TRASHFUTURE - Exiting the Mind-Palace feat. Leslie Lee

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

This week, we’ve stepped away a bit from the usual slate of brain-destroying British politics and have instead decided to review the joint BBC/Netflix special Dracula. It’s bad, but it’s bad in such particularly eyeball-crossing ways that we needed expert advice. So, this episode features Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Alice @AliceAvizandum in conversation with Leslie Lee (@leslieleeiii) of the Struggle Session podcast. We all watched this terrible series so you don’t have to. If you want more from Leslie, check out Struggle Session -- and sign up for their bonus content! https://www.patreon.com/strugglesession If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture  *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS.com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/  *COME SEE MILO*If you want to catch Milo’s stand-up on tour, get tickets here: https://linktr.ee/miloontour  *BRISTOL LIVE SHOW ALERT* Come see us perform at Bristol Transformed 2020 -- we’ll be performing on the night of Friday, March 6 (with more details to come later). Get tickets here: https://www.headfirstbristol.co.uk/#date=2020-03-06&event_id=58254 *LONDON LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’ll be playing at Vauxhall Comedy on Wednesday, March 11 at 7.30 pm! Tickets are £12, and you can get them here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-tickets-91817874735

Hello and welcome to your free episode, free episode. No, no, no, for a week. No, no, for a week. For a week round. You're doing the sexy voice. They have to earn that. Okay, sorry. Forget I said the sexy voice.

Welcome to your free episode of TRIVE FUTURE, the unsexiest voice I can do. Sexy, yo, cool voice. TRIVE FUTURE. Yo, yo, was this one of them potted casts? I'm Riley. And for this week, we've watched the absolutely terrible, god-awful Netflix, BBC collab, Dracula. If you, by the way, if you are in London and you want to see a not terrible show that's not a waste of your time, then of course I would say you must, must, must get a ticket

for TRIVE FUTURE LIVE. We are doing a show on March 11th at Voxel Comedy Club, same place as last time. Come get a ticket, link's in the description, you'll enjoy us. And if you're in Bristol, check us out at Bristol Transform Festival, second year running. That is going to be on March 6th. Sixth, yes, I looked at Milo approvingly. He did indeed nod. So if you're in any of those locations, come and do say hi to us there.

Links will of course be in the description. I'm also here with Milo in studio. Hi, it's me. Just got back from a weekend away in Oxfordshire, ready to talk about one of the worst televisual experiences I've ever had. Also partaking with us in this delicious televisual feast is a newly crisp Alice in Crispy Glasgow. With a new microphone kindly provided by my two beautiful podcast families. Yeah, so I'm in the Mind Palace.

I'm zoned in. I'm jacked on. Let's talk about this dog shit piece of television. And we are also joined by veteran culture critic Leslie Lee of the Struggle Session podcast in America. Leslie, how's it going? It's going great. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so sorry that we had to have you under these circumstances where you had to watch this quite frankly awful, boring, but deeply British show. So you know, I've tried to watch some Stephen Moffat stuff, elementary, of course. It was garbage. It was horrible. I hate it so much. This Dracula show, I enjoyed more than anything else I've seen from him. It's still really bad, but this is the most enjoyable thing I've seen him do.

So maybe he's improving or something. It's a cure. It's egg, isn't it? Parts of it that are, if not excellent, kind of fun, and then the rest of it just kind of ruins those experiences because yeah, trigger warning up the top for some of the worst dialogue I've ever seen. Yes, that's right. It is time to delve in, especially for the, again, for the benefit of our American audience

to the awful writing on Dracula that is Moffat and Gatiss, which is basically an adaptation of the novel of the same name by English romantic author Rob Zombie. Moffat and Gatiss are known for writing. They wrote some Doctor Who, I believe, Matt Smith, the most bored doctor, and some of David Tennant. They also wrote Sherlock, the show that started out promising, and then by the first commercial break was just a mess of cliches and contrived dialogue clanging onto the ground. That's what they do is they're kind of working their way through the English literature canon

for something to modernize and then ruin. We had Sherlock Holmes, and now it's Dracula, and I don't know what the next thing is going to be, the Hobbit. It's Tristram Shandy. No, it's going to be the Iliad, but set in the Horn of Africa with a wise-cracking Achilles who has like- The wise-cracking Patroclus, surely, and sort of gruff Henry Cavill Achilles. They're so predictable.

Do not lay the heaven this into being, please. Oh, no. Yeah, they're going to do it. The writing of Moffat and Gatiss is very interesting because it embodies a characteristic I like to call arch-ness. It's very overdone, very aloof, but also it seems quite... It's deeply self-congratulatory. And that's why I think that's one of the reasons that they keep trying to reinterpret

these great works of the English canon because they think that they're going to be able to match the original creativity and passion of the authors while adding a fun, irreverent modern spin on it. And instead, you just get like the episode of Sherlock where they try to write the hound of the Baskervilles and instead reverse engineer a strange MK-Ultra called Hound. Yeah, it's very, very bad. I mean, part of the thing, right, is ironically, this is something that is like the vampire's curse in fiction sometimes is that they can never create anything new, only derive.

It's in like Vampire the Masquerade if you like your role-playing games. You have no original thought, you're just kind of this shell for interpreting works by mortal. So that's very good. And it's very like meta-textual there. Leslie, have you seen Sherlock just to give our listeners a little bit of a table set? Yeah, so when I remember when it first came out and people started going, wow, for it, the message board, white people were just insane for British shows at that time in America.

People were convinced that everything that the UK did was wonderful and fantastic. So what we soon realized once the streaming services started that there was like one or two good shows at best and Sherlock was definitely not one of them. I guess I like Cumberbatch more than most people, but other than that, it's just a really dull show that gets so close to being good is more upsetting than the show that's like outright bad. Like all the pieces are there for a kind of interesting modern take on Sherlock Holmes, but by about 45 minutes into these very long episodes, needlessly long episodes, you always

end up completely and only disappointed and dissatisfied. And that tradition mostly continued and Dracula just took a little longer. Well, like the acting in both this and Sherlock, I thought was fine, right? In places good. It's just this millstone of a script, just kind of dragging it down to the most basic level of like, oh, we have to do witty repartee and we have to do banter. Yes. Yeah.

And the banter is all in the hands of Martha and Gatiss and as such is awful. Episode one of three, 90 minutes of pure thunder and lightning and I could have watched like two thirds of the Irishman for the four and a half hours. You made me spend watching this instead. Yeah. Well, what is Dracula if not the Transylvanian Irishman? It's a show about dudes being friends and traveling a long distance for some non-particular purpose.

That's some age makeup. Yeah. Yeah. Count Dracula needs some protection from the villages. I can do that for you. I hurt you some veins. I don't know why my Frank sounds like Bernie Sanders. Yeah, Franky Sanders.

So, episode one, we meet Jonathan Harker, lately of the Dracula novel, now capably played by I think Philip Heffernan, looking all kinds of fucked up. Yeah. He looks like the Chernobyl firefighters after handling the graphites. He looks like a version of Hellraiser that it's safe to take onto a plane and he's met by a nun named Agatha and it's made clear that Harker has fled from somewhere he's in terror of and then he's informed that in fact he was with Count Dracula and the first question Agatha asked is, did you get gay with Dracula?

Yeah. Yeah. What a bad question. Yeah. When she said that, I thought, because I didn't know anything about this series, I'm like, oh, this is going to be the Dracula where Dracula fucks now. That's going to be the angle of the show. But he doesn't fuck at all in this show.

He has wives, but he doesn't sleep with them. He just feeds them rats and stuff. So he actually does not sleep with Jonathan Harker. You're like, it's already raising and then squashing that expectation that you might have like, oh, you're doing something interesting, maybe. Well, Moffat and Gases love doing that and especially they love doing that with homosexuality or with bisexuality. They love to throw it out there as a little thing and then just reel it back in, never

like paying it off at all. They did it with Sherlock and that sent Tumblr crazy because, oh my God, Sherlock Watson, what a cute couple. But they never ever commit to anything like this because it would be too interesting. Maybe the whole subtext is that Agatha Fan Helsing isn't terrified of vampires. She's just terrified of gay guys. So she's just checked that straight away at the start. To be fair, though, she is not terrified of vampires.

