BBC's Dracula turns strangely anaemic for it's final episode

It seems that the BBC's New Year three-part adaptation of Dracula written by Mark Gattis and Stephen Moffat's is receiving almost universal praise, but to be honest it left me cold. There was some great imagery and some really effective sequences but at the end  it left too much confusion and resorted to becoming an undisciplined mess with none of it making any real sense.

The casting of Danish actor Claes Bang was a masterstroke and his Dracula is up there with the very best screen versions, but after two really effective episodes the character becomes an over-the-top horror anti-hero, more Robert England than Bela Lugosi. This was so disappointing given that the first two episodes had built up a wonderful inventive story only for us to be  given a convoluted finale that leaves plot points dangling and bombards the viewer with images, presumably in the hope that we wouldn't realise just how bad this had become.

The first episode was superb in building up atmosphere even if it did go slightly awry in the final scenes at the convent, the second was absolutely amazing and oozed atmosphere while the third was a shambles - admittedly a vivid, at times cinematic shambles but a shambles nonetheless. The dialogue in the final episode was mostly idiotic, the characters totally bland and any sense of narrative structure seemed to have been thrown out of the window.

It's as if the writers, both reportedly huge horror buffs, were so focused on offering nods to past greats that they forgot the most important element is the story itself - that Dracula is evil personified and can't be redeemed. There is no redemption for true evil and ending the show with the vampire committing suicide by drinking cancerous blood because, presumably he grows tired of feeding off the living, of destroying lives, is nothing short of bullshit. Dracula is an animal, a feral beast and not some new age toss-pot on a guilt trip. But that's not the worse of it though - to reach this point in the narrative the writers just throw random flashy images about, with one disjointed scene leading to another so that nothing makes any sense.


And it all started out so well, but in the end seemed to suffer from Game of Thrones syndrome, with the final act destroying the brilliance that went before.