My favourite of the three was the second episode. I think it might be because, in the book, the ship of the damned just arrives in Whitby - we don't ever find out what actually happened or who anyone on it was - so this was filling in a gap in the canon. Unlike the other episodes that were shredding the canon into tiny pieces. I thought it was a compelling story in its own right - whereas the others were borrowing heavily from Dracula but telling a different story with characters that don't actually belong to the writers. Fan fic is all very well and good on the internet - but I don't approve of it on the television.
Having said that, I did enjoy the first episode very much. Especially the 'you're naked. they are nuns. It's not your eyes they're not looking at,' line. And chopping the mother superior's head off.
But I did roll my eyes at Van Helsing being a woman now. Sister Agatha was great, but that just seemed a bit too much like Gattis and Moffat were trying to show off how simultaneously inventive, clever and feminist they were... nope. Just give her a different name. Make her a badass vampire hunter in her own right. And the ultimate ending left me a bit weirded out - she was dreaming of having sex with him as he bit her? or at least being intimate. So are they suggesting she was a bit (maybe a lot) in love with him the whole time? Why else would she want to dream that as she dies? So Van Helsing isn't a fearless vampire hunter tracking down an immortal foe for the good of humanity - she's a nun with a crush? Is that why they made her a woman - for the final scene? Not good if so.
The final episode was definitely the weakest. As soon as the helicopter light flashed down on him I thought I didn't really want to watch it if it was set in the present day. Whereas Sherlock translated really well to the modern era, I just don't think Dracula does. He is a creature of superstition, magic and dark shadows, gothic castles and candlelight - he just has no power or resonance when you can just switch the electric light on. The story wasn't at all compelling - a creepy old dude and a girl that likes to go clubbing.
I also didn't understand why Lucy appeared to be completely deranged after she came out of the crematorium (and unable to say 'beautiful' properly). (squigean - she saw herself as beautiful in the mirror for the maximum impact of the horror reveal and for no other reason that actually made sense within the lore they had created for this show!). She didn't stare into mirrors and say 'beautiful girl' before she was burned to a crisp (if anything she seemed a bit bored by being beautiful - and annoyed at the way it made people treat her.) That just seemed like they were purposefully building up to make the horror reveal as jarring as possible ... but completely rewrote what she had been before (an instagrammer in it for the likes and the love but who secretly found the whole thing hollow and so was in love with death - not her own face) and made her come across as mentally unbalanced at the same time.
And was she just undead or did she become a vampire? I think she fed off the crematorium worker which suggests vampire - and I think he wanted her to be his new bride, and I think the other brides were vampires? because unlike the others in the castle they weren't rotting? But - if she is a vampire... a vampire can regenerate and heal all wounds by feeding off humans and lying in a bed of soil from their native land. That's how he stops being old. That's how he gets better after being set on fire and later blown up in the second episode ... so why couldn't she just regenerate?
They didn't explain that - at all - not even just unsatisfactorily (even if it was something he had learned over centuries - once he knew it he could tell her), and the cremation plotline was unnecessary anyway so the whole thing just felt like it was written as a really cruel and brutal punishment for Lucy for being vain... which doesn't sit well with me.
It rather destroys your feminists creds if you go from 'look at us we made Van Helsing a woman' to 'we hideously disfigured a woman in our story - who was acting as a commentary on modern culture and young girls who take too many selfies - to make a point about vanity and what shallow people women really look like underneath'. Which completely ignores the fact that Lucy (all girls), her whole life, will have been taught in a million different ways that the most valuable thing about her was her beauty, and the pressure she (all young girls) are under to look good, get likes and follows (maybe make good money doing so) and the insecurity that comes with this. It's like they punished her for being what society made her - like young girls deserve to be punished for daring to become products of the society that makes them. It was pure patriarchy - you're only worth something if you're beautiful ... but if you're too beautiful or you take pleasure in that beauty, then you need to be slapped down for getting uppity. After all - as the great songsmiths of one direction once sang - not knowing you're beautiful is what makes you beautiful. If you can recognise for yourself that your features are pleasant and reasonably symmetrical then you must be ugly on the inside - and deserve to be revealed as such.
Add in the fact she was a black character ... the actress was good, she deserved the role, she was also very pretty - but her body sustained more damage than nearly all the white characters combined. This is a problem in T.V and film - characters of colour, whilst appearing far less than white characters, still manage to sustain the worst injuries or suffer the most gruesome deaths. As if the damage to their bodies is somehow less appalling or upsetting for a predominantly white audience - and that's something that white writers and filmmakers should be aware of in this day and age. It isn't enough to have more diverse casting if you are still going to treat the bodies of characters of colour as being more disposable or allow more gruesome things to happen to them than their white counterparts.
Lucy being buried alive and coming back with fangs would have been enough - it's been enough for over 100 years. Maybe as writers they only wanted to change things up because they wanted the gory horror - but then that only shows that they weren't thinking about feminist or racial perspectives when they did it. Which makes their whole 'look at us we made Van Helsing a woman' even more ridiculous.
Also - final point - it seemed that everyone he fed off became undead. He killed Van Helsing by feeding off her - they show it as an act of kindness (with a weird sex scene) ... but hasn't he just made her undead? Or does her cancer somehow protect her? I know it was poison to him ... but they never clearly stated that that meant biting her wouldn't infect her. In which case - that ending was terrible!
Yeah - the more I think about it, the last episode - whilst being an OK watch whilst it was on - ruined everything they had built up in the first two.