In Romania circa 1881, two men find a tomb and descend toward it by climbing down a rope. Once they hit solid ground, they see that the body on the coffin has fangs and is withered beyond recognition, so they investigate the sides of the coffin before breaking into the contraption’s second level, where they find gold and another body. While one of the man celebrates their newfound fortunes, the other, who doesn’t show his face, stabs his colleague in the stomach before slitting his throat. He drips the blood into the mouth of the first body and enough makes it to the second body for the corpse to reanimate and the man whose corpse it was to resurrect.
Fifteen years later, the man who resurrected is going by the alias Alexander Grayson and putting on an opulent party that evening for a prototype of an invention that could change the world. After he gets wind that all the guests on the list are present and accounted for, he tests out his American accent, strikingly different from his natural British tongue, and waits for his right-hand man Renfield to introduce him to the public. While Alexander is backstage at Carfax Manor, his guests are having a splendid time, the orchestra swelling and the gossip mill churning in anticipation of whatever they’re about to see. Most of the guests arrive only to have the ammunition necessary to properly mock the new London resident’s attempt at stardom, while others marvel at the expensive glassware he’s using for the event and a certain sect deem the lavish affair to be distressingly American at best. Finally, Alexander makes his grand entrance onto the London social scene and stands before his public, only to become distracted once he locks eyes with a beautiful brunette in a blue chiffon dress. Rather than simple attraction, he thinks that she’s the reincarnated spirit of the wife he lost before he was killed.
But Alexander quickly moves on to mingling with the masses, getting introduced to Lady Jayne Wetherby and her date Herr Kruger; Lord and Lady Laurent; and Clive Dawes, Lady Hope, and Lord Davenport. Alexander brings up the fact that several of them run British Imperial Coolant Company and that he would like access to the grants that they have, in hopes of furthering his invention’s chances at success. He’s soundly rejected, though, and learns British Imperial will only further British industry, not bankroll the projects of their Colonial brethren. Alexander then gets introduced to journalist Jonathan Harker and his two dates – Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, the latter a medical student, daughter of the man who runs a nearby hospital, and the woman he thinks might be his wife. Before the two can talk about past lives and where this feeling that they know each other comes from, Renfield pulls Alexander away since the demonstration is about to begin, setting up an interview with Jonathan for 4:30 the following day as Alexander prepares himself for what’s to come. Alexander gets the floor and while passing out light bulbs, goes on about how society is still in the Dark Ages of brutality, fear, and hatred. However, his invention can bring them out of the darkness using waves from the magnetosphere and just then, the first stage kicks in, with Renfield ordering the first handles that control the coolant supply in another building to be pulled.
Nothing.
As the guests begin gossiping about what kind of impact free, safe, wireless electricity would have on petroleum interests, the second stage kicks in and more handles get pulled, thereby using more coolant. Mina’s light bulb unstably flickers on before shining brighter and more steadily. The rest of the light bulbs gradually come on and fill the room with a tremendous glow; however, they run out of coolant and the lights quickly go out, with Alexander receiving strong applause for his efforts. He approaches Mina and Lucy afterwards, with the former seemingly shaken after being introduced to a new era on this very night. After the party, Alexander gets approached by a deftly quiet Lady Jayne, surprising him in the process, and both invited to the opera and hit on, though he mentions that he’s already reserved his own box. Before the night is over, Clive confronts Alexander over the show he just witnesses and claims that the new Londonite is a fraud and would never be allowed to do business in this town again.