In fact, she's almost weirdly blasé about them. Yeah, she's got some kind of nanny-og sort of energy in the whole thing. It's great. The only good character, I will say. So yeah, I'll admit, Agatha, good actually well-written character for the first time in the first two episodes. But so we're asked if he was ever gay with Dracula in a storyline that is presented the idea of Dracula as this sort of very interesting sexual creature that is, again, just never

paid off. No, he's seductive, but it's curiously PG, like he licks things and he touches things and he grasps thighs and there are lots of quivering bosoms, which I'm as big a fan of quivering bosoms as anybody, but it just really feels like kind of... It's a fucking cock tease of a show is what it is. It's a sex-themed Dracula, but certainly not a sexy Dracula. I mean, at some point, he climbs out of a wolf naked and I have to say that means the Dracula is a furry.

We flashback back to Transylvania and Jonathan Harker is now telling a story. It looks much better. He's in a coach in Romania and is told by some creepy townspeople to just wait on a country road where there's monsters up that path. You're just hitting all of the classic Dracula beats in this first episode. It is then revealed that Harker is married to a woman engaged to a woman named Mina. Again, we're getting all the classic characters from Drac are coming back, we're not leaving a single stone unturned.

Yeah, it's the Dracula extended universe. Who sends him a long and detailed letter that basically says, you could fuck some people you meet on the trip because I'm going to fuck. I might even fuck the girl from the bar. That's the thing. There's another bit of like some kind of like gay flirtation there. Well, it's to show that they're a relation because the only way that Moffat and Gaitis know how to show something is good or competent or whatever is to show people being very flippant

about it. That's like cool because she's like casually bisexual in a way that's never really going to have to be engaged with. But also, it's the same thing and I feel like if Moffat and Gaitis ever want to show a character being good at something or being knowledgeable or being competent, the only way they can do it is by putting them in extreme peril and then having them react as though they're bored. So it's like Sherlock is like getting like fucking people be shooting an AK at him, but

he just be sort of checking his phone because he can just predict where the bullets are going to go because he's so perfect. Jonathan Harker then arrives at a castle that appears to have an awful damp problem. It's just set up to be creepy, like the idea that people just live in Roman ruins. Yeah. I didn't really get this whole thing that like Dracula lives in like a ruined or like decrepit castle. Like why?

Why would you do that? Imagine Dracula doing some plastering is my answer, just doing some like light home renovation. Hell yeah. Leslie, what are we thinking so far at the opening of the first episode? The setting, Transylvania. Well, see, the thing is, it's exactly from the book, right? I actually really enjoy the novel Dracula is one of my favorite books. So all of this setup is exactly like it is in the book, Jonathan Harker going to the

castle writing letters to Mina. The difference is, and again, like so in the Dracula novel, like it's all about Dracula falling in love with Mina, coming after her after he's corrupted Jonathan and like he's been like fucking Dracula's brides. That's like the subtext in the novel. And that's already so much more sexual than this. Yeah, exactly. So in this one, Jonathan does not fuck Dracula's brides and also Dracula doesn't get horny from

Mina and go after her really. Like this is so much less sexual. Maybe it's more violent, but they really tap down on all the sexuality other than we learn that when Dracula drinks your blood, he pretends to be like a sexy woman or a hot guy when he's drinking. The real trans agenda. Yeah. So basically then we as a viewer for the first time get dragged, Dracula, who starts out looking

alarmingly like Jimmy Savile walks in and then Savile come old Greg. I will also point out this first episode is entitled the rules of the beast, which is much funnier if you live in Scotland and then begins to drop some classic Dracula lines. Like I do not drink wine, like every Dracula in fiction is fucking clang because they try to get all of them in. So it's just like it's going from one to another, like a haunted house you like half expected to do the like Castlevania Dracula and be like a man as a miserable pile of secrets. The deep lore of this episode is that Dracula only drinks on bongo.

So Leslie, you're a big fan of Dracula book. Can you just we don't have to spend too much time on this first episode and instead get to the monumentally stupid episode. Just give us a quick praisey of kind of how to get us from here to the Abbey. The Abbey, OK, so pretty much almost nothing happens except Dracula tortures Jonathan as he does in the novel. But the difference, big difference here is that Dracula actually turns Jonathan Harker into a vampire.

And this is kind of the most interesting thing the show does is its definition of what vampirism is is different than anything I've seen because if you get bitten by Dracula, Dracula, a number of things can happen to you. You can most of them just die apparently. They just die. Some of them become like almost zombie like revenants who who maintain consciousness throughout their death, but they continue to rot into dust Dracula says, but they still remain conscious the whole time.

That's the worst thing that can happen to you. Every so often you might turn into a vampire, but you'll be more of like a Nosferatu feral like vampire Dracula is the only vampire who's able to maintain like his sanity and his intellect. Because he's so smart and he has a minor palace or whatever. He's the only one who does that. That's something that is never addressed, by the way. It's implied that it's because he drinks the blood of noblemen and that by drinking the

blood you are what you eat basically and pedodracula. I think it's a little different. The implication is a little different. I think if we really drill down, his power is his special power as a vampire is that when he drinks blood, he absorbs the memories and thoughts and personalities of people who he he drains, but that's a side that's not like the reason why he stayed smart. At least I don't know. Maybe maybe that's the maybe I'm being too generous to the line.

There was a line that said that it was like to do with his like his breathing and his attainment and his intellect in the first place as an aristocrat that he like got this sense of discernment. It's already very like dubious. Weirdly, the only way to be a successful vampire is to have a Habsburg jaw really helps with the biting. Essentially, another real clanger of a Moffat and Gatis line is when Harker says, aside from yourself, is there anyone else living in this castle?

Then Drax Draper says, no, Jonathan. There's nobody living here. Yeah, just waggling eyebrows at camera. Also Dracula looks extremely fucked up at this point. Savile does not quite cover it like he's he's fucked up looking. He's old. He's got like liver spots. So so the main the main thing the main Jonathan Harker is still sort of the main

character right now. What he has to do is get out of this castle that was like designed by a madman and there's no map. Would you say that it was in that sense an escape from the vampire castle? Yeah, Jonathan Harker needs to escape from this castle so he can go listen to Russell Brand talk at a university. So basically he's but he also sees this message scratched in his window. Help us.

And he's like a noble Englishman. So he even though he's getting weakened by Dracula's feeding on him, he's kind of running around the castle trying to like find who's scratched this note in English on the window. Because these people might have heavy earth minerals or something else that could be useful to the Queen. Yeah, they're doing the knockout game. Yeah.

And so that happens and he ends up in like the room of a thousand jump scares when he meets all these revenants, then he meets some of the brides of Dracula and Dracula admires his stick to it and then decides instead of just draining him and making a revenant, he's going to make him a bride of Dracula, which basically just means he drains you. Yeah, then he's going to bust in that ass if only, right? Like it's that's the closest it gets to being a tall explicit. So what Harker decides to do is escape the castle and kill Dracula.

But to do that, he needs a map of this castle, which is unmappable. And this is where they do the real Moffat and Gatiss shit, because apparently Dracula already told him where the map is. Yeah. Map of the castle is hidden in the back of the painting of the architect's wife because he said he longed to return to the sun and see his beloved. And wouldn't you know it? That weird creepy metaphor was all the things that Jonathan Harker needed to

make the bizarre leap of logic that it was hidden in a painting. Yeah. And also he says that Dracula himself doesn't know where the map is. And so somehow Dracula is dropping hints about where the map is, despite not knowing where the map is. Yeah. He got like a video game hint. You know what it is?

That's it's it's like almost the opposite of Chekhov's gun. It's like it's like it's like throwing guns onto the stage. Yeah. Yeah. This episode suffers heavily from Chekhov's Strap-On, i.e. the fucking that never happens anyway. Wait, why would Dracula need a Strap-On? He presumably has a dick. Vampires have no dick.

