“You made me want you like a dog.” -Richie
The episode begins with (shocker) a flashback. But this time it’s back to the 1500s, Spanish conquistadors. Carlos coming to the New World.
Seth is about to kill Texas Ranger Freddie, who has been bitten, Seth worries that he’s about to turn, but Robert Patrick talks him out of it. With a gun. Scott is in the tunnels. And Richie is with Santanica Pandemonium.
Freddie and Carlos’s swordfight is pretty epic. It finishes with Carlos pouring salt in Freddie’s wounds and taking a big bite. But Freddie has an ancient bloodline and he won’t change.
We get Santanico’s backstory. She;s vicious, but it’s because she’s cursed.
Kate’s dad almost comes clean to her about her mother’s demonic possession as they go deeper into the tunnels and hit a “roadblock with a deathstick” man with a shotgun who’s been in the tunnels for sometime holed up in a supply room (the Sergeant. Kate, her dad, the professor, and Seth load up on weapons and get ready.
5 centuries ago, Carlos feed Santanico from her chains in the temple and became her servant. He worships her. We see how he was changed into the serpentine vampire and then took down his fellow explorers. He cries for himself and the monster he has become. But this is what he wanted: a fountain of youth, power, eternal life.
Scott got turned. He is informing on Santanico for Carlos. He looks like one of those Buffy style vamps.
The Sergeant tell them that the temple messes with their heads, that he thought he was in Falluja. He’s never going back out there. The rest do. Kate envisions her mother committing suicide right before she is taken. She’s about to be stabbed when the others find her.Team Human is quite outmatched when the Sergeant busts in and sacrifices himself.
Richie is on death’s door and Santanico is compelling him to be turned. As the episode ends: she sinks in her fangs.
The intensity was ramped up in this episode. Of course that came with some tropes. Only black man in the horror show dies almost immediately. Combat veteran on TV? immediately means he has PTSD. STOP. Stop it.
Other than that? Good shit. Loving the addition of Jake Busey