seeing the man he calls the closest thing to evil that he’s ever seen. Elsewhere, Grayson goes to see Lady Jayne and finds that she knows of his feelings for Mina, which she says became apparent after she watched them dance at the engagement party. She says that Grayson wins and that she has officially been bested before asking if it was always Mina when they 
were together and showing him out of her house. While Davenport finds out that he has several reliable men to introduce to Mina, Grayson is beside himself with the resonator’s seeming failure; it’s to the point where he wants to go kill someone in order for his machine to get the chance that it deserves to go public, but Renfield convinces him to use a contact at the Board of Health instead.
Mina then comes in and mentions that Harker is terrified of Grayson, which the latter says is due to his own necessary ruthlessness to combat the men looking to crash his project. He argues, though, that Harker is even more ruthless than he is, causing Mina to claim that Grayson infects people and that the charm he puts on is nothing more than self-interest. As such, she won’t be seeing him anymore. After she leaves, this judgment causes Grayson to become furious and hungry for blood; he tries to fight his way out of the house, but Renfield refuses to let him go, not when Mina makes his friend hate who he is and not when that thing is the biggest weapon they have in terms of destroying the Order. Elsewhere, Lucy and Harker are meeting with swatches for his coat at the wedding, which quickly turns into something much more awkward when she confesses her feelings for him. Though he tries to get her to keep things quiet out of respect for Mina, he ends up having to pay for her silence with a kiss, as she claims to need the consolation of something she cannot have, a crumb to ease the pain. She tries to pull him in for a kiss when he was merely going to kiss her cheek and when he pulls back, she lays into him about Mina spending so much time at Carfax Manor – even when Harker isn’t there.
Harker then confronts Mina at her college and states that he doesn’t believe that she wasn’t flirting with Grayson and that she didn’t go out of her way to find reasons to go to Carfax without him. He leaves and later, as Mina is getting ready to go home, three threatening men come into the office. She tries to escape up the stairs, but she ends up falling and hitting her head, giving them the opportunity to tie her up and put her on the exam table in the middle of the classroom. The leader, the man with the facial birthmark from the previous episode, taunts her with sulfuric acid until Grayson quickly arrives, ripping the man’s arm out of its socket and the throat out of one of the other men. While Mina flirts in and out of consciousness, Grayson kills the three men and puts their bodies on the fence spikes outside the Order compound, which Jayne and Browning take note of. Luckily for Mina, her injuries were mostly superficial and she regains her consciousness fairly quickly, recounting the events when she gets her bearings about her.
While Lady Jayne finds a nest of vampires that she tortures with holy water and chains, a method that eventually points her in the direction of a vampire who can walk around in sunlight, Van Helsing panics about all the years he’s dedicated to getting the resonator off the ground being for naught following the disrupted public demonstration. Renfield doesn’t help matters when he reveals that the higher-ups in London society have been freezing them out, but he does do something helpful when he mentions that a Mr. Browning kept coming up. Renfield thinks the man is for sure in the Order’s high council and possibly even the Dragon’s Head, so when Van Helsing leaves Grayson’s residence, he begins stalking the Browning family, waiting for his opportunity to strike.
Harker leaves the hospital room with the intention of going to the police, only for Grayson to explain that a man like Lord Davenport, whose man Harker recognized upon a description by Mina, is too respected to be fingered for a crime like this. As such, Harker decides to go to Davenport himself, pulling the gun on the older man and claiming that the attack on Mina was retaliation for what happened to General Shaw. Davenport tries to convince Harker that it’s Grayson who’s truly at fault her, that regardless of the outcome of their current confrontation, he stands to gain. Whether Harker dies or goes to jail, Mina will need to have someone look after her, a position he’s more than willing to fill. Davenport goes on to mention the Dresden Triptych and the fact that Grayson not only hired Harker to get closer to Mina, he allowed them to have their engagement party in his home; Harker shoots Davenport in the chest, killing him instantly and leaves the house once he sees that the man wasn’t lying about the existence of the Triptych. Harker makes it to Lucy’s and the two make love, just as Browning returns home to find that his children have been kidnapped.
While at Mina’s bedside, Grayson confesses that nothing has been the same since he laid eyes on her and that he truly believes that she is Ilona. He pledges to belong to her and learns of Davenport’s death when he returns home. His plan worked.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-I think this was the best the show has been directed since the pilot, if only for the shot of the ink running over the map, the show of Van Helsing stalking Browning’s family, and the shot of Lady Jayne with the vampire’s blood on her face. The episode as a whole felt crisper and more alive than other episodes this season did while retaining the show’s brooding atmosphere and stylistic comfort cues.
-With Grayson engineering the murder of Lord Davenport, as well as the framing of General Shaw, the show has went in a Devil’s Advocate direction that I wasn’t really expecting when the show began. Grayson has systematically destroyed Harker all in name of getting closer with Mina, but is the finishing blow going to come during the final two episodes of the season?
-Also fun: Lady Jayne finding the vampires in the cave and torturing/killing them with holy water. It forwarded the plot, in that she knows that Dracula has found a way to walk in the sunlight, and was visually interesting, as well as added the type of action/gore that the show would do well in embracing slightly more. (Case in point: Grayson leaving the bodies of the men who attacked Mina for the Order to see.) Hopefully in episodes nine and ten, the deliberate pacing will prove to have a purpose and that watching everything build to this point will make the final confrontations between Jayne, the Order, and Grayson all the more powerful.
-Disappointed that the episode didn’t follow through on the promise of showing the rat from earlier in the season. At the rate that the bodies are dropping, though, that rat might outlive everybody on this show except Grayson and Renfield.
-Nice to see Lord Laurent and Lord Davenport’s son being brought up again, a week after Lady Jayne mentioned her husband for the first time in a few weeks.
-Lady Jayne’s “I don’t remember inviting you in.” to Grayson was a cute nod to one of the most used aspects of vampire mythology that the show has decided to leave out.
-I like how Mina’s blanket in the hospital was the same color scheme (blue and white) that the costumers have used for her the entire season. The truly stylish among us coordinate even while unconscious.
-It’s very curious that the show isn’t afraid to kill off its characters without introducing new threats for Grayson. I appreciate the show not holding any punches in that aspect, but since we’re nearing the end of the season, you’d think that there’d be some signs pointing to what a second season would look like. Is it going to be strictly Grayson doing battle with Lady Jayne? Could Mr. Browning find himself under the control of Van Helsing now that the latter has had the former’s children kidnapped?
-Next week on Dracula: Grayson goes to war with the Order of the Dragon, while Lucy tells Mina about her tryst with Harker and Lady Jayne prepares to hunt the ultimate vampire.