That's the cost, the cost of immortality. The true vampire is cursed as you're immortal but have no dick. You cannot fuck. You can only get some bull sack action. Anyway. Yeah. As Dracula becomes healthier, his bull sack looks less like his face and vice versa. So what then what what happens is we're cutting back and forth between Agatha

and and Jonathan in the kind of like cop interrogation of him in a convent. Yeah. Good nun, bad nun. Yeah. You half expect to see like a one-way mirror with a bunch of nuns behind it smoking. You're off the case. Womack. Why am I not surprised you piece of shit? It's revealed in your scapula.

It's revealed that sister Agatha is actually Agatha van Helsing, the famous vampire hunter from the books. And this is my assistant. Schwarzpiet. She's Dutch. And so what we constantly wearing blackface or putting blackface on. What it comes down to is Parker escapes by when he realizes he's been made into a vampire. He retains some of his consciousness, jumps off of the castle,

is drifted out to sea, is taken back to the convent. At this point, he remembers that he's a vampire. He's like, oh shit, I forgot to breathe. Fuck. And then Dracula turns up at the convent. And then there is actually again a pretty good scene. Yeah. Because he's like, where's my wife?

And Agatha van Helsing like traps him with a portcullis and just kind of baits him and taunts him. Because he can't come in if he's not invited. Yeah. So Leslie, I'll throw to you. What do you think of the end of episode one where Dracula has got to the convent and they're sort of taunting each other back and forth through the gate? See, so in a sane country, what you would do is that you would make that first episode,

the Jonathan Parker thing, where he's going to Dracula's castle and he escapes as a vampire. Then the whole second episode is this really interesting premise of Dracula outside this nunnery, this convent, and picking them off one by one. That could have been a whole episode instead of the last 10 minutes. Have you considered one and a half hour episodes only? No editing. Absolutely refused to allow my vision to be compromised in the slightest.

Hell yeah. This is also like, Martha and Gatiss just will not allow themselves to be in. No, no, they're now too successful. We have in fact created a monster if you want to move to a different English gothic novel. And like, yeah, they absolutely refused to let anyone stop them from making a series of feature length films. It's awful. The end on a cliffhanger that is not fulfilled until two thirds of the way through

to the next feature length film that they make. This is a death march of a series. Look, what they did is they read the secret sequel to the book Save the Cat, which tends to just write a really fucked up story that doesn't make any sense. But don't do it in a cool way like Uncut Gems. Do it in a lame way like this. So this is the Xyborne clock. So the other thing is Dracula is just going around making bats.

The other thing I've noticed for Dracula's on the edge of a cliff. The other thing I noticed is that like, when Dracula turns up to the convent as like a plague of bats, because they want to show that Van Helsing is an interest is a competent vampire hunter with lots of sang foie. She just says, oh, how interesting. Or when Dracula gets into the convent and like throws a nun severed head across a room, he might as well have just been on his phone checking Twitter with his other hand. They're so bored.

Every character is so bored. That's how you know someone's smart is that they appear uninterested. Hell yeah. So in episode two, I'm going to gloss it pretty quick because basically episode two is the journey to England because that's what Dracula wanted to do. It's a fun murder mystery. Yeah, but imagine the part of the novel Dracula that was so interesting that it

does not appear on the novel. Yeah. So this is actually what if Dracula was murder on the Orient Express, but also it is. It's Dracula pot gruffa. But also it's well because the voyage of the Demeter because like Dracula is written as an epistolary novel. It's all journal entries and newspaper clippings and letters to people and so on. But I mean the voyage of the Demeter is just like a note like oh weird a ship arrived and

the whole crew was dead. It is how you answer the question. How does Dracula get to England? A question of the kind that we see Moffat and Gators be presented with having to answer. And their answer is well spoilers, but we'll get an hour and a half of some boring nonsense. No, I was I was I was thinking of their other plot hole where they're like, well, we have to resolve this. How does this character know this or get here?

And the Bram Stoker answer is it's a ship. It's boring. So we're not going to write about it. And the Moffat and Gators answer is something much more contrived. Well, it's what I find very interesting is it's a retelling of murder on the Orient Express because it's a bottle and there are these murders on this ship. But it's like what if instead of society, murder on the Orient Express started with chapter one, line one, here's who did it.

No suspense. Zero. Actually, that's knives out. Actually, there are things that can make that interesting. It's just that this isn't one of them because like what what you're interested in then is like a how done it. But like Dracula is he dragged him. Yeah, he drags stuff.

He's magic. He does magic stuff. He vapes a big cloud of chum that follows the ship for a week. Did he fuck them? Yeah. He basically he covers the whole ship in a fog and then he just starts dragging people the entire episode. He literally he like he just fucking joules them into a big fog and then murders them one by one

in exactly the way you would expect a Dracula to murder people. Yeah. And you could have told the story in a way where there was some tension about whether Dracula, you know, actually succeeds. If he was vulnerable at all. But he's never vulnerable because he's too smart. Yeah. And they also tell you from the beginning they frame this episode two with another interrogation

of Agatha interrogating Dracula about the ship, which you think of, which you assume takes place after it. So there's no real tension on the ship. And then you realize the reveal is that, oh no, the interrogation is actually taking place in Agatha's mind while she's on the ship, which is, you know, a fine twist. But like you have sacrificed all the tension that was coming before it just to give us to this twist that really when it happens, then we're like, oh, then now they can fight. Yeah, exactly.

I fucking hate that. It was all a dream shit. Fucking Moffat and Gaddis loved that. Yeah. They loved doing I kept thinking of it as close up magic, right? Like you see this plot twist that seems very impressive and like makes you go, oh, wow. And then you actually think, what did I just see?

And it turns out it was just a guy throwing a deck of cards at a window. And you're just like, okay. Well, yeah, you could really hear Moffat and Gaddis high five when they were like, oh, and then it turns out that the secret infirm passenger in the secret cabin is Agatha all along. Yeah. And like it's not like Damon Lindelof where like you write yourself into a corner and then your way of writing your way out is by doing more and more plot twists. They do genuinely think that they're doing something like significant to the plot here.

And it is supposed to tie into some overarching vision, which makes it worse that the result is so incoherent. Because what you get is, I guess the reveal is later in this show, but I think it's worthwhile just revealing this now, which is that at the end of the story of the first episode, because it sort of cuts when Agatha and Mina, Jonathan's fiance are like cornered by Dracula, that Dracula is fascinated by Agatha because she doesn't seem to be scared of him. Instead, she's just bored by him.

So he's like, I guess he's like a toxic masculinity guy. She's nagging him. Yeah, she's basically nagging him. He's like, damn. He's like, this girl's not interested in me. How intriguing. She's not like the other girls. Oh, she's also smart because she's an atheist.

That's another thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. She fucking shoe horns that in. Yeah, these guys, their idea of what was cool really is message board shit. So Agatha, you're cool. I'm going to bite you so I can learn all your shit. And then he takes her over to England with him.

Anyway, it's revealed. Oh my God, he's just dragging it up. He's dragging it up on the ship. He's dragging it left, dragging it right. He drags a cabin boy so we can learn how to speak German. He's got it on the sticks. He has a kill streak running riot. Yeah, exactly.

So he gets the chopper for some reason. UAV online. So he's basically, but he's arranged for all the people on this ship to be there by just subtly manipulating them into coming on because he wants to. And then there were none, right? The other Agatha Christie novel that people can reference. So he eats like Dora Bella, the sexy beard wife of the secret gay aristocrat. Wait, the sexy beard wife?

Like a beard being someone who, yeah, like a beard is someone who a gay man, a woman, a gay man has a relationship with to hide being gay. Yeah. And they have this kind of like, they have this repartee on the deck where she's like, are you, this is like, would you be this dangerous figure of like Oriental mystery? And he's like, yes, but like, how can you write all of that and say all of that knowing that you haven't implemented any of it? I don't.

