Dracula 1x02: "A Whiff of Sulfur"

[cleolinda]

@InterestingLit: Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was born on this day in 1847. In early drafts of the novel, Dracula was named ‘Count Wampyr’.

@particle_p: Count Wampyr just made my morning.

@cleolinda: People in "Count Wampyr" really should know they're in "Count Wampyr."

So I'm just in time, it sounds like.

Comments

[eruvadhril]

That was like a really accelerated version of that time your mother thought Edward imprinted on Renesmee.

[cleolinda]

Oh God, I still can't believe she went around for WEEKS thinking that's what had happened. I still feel bad about that, because of course it was confusing just hearing me tell it all out of order.

[aka_paloma]

I was doubled over with laughter and had to rest my head on the desk to recover after reading your Lord Laurent and his son/not-son confusion. I saw some of your tweets regarding this, but I hadn't realised the full extent of your confusion.

Lucy is my favourite thing about this show.

Also, I now ship Mina/Lucy. (Let's face it, except for Renfield, all the guys on this show are a bit tool-ish and Mina deserves better.)

[jubilantia]

Hear, hear on that last one. I didn't think Jonathan was too bad the last episode, just a bit boring, but they really made his jerk flag fly in this one, didn't they? I do appreciate that he is realistically wary of the Grayson windfall- if he's accepted it right out, he would have looked (more) like an idiot.

[cleolinda]

Well, the jerk issue has since been addressed in the third episode, but yeah. It's kind of startling to me, actually, because one of the hallmarks of the book is their devotion to each other.

[jubilantia]

Well, really, it's all their fault for casting Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the Dracman. Not that his looks make his murders justifiable or anything, but with all the flashbacks the show is definitely shipping Drac/Mina. (Although I haven't seen the most recent episode- we'll see).

[missychacha]

watching the quick preview for episode three and all I can say is van helsing's injection technique is terrible!

[cleolinda]

See, needles make me really unhappy, so I probably wasn't paying very close attention to that.

[missychacha]

I'm taking nursing classes and working in a nursing home... injections and body fluids no longer hold any terror for me.

[jaimelannister]

I definitely ship Lucy/Mina.

somehow, the conversation is all about light bulbs. And not even as a euphemism.

I feel like the scene in my icon could be interpreted in a certain sapphic way. I mean, Lucy's lightbulb lights up as she's staring at Mina.

[cleolinda]

Aw! I don't know that I actually noticed that, but I can believe it.

[sherrilina]

Yessss, Lucy/Mina ftw! <33 Love your icon, bb, did you make a Dracula set?

(Also I didn't notice that with hr lightbulbs, but aww!)

[jaimelannister]

This is the only one I made (and it only came about because I made a Lucy/Mina gifset after the first episode), sorry :(

[uldihaa]

And then Daniel and Lord Laurent agree, significantly, to meet later, and I was like, "Well, they probably have some nefarious father-son stockholding WAWAWA to attend to." Oh my God.

I had to stop reading here so I could laugh and laugh and laugh. I laughed until my stomach ached, my ribs were sore, and my throat kind of raw from my raucous, honking laughter.

The thing about the mother covering her daughter's eyes amused me because she only covered her daughter's eyes. She didn't even bother with her son's. How very Victorian.

Now, since the two seers have working-class London accents, rather than something ~exotic,~ what I hope happened is that this is attempted diversity in casting that tripped and fell into some really, really unfortunate tropes, rather than Magical Brown People, considering that this is also the show that racebent a cool, capable Renfield.

That the opium den was set in a clearly Asian store had some unfortunate implications itself.

Forget the coin--Am I a terrible person for expecting that coin to be

[cleolinda]

That the opium den was set in a clearly Asian store had some unfortunate implications itself.

That itself is fairly accurate, as I understand it--while there was a hell of a lot less opium smoking in London than everyone at the time liked to think there was, most of the opium dens in, say, San Francisco and Manhattan were Chinese-run. But among the smokers themselves, "all nationalities seem indiscriminately mixed." Wikipedia's most convenient to link to, but there's a lot more about all of it in a fairly interesting book I picked up. Unless there's a different implication I'm missing...

[uldihaa]

I think what bothered me about it was that the opium den was completely unnecessary and when combined with the seers themselves seemed to come across as 'Bad Minorities'.

[jubilantia]

yeeeeah I definitely picked up on that. This show needs to take a leaf out of the Hannibal book. And really, aren't the writers, like, a cubicle or two over? Go for lunch, pick their brains on how not to be racist in your casting. I would say Sleepy Hollow, with their fabulously diverse main cast, but they've also made some uncomfortable missteps with their minor characters. (Honestly, though, points for trying. It's better than most shows manage.)