That night, Jonathan confides in his roommate that he thinks Mina deserves better than him, while Lucy tries to convince Mina that Jonathan is boring and that even Alexander’s leering beats that. Mina remains faithful to her boyfriend, though, as they hear a strange whooshing sound that stirs up the dogs outside. Although they see nothing at the window, the trouble is at Clive’s home; the compulsive gambler, who is very much behind on his debts, gets attacked while trying to open the door, blood splashing on a column nearby. The attacker? Alexander, who thinks that Lords Laurent and Davenport are members of the High Council of The Order of the Dragon, a violent organization that has wreaked havoc for hundreds of years. Only this time, instead of burning people alive or branding them heretics, the Order has infiltrated boardrooms and private office, including the political and oil industries, so the way to defeat them, and exact revenge for the his wife’s death, is not through violence but through monetary means. If he’s able to get geomagnetic electricity off the ground, it would severely cripple their funding and, therefore, their power, making them easier to beat.
Herr Kruger breaks into the funeral home that holds Clive’s body and sees that the man’s head was severed in the attack. He cuts it off and puts it in a suitcase that he takes to the back of a nearby clothing store, where he passes it off to Lady Jayne, who brings it to another member of the Order. The head was surrounded by garlic in the suitcase and the two discuss both the amount of time it had been since the last vamp attack (eight years) and the way their organization should proceed. As they don’t know that it was a vampire due to the damage on the neck, they’ll be playing it safely for now, taking this as a strike by their enemies and having an eye being placed on all members of High Council until further notice. Meanwhile, Mina is in a class with Professor Van Helsing and stands up for a classmate who gets caught reading a newspaper article about Alexander’s splashy entrance into Victorian London society.
As the Professor sees the analogous nature of the article to their discussion of a neuron, Harker heads to his interview with Alexander, opening one of the windows and letting the sun in, which causes a small burn on Alexander’s hand when he shakes the boy’s hand upon entering the room. Once he scoots his chair out of the way of the sun, Alexander begins the interview by talking about the reason he came to England (it’s where his great grandparents are from) and his struggle with being someone from an old family that is laser-focused on the future, when he wants to help redefine the human species and facilitate the type of evolution that only Darwin had hinted at previously. Harker’s response? Three words in his notes, describing Grayson – Visionary. Delusional. Egomaniac.
While Mina gets encouraging words from Van Helsing that evening during a conference, where he told her she gets the best grades but needs to trust herself more if she wants the research assistant position, Dracula ends up having sex with and then subsequently draining a woman. He then heads to the opera, lingering in the shadows of Lady Jayne’s box while Jonathan and Mina took his. He and Jayne sit in the last row of the box by themselves and passionately kiss, his hand going up her skirt and her mouth getting bloody from the biting of her lower lip. He keeps his hand between her thighs while kissing her chest, licking the blood from her mouth, and not taking his eyes off Mina the entire time, as she was directly in his eye line. The result of their affair was Grayson getting a block of imperial coolant after using Clive’s gambling debts against Jayne, his wife; as she wants to avert scandal and keep her name out of the mouths of the society she runs with, she gave in and let him have whatever he needed, much to the chagrin of the rest of the order.
Grayson watches members of the Order leave their carriages from a nearby roof and gets shot in the leg with an arrow by Kruger. The two have a brief skirmish before Alexander slices the man’s wrist and throat, letting him bleed out on his own. But he makes sure to mention that he’s ready to take down every single member of the Order and shows Kruger his fangs, with the German realizing that Alexander is in fact Dracula. Elsewhere, Lady Jayne is training with a blade that she uses to slice up two sand-filled punching bags while a vampire she’s held in a metal cage watches on. The vampire won’t tell her anything about who sired her and pledges that her kind will soon be legion, even with Jayne’s threats to dump the cage in the middle of a body of water and let it rust for a couple of decades, sheer torture for a vampire.
Dracula arrives home and takes a drink, only to have Van Helsing emerge from the shadows and admonish him for the sloppy way that he handled Clive. The plan wasn’t supposed to be this; they were to use Clive’s gambling debts as leverage against him, not his wife. Van Helsing reminders Dracula that the way they’ll defeat the Order is to destroy their wealth and that takes time and patience, not impetuousness and carelessness. It took a decade to build to this moment, as Van Helsing was the man who brought Dracula back to life, but Dracula confirms that while Helsing gives their hatred form, he’s the one who gives it strength. He pledges revenge for his wife just as Mina wakes up from a nightmare.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-So, the opening 7-10 minutes of this was some gorgeous, gorgeous television. The score, the costumes, the dancing, the direction, the emergence of Dracula – all extremely well done. I don’t know if it’s where this fall has seen a lot of cheaper looking dramas, but I was definitely spellbound for much of the part at the manor.