Are you sexy? Yes. Damn. They're Orientalizing him like, like Mike Bloomberg. So, but sort of going through this as well, he eats, eats her, eats some cabin boys. He's, he's dragging it. He's dragging everyone.

He drags a very hungry vampire. He drags an old countess who he met on her 18th birthday after freaking her out. And then after he's eating all these people, Agatha and his dreams. And this is a fucking moffat and gaitest line of paper. Um, Agatha is like, oh, you've eaten three people already. How will you last until you get to England? And Drax Draper says, I can get by with a skeleton crew. After all, I've worked with them before.

He's been written as a jack-o-lantern. He hangs out with skeletons. That's what he does. So vampires do. He does spooky shit. Yeah. He's, he's a hot, he's hot topic Dracula. He's like, yeah, someone like, I fucking am friends with skeletons.

Yeah. He's like, he's getting all the skeletons to do up Dracula Castle, but then he finds they're all distracted from the plastering and they're playing Xylophone on each other's ribs. And he's like, goddamn fucking skeletons. So one thing I do want to say is that I actually like, I think his name is Klaus Bang. I do like him as Dracula in general.

I think he's good. I think he's kind of channeling the Christopher Lee look, if not, you know, performance. And I think he's generally pretty like charming and fun. And a new take on Dracula, which I thought I would hate, but actually ended up not hating him that much. Yeah. Well, it's just exactly the same reaction to,

I had the exact same reaction to Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock. I thought, oh, I'm going to hate this. And it turns out I like the performance fine. It's just the words that make him say don't make any sense. Yeah. I have no, I could not pull, except for maybe like some of the, and maybe in the third episode, I can't. Apart from Mark Gatiss casting himself like he always does,

which is fucking gross, by the way. I can't really find much fault with the actual performances. It is the incredibly arch and smug way it's written. Anyway, more of the crew disappear, get their ship murdered. Drax is dragging around. He's Drax Draper. We find out that all the conversations between Agatha and Drax Draper are hallucinations. And I'm just smoking that loud.

And everyone on the ship begins to realize that Drax Draper is actually a bad guy and begins to try to fight back. And again, Agatha Van Helsing informs everyone she's dying, because she's been fed on by Drax Draper a million times, by just being like, oh yeah, I'm dying, by the way. Her fingernails keep falling out. Yeah, PS, I'm dying. Yeah, that's how you know that you've been dragged is that your fingernails just fall out.

Anyway, so we get our, they do a bunch of other stuff with like, oh, we'll build ourselves a circle of Bible pages around the steering wheel. And you know, some more boring shit happens and more people get killed. Losing your energy, we're doing a synopsis of this. Yeah, yes, I actually am. It's very difficult. They ever so drag so much. So you're like, why does Dracula fear the cross?

And he's like, oh, well, I fear the cross because the church has terrorized peasants for centuries. And now I'm scared of the cross as well, because the Catholic church is bad. He was like, ah, Richard Dawkins, guesswriting credit. Yeah, atheist shit, you know, it's cool. New atheists. It's also like, but the peasants aren't scared of the church. The peasants love the church. They don't understand that the church is bad.

That's the whole point. Unless you're a cathar, I guess. But like, I don't know how many of those you get the chance to eat in Romania. No. And so also, it's okay. So it, he actually does fear the cross, but outside of his crazy castle, where no sort of, where there's like non-Euclidean geography, geometry or whatever, like the world is full of right angles.

There's a mast. There's a mast on the ship that's one big cross shape. Yeah. What the fuck? It's, they just, they just do not handle this. Anyway. In Peter Watts' novel, Blind Sot, Oh my God, I'm, I'm, I'm hanging up the call now.

This is my, I was going to make this comparison, Leslie. I'm glad you're doing it. Please continue. Yeah. And they, vampires are just another species. They're not supernatural. And they, a species that when extinct, because there's something about right angles that gives them seizures, because you don't actually find any, according to the novel,

I think it probably is true that you don't find any right angles in nature. Only when they're very, very rarely do you find perfectly intersecting right angles in nature. Yeah. Rarely. And so, and so that, and so once, you know, human civilization started, this ended up being the way that humans got rid of the vampire species. And so they give them basically like anti-epilepsy medicine to help them deal with it. Yeah.

And it's fucking anti-Euclideans, they call it in the book. By the way, if you want to know how to write a vampire, because a lot of what this show does, it tries to say, oh well, we need to know why does he fear the cross? Why does he, why does he, why will the light burn him? Why all of these things, the thing that gets repeated by Agatha is, no, these things must be one thing. They must derive from one, they must be expressions of some tendency. And the answer we ultimately get at the end, which I mean, it's not that big of a deal,

I might as well just say it now. It's not a spoiler. It's very boring. No. It's just a really dumb reveal. Which is that, oh, he, oh, all of it's in Dracula's head. He doesn't, he just, he fears what the cross. He's superstitious.

He fears what the cross represents. He fears the concept of light because, you know, he's, he's afraid of death or whatever, basically. Whoa. The real Dracula was the friends who made it along the way. He's afraid of dying and that is. Well, it's even weirder than that because, you know, when I watched this show, right, and, you know, before I watched the show, I thought it was possible to understand the

British mind. I thought it was knowable. But after watching this. I've been working on it for eight years, Leslie. Okay. Because this show, Dracula, he's not a foreigner. He's a British. He's the British empire, right?

Yeah. He absorbs Britishness from this British guy. Yeah. He's smarter. He's better. He's powerful. He's lived all this long time, but he finds that the only thing he really wants to do is die.

He just wants it to be over with. And the reason he fears the cross and the sun is because it reminds him of other people who died, who were brave enough to die before him. They say something about, oh, you were a warrior and your line of warriors and all your warriors died on the battlefield and you are still around British Empire. Why you still exist. You need to die. We need to die.

We need to bring this to a close. We've seen the modern world. We have nothing to offer it. We just need to die. That's what this show is about. When they advertise it, it says that we're going to show a vulnerability of Dracula that have never been shown before. And the vulnerability is that he's an aging empire that just needs to go away.

And that's the theme of the show when I got to it. I was like, this is so fucking bizarre. Small vampire bean. And you could do this so much better and more quickly by just reading The Quiet American, which incidentally one of Pete Buttigieg's alleged favorite books. I'll just throw that one out there. So, any case, what we get is they try to do this grand unified theory of vampirism that you've explained Leslie.

And I feel like they just, they really don't earn it. There's nothing that Dracula does throughout the series that is sort of thrown into a new light. They don't earn anything. They just throw it into the script and it just kind of, it just kind of sits there. But so the last thing on this and the idea of making a unified vampirism theory. Blindsight does it well because they like, because the Peter Watts actually thinks, okay, what are the elements of the vampire myth? How can I connect these things together in a way that's meaningful?

It is meaningful for the plot and explains the way that people interact with one another. Whereas here, we just have a bunch of vampire stuff that's kind of tenuously connected by a theme and that theme is brought up in the last five minutes of the series. And again, that's good writing. What I want to note is that you don't have to do this. You don't have to explain away this vampire stuff, especially when you have a, because Peter Watts, he's doing this hard sci-fi story and he wants to explain vampirism away only using science, real science.

Which is cool, which is super cool. Yeah, which is fine. And then, and then you also have most vampire stories. They just lean on the supernatural elements and don't try to scientifically explain it. You have some things that kind of mix the two, like maybe a blade. But with this one, like, okay, you've explained why he fears these things, but you haven't explained, like, what is vampirism? Where does it come from?

