Castlevania: Season 3 Review

I think I’m also going to do a masterpost of links to do if you’re stuck somewhere and you’re really bored.

This review has spoilers, yo.

---

Castlevania: Season 3 Review

If you’ve read my previous reviews, you know I have a bit of a rocky history with the Netflix adaptation of Castlevania. I love the animation and the action, and I like the core team of characters quite a bit. But thematically I have some issues with its overall message: on religion (which it doesn’t seem to like very much), on human nature (which it seems to like even less), and on its pacing. That last one stood out, because the first season is only four episodes and its second season is eight, and in  all of that we get both our setup and our climax, and I thought it didn’t feel that earned, especially since the heroes spent most of season two sitting in a basement doing homework. Them killing Dracula was awesome, but I didn’t get a sense that it was all building up to this moment, you know?

Season three is a bit better on its pacing, though the way that works might frustrate viewers to an extent. Because while it feels like this season gives the characters some stuff to do that isn’t rushing towards a climactic battle, at the same time… very little actual Plot development happens. Trevor and Sypha’s story doesn’t connect with anything else in a direct way, nor does Alucard’s. Isaac’s story is good overall, but the season ends before it really gets going. And Hector’s just… goes exactly where you expected from the very beginning.

And since I mentioned Hector, I’ll go into my number one problem for the season: the Plot relies on people being stupid. Hector’s in particular sticks out. After trusting Carmilla last season backfired (because OF COURSE IT DID), it seems like maybe Hector has learned his lesson, as first chance he gets he tries to hold Lenore, one of vampires on Carmilla’s council, hostage. Except after she beats the snot out of him, she keeps trying to be nice to him by talking how vampires aren’t so bad, feeding him food, getting him better living arrangements, and so on. But whenever she takes him for a walk she puts him on a leash, and when he does something she wants she tells him “Good boy!” like a dog. So at the end of the season she seduces him, and during sex gets him to swear loyalty to her, which because of black magic shenanigans binds him to her and means that he physically can’t escape. And then he’s like, “You tricked me!”

YES! The vampire woman who treats you like a pet sees you as a pet! Why would you think otherwise? Why would you have sex with her? Why would you swear loyalty while having sex with her? All of those are things that would happen only if Hector was a complete moron. Which apparently, he is.

That’s hardly the only example this season of someone being stupid, but it’s the one that sticks out. There’s also the Lindenfeld Plot, in which the deranged evil monks who worship Dracula are carving alchemical symbols on all the houses in town, but no one sees fit to try to scratch out or get rid of these marks. There’s the two Japanese vampire slayers who go to Alucard to train, only to decide that he needs to die for… Reasons? 

Leading to my next point: if the first two seasons had a low opinion of humanity, it’s even lower here. Yeah, there’s the stupidity, but the implication is that humans are just stupid to begin with, and of the few that aren’t, most of them are terrible. The finale reveals that the Judge who’d been aiding Trevor and Sypha all season, seeming to be a reasonable authority figure, was also a child serial killer, something that doesn’t affect the Plot at all except to kick you while you’re down. Isaac has a conversation with a damned soul which tells us that apparently in the Castlevania-verse, when Greece turned Christian that pagan philosophers were hunted through the streets like animals and tortured. That thinking about God was considered a crime to get you executed.

[Thomas Aquinas would like to disagree.]

I’m also really not comfortable with the show apparently hardlining this anti-Christian stance, considering we live in a world which there are violent groups of people who increasingly want us Christians dead that there’s a critically acclaimed series more or less declaring that it’s totally fine, Christians are monsters anyway so they all deserve to die. I recognize that the places where this is a big issue are generally not where this show is streamed, but it’s still a very disconcerting notion that it consistently tries to paint an entire religion as by its very nature evil.

TV Tropes’s YMMV pages tells me that I should be grateful for that one priest character who blesses some water in Season One, but let’s be real: he isn’t given a name, never shows up before or after that point, and has no lines at all. 

And while Plot’s pacing is much better, the pacing of characterization isn’t. There’s some ship tease between Trevor and Sypha in the first two seasons, but when we start Season Three they’re already in a sexual relationship, which is more than a little jarring considering we haven’t even seen them kiss before this point. It’s not just me, is it? That we’re following two of our leads, and the show’s like, “Oh, by the way, they’re sleeping together now. Is that cool?” It’s a huge bit of character development to just skip over.

Isaac’s character arc is a bit frustrating because he’s very slow to figure out why guards are upset at him marching a group of Hellspawn through their towns. There’s also a notable scene where someone tells him, “What if humans aren’t all bad and don’t all deserve to die?” and that gives Isaac some pause. Which is stupid, because you’re telling me he’s gone all this time hating humanity and wiping them out, and never once did he stop and think, “Hey maybe not all humans are terrible to everyone else all the time!”? This stoic character has never stopped and thought about what he’s doing?

Hector’s just an idiot and that’s irritating to watch.

And Alucard has Sumi and Taka to train, who then decide because he isn’t helping them as much as they want that they’ve got to seduce him into a threesome (???) and then murder him (?!?). This isn’t actually out of nowhere, as we see them talk to each other and Alucard about how he’s not sharing everything with them, and how they really want to figure out to make the castle move and he’s telling them that the mechanism is broken and he doesn’t have much interest in fixing it. But them leaping from that to seduction and murder is a leap I didn’t quite follow.

It felt many times that the series was trying very hard to be bleak and grimdark, and of course, this is Castlevania, of course it’s got to be dark. But so much of it was just pointlessly so. This wasn’t monsters killing people, this was people being dicks to each other for no discernible reason. One of the characters was an actual child serial killer, and this wasn’t a part of the story for anything except shock value. 

This season was not without its bright points; the Plot moves along much better. There are interesting new characters, like Carmilla’s council and the Count of Saint Germaine. And the action’s top notch again; the battle at the end of the season is well worth the wait. But I don’t know if it was worth the full ending, and some of the other bits of the season. I can’t help but find myself thinking that if the show is going to continue with giving us a grimdark atmosphere with plot twists like this, I can’t say I’m interested. 

I don’t care for it.

---