-The score, especially, was an asset for the show, not only in the beginning but during the opera scene, where it added a lot of tension to Alexander’s interactions with Lady Jayne. The show didn’t lean into the horror as explicitly as I expected it to; I would, though, be okay if it kept up setting this type of mood and amping up the sense of dread through other means than gore. I will say that having a Dracula pilot and having his one vampire-ish kill take place off screen was silly. Not wanting it to become Just Another Vampire Show is totally understandable in my book, but if you remove it entirely or only vaguely hint at it, it’s a different kind of show entirely.
-Jonathan Rhys Meyers was a nice bit of casting in the lead role, though hearing his American accent will take a lot of getting used to, especially after marathoning the entirety of The Tudors earlier this year. After what I think(/hope) was an intentionally comedic overexaggeration while he was getting ready for the party, I thought it was a pretty okay accent overall. I’ve heard much worse.
-Lady Jayne didn’t show her neck in her two green costumes – sign that she’ll be turned? Maybe there’s a chance she’s not as loyal to the Order as we think?
-Carfax Manor. I see you, product placement.
-The opening credits: good or not good? I’m firmly in the “okay” camp – I don’t know if they fit with the tone of the show, but I think they’re interesting. They vaguely reminded me of a more cleaned up version of Lost Girl’s opening credits, for some reason.
-Here’s a little bit about The Order of the Dragon. I kind of got the vibe during the episode that it was Illumanti-like in nature thanks to their seemingly all-encompassing (yet impossible to detect) power.
-Another reason I didn’t like Clive’s death was because of how splash-y the blood was against the column. It was like somebody dumped a big bucket of red paint vs. a somewhat realistic killing. I don’t need an hour of gore every week and I’ve got a pretty strong suspension of disbelief, but come on.
-I would like the coat that Dracula was wearing before he killed the redheaded girl. Someone buy it for me.
-The direction during the head transfer was very fun – I loved the tight shots on the suitcase. (Or was it a hat box? It looked to be leather, so I assumed it was a suitcase, but Kruger went into a clothing store, so it could have feasibly been a hat box.)
-Jack the Ripper mention! Here’s a website to quench your thirst.
-One encouraging thing the pilot had was comedy. There were a few quality Renfield moments and I appreciated the “Tell me what other words you had to look up” exchange in the opera box. A show like this needs to either embrace humor or go all in on the darkness, so at least it’s seemed to pick a lane early on. Crossing my fingers that the humor is steady and consistent without being overbearing from here on out.
-For all my complaints about the lack of vamping, the way Dracula revealed himself to Kruger was entertainingly operatic in a good way. A part of me wishes that the episode ended something like that, with one final shot of his fangs or with him finally acknowledging to someone that he’s Dracula. The actual ending was okay, promising enough to leave me curious as to what kind of connection Mina and Alexander have and whether or not she’s in fact his reincarnated wife.
-How about Lady Jayne being a ninja? That was both awesome and seemingly out of nowhere, but if the show decides to go big, I might be okay with that, since much of the middle of the pilot was dull. If it turned into Da Vinci’s Demons but with Dracula (coincidentally, we met Vlad the Impaler on an episode of the Starz drama last season), you’ll hear no complaints from me.
-Do you think the vampire in the cage is anybody we’ll come to know in the coming weeks? Or just a random creature that Jayne captured?
-Next week on Dracula: Grayson investigates Lady Jayne’s involvement with The Order of the Dragon, while Mina faces a critical challenge at school, Van Helsing continues working toward a solar vaccine, and Harker strikes a devil’s bargain.