How, why and how does he transform into a bat or a wolf? So if you're not explaining any of that stuff, you don't need to have an explanation for why he is fears, crosses or sunlight, especially if you don't have a good explanation. I have, I have a name for this genre and I'm going to call it I fucking love science fiction. Because it is, it is, it is speculative, but only in a, like, a soft scientific way where things like, like atheism is very good and like believing in yourself is very good. And the Catholic church and superstition, that's very bad. But like the point that I feel like you're making Leslie, the one I want to agree with

especially is, like, we're not interrogating this on the terms of blind sight or hard SF or anything by it's like on its own merits as a piece of like, let's say middle brow, like BBC 9pm drama, it's just not entertaining. And this is why, because it's, it's just so poorly written. So it kind of has this thing of like the whole like kind of like, pablum that we're fed by British TV and particularly like BBC and ITV like drama and entertainment shows where it's just like, kind of like, it's stuff to make dumb people feel smart. Yeah, that's anything. It's like, it's like stuff that's actually incredibly stupid and facile, but it's phrased in like a hoity-toity way to make it seem like you're reading like

infinite jest upside down. The only thing that it's missing is David Tennant playing like a child murderer. Because that's that's the only other thing that like British prestige drama knows how to do is giving David Tennant the role of like child rapist or something because that's subversive. Which is unfortunate because he's a very charming man. Yeah, anyway, actually, they should have given it to many of their TV presenters. Yeah, he's a fine actor, but he does love taking roles where he's like, ah, you didn't expect that from me, David Tennant, did you? Because I played this nice man and now I'm playing an evil man. So anyway, moving us on, the ship then goes down, Agatha Van Helsing and the captain sort of unite

together to sink the ship before it can get to England. And then Drax is, he's Draxing it up at the bottom of the ocean. He's under the sea. He's Drax two, Drax sea floor. He's in the game lobby having been kicked from the first one for being two goats. Yeah, he's spectating. Anyway, so, but then Dracula, he lands on the bottom of the sea floor, but holy shit, they didn't stop him. He walks up onto Whitby Beach in Milo. What happens? The most annoying twist to have ever occurred in a Stephen Moffat and Mark Gassis drama, he arrives in England in the modern day. They literally do the M Night Shyamalan's The Village twist where you think it's olden times, but it's not. Leslie, did you expect this and how pissed off were you when it happened?

You know, I actually, I thought that this, that was the premise of the show. I assumed that it was going to be Dracula in the modern day. And what I liked about the first episode is like, oh, when, especially when you got to the convent was like, oh, this is just going to be like new stuff that happened during, you know, Dracula's time. And, you know, the fuck whenever Bram Stoker wrote it. But then when it gets to the modern world, you know, completely bizarrely, before the start of episode three, I was still kind of like okay with it because the show, it hadn't been good, but it hadn't been horrible yet. Yeah, it doesn't make that turn yet. Yeah. So I was kind of okay with the twist. But of course, looking back, I wish they had never

done it. Probably the moment when like, Agatha's descendant shows up, looks exactly like her, that fucking sucks. I hate when anything does that. The incest in the Van Helsing family is like a weird subplot of this. So basically, yeah, we what happens is holy shit. Yeah. And she's at the head of like a bunch of like Range Rovers and helicopters. And then they just are like, and Steven Moffat and Marek Gatius, you could hear them rubbing their hands together as they're about to like write Dracula as a fish out of water in 2020 UK, except they can't do it. He's still like composed. And he's like, yeah, of course, I know it's camera like, you know, I'm not dumb, I can guess. Yeah, I'm so smart. I'm amazing at guessing. Yeah.

Gets into his mind palace. He predicts 150 years of technological development. And he's like, Oh, a helicopter. That's cool. Do you got anything else though? Because I don't know, it's kind of boring, actually. Yeah, he's like, show me the hentai. I've been imagining it in my palace. So yeah, that that happens. And then again, just disorientingly, we cut back and forth between the beach and then a woman's house into which Dracula has just broken. And there follows an indescribably, an indescribably stupid scene where I can only describe Drax as going full Steven Pinker as he interacts with just a normal person for a while. It is Owen, it is Owen Wilson voice. Wow, about everything. So what he does is he goes into this woman's house,

he eats, he drags up her husband. He was who is abusive because they're working class. Yeah, and he locks him in a fridge. And despite having despite having easily guessed what a camera was, he can't imagine what this white box might be. And so then there follows Drax being like, yes, your husband was abusive. So of course, I ate the shit out of him. And she was like, Oh, is he drunk? And Dracula was like, after a fashion. Yeah, but the helpful repartee they have. So yeah, she's just sponsored by strong food outposts. So Drax goes full Steven Pinker on the woman and is like, wow, you've got this car, a magic picture box, food on command, lights that you can turn on and off. I've lived for 500 years

and I've seen the greatest kings of history would think this was a palace. You know, the Holy Roman Emperor barely got any cool ranch flavoring in his life. Wait, you're telling me that you wash your dick every single day? Why? Commodus could barely have dreamed. Leslie, I'll throw back to you as well, because this is kind of a trope you get, right? Where there's in stories, it'll be like the, you never had it so good. You should stop being socialists because the kings would kill to live like you do. You know, I haven't seen this trope too much. This is again, like a thing. It's a British thing, maybe. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. I think it's like a

British thing where it's like, you work in class people, you don't know how good you have it. All of our kings and queens lived in hovels compared to what you have. So you should just be grateful for it. And I don't think that, frankly, I think that I don't think that's something Dracula would say. I think he would be like, like, I think he would still look down on like common people like commoners and be like, actually, your house is a fucking mess too. Like you have all these conveniences and you live and you still live like this is fucking pathetic. That's, I think that's more what he would go. This is what you spend your time and your days doing when you could be doing anything. It sickens me. That would be like more interesting,

more compelling. But no, it's said he just, he does the Steven Pinker. Look, line go up. Yeah, there are two things that are annoying about this section, right? First of all, have you been to a palace? Like who, what kind of fucking king who'd like lived in a fucking palace would be impressed by this fucking two up, two down in like an English suburb? Like what? Yeah, he might be impressed by the television, but he wouldn't be impressed by the room. Like, what the fuck? It's a small room with like shitty 70s decor. There is nothing impressive about it in any way. Two, it sounded like he was excited by like they had books on the shelf and like little figurines and stuff or like a Funko Pop or some shit like that.

Or maybe maybe the running water was the main thing. The old timey thing was set in 1897. We see Mina Harker typing on a typewriter. It's not that different. Yeah, they had fucking electricity anyway. And then the second thing is like the whole, like him being impressed with the television, like, oh, he's all this entertainment on demand or whatever the fuck, which is an amazing leap on the basis that at the time of Dracula talking about how your modern life is so amazing, what you're watching on your television is this absolutely piece of shit drama with terrible dialogue. You'd have been better off reading a fucking book book. I just also love the idea. It's like, it's like the other thing I say, Alice,

you notice this is that in the modern day, this doesn't really happen in the early episodes, in the modern day Dracula does do a full soy face when he's about to bite someone. No, he does it in the old ones too. He like every every time he drains someone of blood, he like leans back and he goes, but he's doing the soy face while he does it. Yeah, what's also amazing is everyone Dracula bites appears to like not as he does it, which I enjoy. Again, it's because they're horny, but it's never horny enough, right? Well, it's one of these things where it's like two dimensionally horny, where they were like, what's a horny thing someone could do here? Not like, how could we how could we write like

about like desire and revulsion at the same time? They're like, no, what if it's horny, make it hornier? Anyway, so there's a big clatter as this woman, then this is another thing Moth and Gators do where magic, just enormous amounts of infrastructure are made available to people in the plot for like no reason. Like how I don't know, like Sherlock, various sort of ancillary characters in Sherlock are able to command like battalions of mercenaries to like drive through Surrey or whatever. They love a good mercenary. They love, we love to see like the same six extras wearing gray t-shirts and plate carriers with nothing on the straps. Yeah, it's great. We love it. So there's this big clatter and then like it turns out like what

this was all a setup because like they were waiting for Drax to come into this house and Drax up the husband, maybe as part of a divorce and then the woman she sets up the claymores so that when he rounds the corner, he like loses his kill streak. Yeah, so he there's a backhoe, tears the roof of the house off and then Agatha is like, you got to get in this coffin so we can like go and study you. So that's a big question. Did they just kill that guy to capture Drax? Probably. Yeah. No, because they're anti-vampire, but they're also anti-violence against women and so that's why that guy had to die. Yeah. So where do you get a backhoe at night in Southern England?

You can't even get them like on weekends, I don't think. So Agatha Jr., Zoe Van Helsing who looks and talks exactly like Agatha Van Helsing. Yeah, but she has bangs now. Yeah. He's got some very interesting opinions on gender. Walks in and Drax of course hits her with the bite, but then he can't stop puking. What? What? Because we've introduced a new vampire rule, which is the blood of the dying. It also is poison to them. She's been drinking white lightning and he doesn't like it. She poses his drak hole and yeah, he's just sick everywhere. It's great. A better version would be Dracula comes back in the 80s, but obviously doesn't know about AIDS.

That's been done. That's been done. Yeah. I hate to keep saying Vampire the Masquerade did this, but Vampire the Masquerade did do this. Indeed. So Drax is then covered up in a coffin and taken to what appears to be the isolation warehouse from the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. But also the underground MI6 base from Skyfall. Yeah. It's both of those. And it has sunlight countdown clocks and things of that nature. It appears to be... It's an epic Dracula fighting bunker.

I love that Skyfall plotline because it's like, oh no, we're going to have to go to the old secret MI6 in the tunnels, Dumbledore's MI6. Yeah. So this is, this is, wait, what? Just why, how was the government just expecting Drax to just pop up on the beach and then murder that particular guy and then get put into this thing where we've like, again, clearly been built for a while. A Drax holding bunker. Why are there undead things that just seem normal, but the rest of the world hasn't prepared for it in any way, except for like this one group of people. Anyway, that's not explained yet. They do reference the existence of Sherlock Holmes in a line in this episode.

Just so you know that... Oh, didn't they in the first episode actually? Yeah, you're right. It was... I have a detective acquaintance in London. Yes. So it's all in the Mophith extended universe. It's just an annoying extended universe where people are sort of slipping into trances where their imagining words come up in front of their eyes and just sort of snarkily talking down to one another and being bored in gunfights. When people are texting where they show the text on the screen as like a little floating pop up. So anyway, Drax gets, Drax gets dragged away

and then we cut to Lucy Westenra. Again, just another character from the book and the original book, she's sort of the object of desire of many suitors and Drax just keeps on like draining her. And so the suitors and Abraham Van Helsing have to team up to stop Dracula in the original book. So like, yes, we have a role in which a woman is attractive as a plot point. I'm sure the people who turned Irene Adler into like this weird sex dominatrix aren't going to fuck this up. No, not at all. Absolutely not. Which is one of the weird things about also how Gatiss and Moffat write women, which seems to be... One of the... Yeah, it seems where it seems to be like they can... Lucy Westenra is...

She's... Her main personality point is that she's hot, but that she thinks death is cool. Yeah, she's goth hot. She's Avril Lavigne. But it's the same... In fact, this goes back to something we mentioned about a fucking black mirror on Struggle Session, Leslie, which is like the whole thing of we need to show that this girl's cool because she's not frivolous like every other girl. Yeah, like that's the thing that sets her apart. Well, she is supposed to be, you know, frivolous and treats, you know, men like garbage and, you know, has her demand, who's in the boy really, who's in love with her, has to watch her like date all these other dudes for their money, all this other shit. But she's actually, you know, secretly in her heart of hearts,

like just a really like golf girl who also wants to die similar to Dracula, and that's why they get on. So Lucy Westenra is portrayed as this cool, mostly for most of the episode, and again, just doesn't build up a kind of moored lust, doesn't... Just none of this is built up at all. She's just like an ego, like... She posts a selfie and there's a little like flurry of hearts that come out of the phone. And it's like, whoa, she's addicted to the likes. Yeah, we live in a fucking society. Anyway, and the other funny thing is, and this is mostly, I think, just for not just British listeners, but people who live in London specifically, is that she just loves going out to clubs and dancing, and she likes to put on a

sparkly dress and go to Dustin to deep house in... Like it's 2005. Fabric? Every single club scene takes place in fabric. Yeah, except the music is not even deep house. It's like pop, EDM. Yeah, and then... I love to go to fabric and listen to Arm in Van Buren. I mean, I consider deep house to be pop music, actually. That's the most I consider mids loud thing I've ever heard. And then she and her gay friend, whose main personality point is that he's gay, and has a hat and he's gay. Which is a function of being gay. The thing is, you know a fake gay guy because the hat comes off.

It just like clips on like a Lego guy's hair. They show that she's super wild because then they leave, they go from fabric to the smoking area of Corsica Studios, which is across town, but apparently behind fabric, where she pees behind some dumpsters to show how fun loving she is. Yeah, sure. Why not? Like the plot is basically the same as a Fright Night, the 80s vampire movie where Dracula gets where a vampire gets the hots for like a young modern girl instead of the old Victorian girls. And in Fright Night, the younger woman ends up really loving her boyfriend and rejecting Dracula. And this one, she ends up falling in love with Dracula, but she gets like fucked up

and cremated alive because of that. And Dracula, to his credit, is still like, I still love you, babe. I don't care what you look like. Because he looks like fucking Slavic Jimmy Savile. Every time they show him go past a mirror, he looks like fucking Croatian sex offender. It's wonderful. Speaking of which, there's also one bit which I definitely noticed, where he says something to that housing where he's like, well, as we used to say in Vladivostok, and it's like, he is from Romania, which is not near Vladivostok. You can't just take two things when it sounds so of Eastern European, but it's thousands of miles, thousands! It's near Korea! As we used to say in California. Yeah, I'm walking here.

I'm walking here. So, but we meet two of Lucy's suitors who are sitting in fabrics just talking and not, you know, doing ketamine in the toilets, which is a simp doctor and then a rich Texan Chad, the latter literally the Virgin and Chad meme. Like one of them is like skinny and fucked up and looking under shoes. And the other one is like just insanely ripped and has this massive jawline dresses entirely in neon colors. Anyway, he's there to marry Lucy so that the simp doctor can be simp and that as soon as he marries Lucy, he's like, well, goodbye forever. You'll never hear from me again. Yeah, that's that's the rule with the Chad. And then the amazing thing is that the doctor's opening line is like, so Lucy tells me you have money. This is in Britain,

like maybe in America, but not in Britain. Anyway, so they leave the club and I get gay friend is just like, you know, simp doctor, I think you're very cute, actually, if you want to go for a drink or something. And then that again, that plot. Yeah, you can you can mention gay stuff. But so long as you never, ever, ever follow up on it. They love that they don't speak its name. So we we are walking through the arches of what appears to be the soft homophobia of early retired plot lines. So basically, he gets a call from Jonathan Harker. What I thought he was he all got vamped up and killed in episode one. What the hell? I need a big like M Night Shyamalan swagger. And so simply who actually is Jonathan Harker in this? I didn't really get the lawyer from

the beginning. Yeah, the guy who gets like fucked up to noblehead. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's the Jonathan Harker Institute. Who is in the modern way. So there isn't actually Jonathan Harker in the modern era. He just put it in his phone as Jonathan Harker. But it's the it's the Jonathan Harker Institute for advanced vampire studies. So fucking stupid. Because Mina, of course, had a lot of money and then she cooperated with Agatha Van Helsing's descendants who all look exactly like her like that Alex Jones meme. Even to fund the Mark Fisher Institute for advanced vampire castle escapology. It's basically just the you know, the the the the Bunker Center for Drac studies and it's just vampire torchwood or vampire Eunice, if you prefer Doctor Who.

It is like they cannot write anything without having one of these weird mercenary SWAT teams with a bunker on call. And so they have to write it in. Honestly, every man that live to Marx, Gattis and the other one Fisher Fisher. Yeah. So it's the funny thing is, yeah, it's like it's like, yeah, right. It's it's like help to buy ended up just constructing underground mercenary secret bunkers all around the southeast. But yeah. Oh, also, Mark Gass is playing Mark Fisher. Yeah, there's some millennial who actually owns the bunker is just like, yeah, I mean, I don't really need a bunker, but the mortgage is underwater. So I'm stuck with it. I've got three jobs. I got to put this Dracula in it. Yeah. So yeah, so he's put it right to my landlord

to be like, can I keep a Dracula in here? And he's like, well, no. Yeah. And there's the the same plot exists in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the movie cabin in the woods basically is the whole, you know, secret organization with tons of funding built to capture monsters has been done and done to death. I guess the innovation here is that Dracula instead of breaking out has his lawyer come and say that this is violating his civil rights and they have to incredible. The worst scene in four and a half hours of this shit was when they were like, sorry, due to political correctness, we have to let a vampire lose who's going to kill everyone. Oopsie daisy. And that's why you're going to jail for not respecting Dracula's pronouns.

And that's why they only let incompetent lawyers on little St. James Island like Alan Dershowitz. So yeah, they were like, it's so fucking annoying. So I got to drink some of Dracula's blood that she takes from him in this in the Drac chamber. And she gets the the magical Dracula powers. But what's very, what's very interesting is that yeah, they do the 24 thing of human rights. And they get the thing is they gave he could contact his lawyer because they gave Dracula an iPad so he could read, but then he just guesses that the Wi-Fi password is his name Dracula. A bit that they reused from Sherlock where Sherlock unlocks a phone because the phone's lock is sure for Sherlock. And Dracula can read minds. We've shown that he can,

he doesn't even have to necessarily drink the blood. He can hypnotize people and read their minds. He can, he can vape out fog and he never does that again. He has every power. He never forgets he can turn into a wolf. Every power is used once. I would love it if Dracula's like the Wi-Fi password, which is like a normal Wi-Fi power. It's like 26B, 4634, the H.J. or whatever. And he's like, I've deduced that it was that. Yeah, life familiar has like brought me the little card from the back of the room. So it says BT open net. So what we end up with is a few months later, he's let out because of political correctness. And then Renfield is now like, you know, properly re...

It's Mercade. It's just Renfielding out. It's eating flies, writing Dracula's God on stuff. And then Dracula's got a cool Dracula pad, Dracula pad with Renfield just there being like, Master, you come to me with a genuine plan for what do you call it? World domination, a line that comes from nowhere. And more importantly, goes nowhere. He's just doing chat stuff. He's just like a single vampire in the city. So Drax actually is using Tinder now to find women. And that's where he found Lucy some time ago. Lucy just keeps going to him because she loves getting bitten. And he bitches about it because he's like, ah, this modern world, you can get everything

delivered, even food as he's swiping through Tinder. Yeah, because we're always on that phone. Yeah, always on the phones. Anyway, oh, by the way, is the Harker Foundation still a thing taking an interest after Drax got his human rights? Do they keep trying to fight the vampire or do anything? No. No, that that done and dusted halfway through the episode, the main organization for the protagonist is now gone. Well, they, what they fail to acknowledge is obviously like Dracula would be a huge boomer. So like he would be, you know, he would just be like on Google reviewing the band Vampire Weekend. Like I went there, there was very few vampires, very disappointing. They called

us music these days. There's another plot line they forgot. There's a plot line they keep bringing up about like the sinister funding of the Jonathan Harker Institute. And then they just forget and it just doesn't go anywhere. So I think if we want, I'm going to try to wrap this up. Lawsuit from the Epstein Foundation. I'm going to try to wrap this up pretty quickly because Leslie, I'm aware you're on a bit of a schedule, but it seems like this was just the first thing that they wrote. And they just, there was no second draft of this at no point did it get edited. No one reviewed it. And they seem to just like, they just seem to sort of not even improvise anything because all of the lines were sort of clang with a sort of,

with a thud. What is your, how do you feel? Do you feel like this is something that really suffered from no rewrites? I mean, I don't know. It suffered from the fact that they didn't actually have, they had a few new things to do with Dracula maybe and vampires maybe. I think, actually, I think maybe they have something, they wanted to do a vampire show, but because they have done Sherlock and Hyde and this other stuff, they thought it had to be a Dracula show and had to be about Dracula when they don't really have anything to say about some guy from Transylvania. They don't have any, they don't reuse any of the things from the novel, which is about this fear of foreign investors, foreign money, that sort of thing. But Dracula, he's just like an old British

guy who's just like so much better and superior than everyone else that he needs to die in order for the rest of us to live our lives. And there's only one person in all of history cool enough to die with him. And that's basically the story of it. I just don't know why they made this show other than they like BBC told them like or Netflix told them, we're going to give you $15 million, give us a show in six months. Yeah, we'll give you $15 million to make text messages appear on screen. It's Brewster's millions. They had to spend $15 million, but on a show that was not good at all. And if it was even a little bit good, they wouldn't win the prize. So basically just so what happens just very quickly is Lucy, who's tired of being an it party girl

and is actually in love with the idea of death, goes to meet Dracula at a graveyard so he can feed on her. Because he meets people at graveyards because he's that kind of guy. He's kooky, you know, he's a scene kid, he loves that manic pixie Dracula. Yeah, they go meet at a graveyard. And gay friend in the hat uses an app that may as well be called plot device with no vowels to monitor where she is. Yeah, track her to the graveyard, finding her freshly fed on. And then at the same time, he's like, oh, shit, she's all fucked up. So he takes her back home. You're going to have to skip stuff because this drags so much. So anyway, what happens ultimately is that she's like dead, but then gets cremated because she's

sort of he was going to turn her into a vampire, but they fuck up and a church is also a crematorium for some reason. And Agatha and Dr. Simp and the burned corpse, the burned living corpse of Lucy and Drax, all meet at Drax's Dracula pad with Renfield just gone. I don't know where he is, he's just left, I guess. Lucy's like, I used to be beautiful. Now I'm not beautiful. And Dr. Simp is like, I actually think you're beautiful without makeup. Kisses are in stakes, sir. Yeah. The classic bait and switch. Yeah. And then he leaves and then Agatha Jr. pulls the curtain down and is like, ah, you just wanted the courage to die. Yeah, she owns him with facts and logic. Yeah. And he was like, ah, finally someone understands me. And then for some reason,

Dracula then drinks all of her, drinks her blood. So she dies because she had cancer and the blood of the dying is death to a vampire. Then he also dies and then they're like naked in the middle of the sun and then the end credits roll. And I felt like I'd been given too much water. And I just drank like four liters of water as part of like being fucked within a police interrogation or something. Yeah. This was actually, this just reminded me of one of the things from the first episode where they're trying to portray like hers. Like a lot of the time like Moffat and Gaddis like accidentally did go boss shit when actually what they were trying to do was like, dude, like, oh, we don't know what, we don't know what women are like. What would

a cool woman be like? I don't know. I've never met one. How could I imagine this? And there's this point where Agatha Van Helsing says to Dracula, I'm your worst nightmare and educated woman. It's like, why would that be his worst nightmare? He's a 500 year old vampire. Like what, like, why would he be like, like an anti-feminist four-chan guy? It doesn't make any sense. Like the concept of feminism didn't exist when he was alive. At one point he's like, oh, women's rights. Crazy. He does say that. But he follows that up by saying, no one has rights. What are you talking about? There's no such thing as rights. You know, he's a, which is low. When you know what it is, that conversation, that is the flash of a better show that might have been, I think.

That's a show is called what we do in the shadows. Right. Amazing show. Ridiculously good movie. Anyway, but I know, I noticed we're running long. So Leslie, I want you to take the honor of final judgments. Final judgments. Do not watch this show unless you are absolutely, positively obsessed with vampires and you have to watch everything with it in them. Don't let your friends tell you this show is good or gets better. They're lying to you like they've lied about every single other Netflix or British show that's come out in the past 20 years. It's a bad show. You don't need to watch it. You don't need to block out, was it five hours of your life watching these really long episodes?

Maybe fast if you, if you really must watch the first episode and that's really all you need. Consume it like a podcast, watch it on two times speed and that way the fight choreography will look good as opposed to terrible. Captain Kirk asked choreography. Yeah, I think that's about right. You should only watch this show if you're going to do a podcast about it. Otherwise, just let, let us do it. I regret it. We got one segment left to talk about Liz Smith as a Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss character, but Leslie, I'm aware you're on a time constraint. So I believe this might be where we bid you adieu and say thank you for coming on. All right. Thank you so much for having me on. If anybody wants to hear more from me,

check out patreon.com slash struggle session. We have not one, but two bonus episodes every single week. We're giving you the best bang for your butt on Patreon when it comes to podcasts and check us out. That's true. Better value than this show. All right, Leslie, thank you so much for coming out. Everyone do go listen to struggle session. It's a great show. I did an episode of it recently about Black Mirror. So it's worth, it's worth a little listen. Tom, what if your Patreon was your fine? What, what if that? All right. So Leslie, thanks a lot man. All right, thank you. So Milo, do you know who Liz Smith is? A well-lubricated final segment here. Why don't you explain it for my benefit? Well, that was Leslie Lee joining us for our

discussion of Dr. Acula, but I also would like to talk about Liz Smith. Yeah, we had to clear the decks for this one. This happened an hour before we started recording and Twitter was obsessed with it. I was obsessed with it and we all had to like tack an extra 10 minutes onto the end of the podcast because of it. So this is from a Politico piece about Liz Smith. If you don't know who Liz Smith is, she's Pete Buttigieg. No, no, no, no, no. Let this paragraph be the first introduction you have to her. You have to experience this paragraph unsullied. Liz Smith burst through the doors of a marbled hotel bar in Brooklyn wearing oversized Anna

Winter sunglasses, a faux fur lined coat and impossibly thin and tall high heels. She's been written by Mark Gayness and Steven Moffitt. Impossibly thin, like for very narrow feet. She's on her phone talking to another Buttigieg aide. She puts the word fuck through every part of speech the word can be bent into. Noun, pronoun, gerund, verb, turn of endearment, sobriquet, epithet, honorific. She's practically shaking with excess energy. I tell her I've been calling around to former coworkers and associates to get a sense of

how she operates. How badly, she asked me, are you trying to fuck me over right now? So, yes, this Aaron Sorkin character is Pete Buttigieg's at time of going to press comms direct. Yeah, she's operating on two and a half hours of sleep having just arrived back in New York on a charter jet from South Bend. She has a three day old copy of the New York post in her bag. It is, she says, the only newspaper she subscribes to. Damn, so cool. Yeah. Brain stuff. Brain stuff. Yeah. Why, like the New York post is such a bad newspaper. Like, what is it like? Because she's not, she's, she's a counterintuitive.

She's an outsider and it's like the word on the street. And she, yeah. I like to keep my finger on the pulse of what racism grandpa thinks. That's the key to understanding the world. It's that American establishment Democrats and Dominic Cummings and Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffitt all truly believe that the brilliance of their own brilliance is communicable only through like a mind palace and, and that you have to be able to do the like counterintuitive rebellious stuff of being an establishment Democrat or being an establishment conservative

in every way, except the signifiers. You have to do all of the same things, but read like a weird newspaper. She orders a beer, downs it, and then orders another. Whoa. Just chugging. Fuck, she's so cool. She's such a chad. Damn.

It's only, it's only 5.15 on Monday. Yeah. This, this, this, this is so cool and like not worrying at all. Yeah. So this is an alcoholism. This is being a girl boss. And so she says, she can't talk right now. Her phone is literally exploding. There's a talk. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. It is figuratively exploding. There was a top political reporter for a major national newspaper apologizing for

blowing off a meeting with Buttigieg earlier, trying to get one now. Asking Smith, will you ever forgive me? Liz Smith, by the way, and she spells her name LIS because every establishment Democrat has to have a normal name spelled weird. Liz with no Z, John with no H. Buttigieg. Wait, hang on. Sorry about the phone exploding thing.

She was just trying to charge her Samsung Galaxy S8. Liz has absolutely no fear, says Jeff Smith, a former Missouri lawmaker who dated Smith for a couple of years and considers her one of his closest friends. That's Smith with a Y, by the way. There's nothing too big for her. She doesn't give a fuck. She's the most competitive person I've ever known. She's basically a, she is basically a Mary Sue.

But she's like, she, she's like a liberal Mary Sue, basically. She's alpha, right? She's epic. They're like running a fake Nigerian man account to like big up your own selfies, making Elliot Spitzer suck your toes in a hot tub. She's, she's cool. Like, I like that. Did it actually happen? Yes.

What? Yeah. Disgraced former New York, I think Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, was he Attorney General or State Senator? I think he might even have been like Governor or something, but either way. Spitzer with a Q, by the way. She dated him and also made him suck her toes in a jacuzzi. That's cool though. Damn, King.

King. Exactly. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. That's very uncut gems vibes. Yeah. I think it's funny is she's like, is, she says, I think I'm impressive because I'm a violinist and I went to Dartmouth and I speak French and I've traveled all over the world. I don't know.

And I know a lot about great apes. Like, what the fuck? She says, but there are a few, a few times when I've... You skipped a bit where she said that she knows a lot about great apes. And that's such a fucking sorkin, like, relatable, quirky thing to throw in. I think let's tie it all together. She's a Stephen Moffat and Mark Gattis character. Yes, because they're aping sorkin and so is she.

So that's the common source there. That's the heart of darkness. Mr. Kurtz is driving a conversable into Universal Studios with a phone in each hand and a nostril full of Coke and just kind of yelling. Coke with a Y, by the way. But there have been a few times when I've been around Buddha judge, when I know something, a factoid or something he didn't know. And let me tell you, I fucking lured it over him.

Oh, really? You didn't know that? I can't believe you didn't know that. I thought everybody knew that. Apparently, what it is, is what it's like to have your toes stuck to the jacuzzi by disgraced former New York governor, Elliot Spitzer. That is an experience. Yeah. It's a factoid.

Yeah. But PPGJ's husband is way too chaste to do that. He would not. It's right in the name. Friendship ended with Amy Klobuchar. This is the top energy I want going into 2020. But I think the reason that we did want to read this Liz Smith thing is that we've been thinking about this today and it is so in line.

The way that establishment Democrats talk and want to think about themselves is so in line with the derived extended Sorkaverse, which may as well include this Moffat and Gadaverse. Yeah, they're all the doctors. They're all Sherlock. They're all, I guess, now Dracula and also Van Helsing. Yeah, they're all Drax. They're all Drax.

They're Drax and around. They're Van Helsing around. They're all trapped in a mind palace from which they cannot escape. Yeah, and this is like just the dismal failure of imagination that this is what being epic is now. This is cool. It sucks. It sucks.

It sucks. It all sucks. Anyway, we are running a bit long on time. So I'm going to say thank you very much for listening to this week's free TF. It's been, as always, a pleasure to talk to Leslie. It wasn't necessarily a pleasure to watch this terrible show, but hey, now you don't have to. It was a pleasure to think about Elliot Spitzer sucking toes.

Yeah, that's going to stick with me for a while. Hell yeah. Everyone's just jealous because everyone wants Elliot Spitzer to suck their toes. Yeah, that's true. Mike Bloomberg especially. So don't forget, we do have that Patreon. Hop on it for that second episode a week. Our theme song, of course, is Here We Go by Jin Sang,

Find It On Spotify. Listen to it early. Listen to it often. Milo, what are your plugs? 18th, which is to mark today. So if you're listening to this on Tuesday, Smoke Comedy at the Sekford featuring Headliner Ahir Shah and also Balthazar Speedboat favourite Pope Lonergan.

So come and enjoy that. 21st and 22nd, I'm doing Leicester Comedy Festival. The tickets will be in the description. Get tickets to that. And the 25th of February and the 3rd of March, I'm doing my previous and my new show at the Vault Festival in London. So if you're in London, grab tickets to those. And also, don't forget to listen to Alice and Justin and Liam

on Well There Is Your Problem. Continue, we can continue to get... The more people listen to both, we can continue to get better equipment for Alice to make her crisper and crisper and crisper. Yeah, I can turn the gender dial all the way to the right and just keep it stuck there. We can get a gender whammy pedal

to get like weird super octave gender. All right, later everybody. Bye.