Main cast: Claes Bang (Count Dracula), Dolly Wells (Sister Agatha Van Helsing, Dr Zoe Van Helsing), John Heffernan (Jonathan Harker), Morfydd Clark (Mina Murray), Joanna Scanlan (Mother Superior), Jonathan Aris (Captain Sokolov), Sacha Dhawan (Dr Sharma), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Adisa), Clive Russell (Valentin), Catherine Schell (Duchess Valeria), Patrick Walshe McBride (Lord Ruthven), Lily Dodsworth-Evans (Dorabella), Youssef Kerkour (Olgaren), Samuel Blenkin (Piotr), Alec Utgoff (Abramoff), Lydia West (Lucy Westenra), Matthew Beard (Jack Seward), Mark Gatiss (Frank Renfield), Paul Brennen (Commander Irving), and Phil Dunster (Quincey Morris)
Directors: Jonny Campbell, Damon Thomas, and Paul McGuigan

I initially had many reservations about watching this yet-another-take on Dracula, mostly because it was created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, with Mr Moffat being the catalyst of the downfall of Dr Who based on what I understand from disenchanted fans of that show. Of course, back then they wanted Mr Moffat gone, and now they regret making that wish because I hear Chris Chibnall is now taking a bigger dump on the show, heh. Still, when long-time supporter Andrea asked whether I would take a look at this show, it’s the push I need to take the plunge and watch this three-episode miniseries.

Now, Mr Moffat’s past works were described by his detractors as glorified fanfiction, and watching this latest and pointless take on the daddy of all vampires has me thinking the same thing. This miniseries feels just like glorified fanfiction, right down to a reinterpretation of a character as a self-insert character that exists only to help Count Dracula “see the light” (in this case, quite literally) and get a sex scene with him, the latter being the tired, old payoff of every fanfiction that is infatuated with Count Dracula’s monster dong. Yes, Abraham Van Helsing is now Agatha Van Helsing, a nun that is all so sassy and spunky that she practically pushes every other character that normally played important roles into minor, even inconsequential roles.

In the first episode, The Rules of the Beast, Jonathan Harker visits Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania in the 19th century, and despite encountering all kinds of menacing threats and a wizened old count that camps it up like he was possessed by the ghost of Christopher Lee, decides to stick around anyway to roam what resemble cheap-looking set pieces of tunnels and hallways. Surprise, he’s not only shagged by Dracula, he ends up being killed and returned to life as an undead. Just when I think that this series will be about the “good” vampire Jonathan trying to take down his evil sire—cheesy, yes, but may be interesting—the two writers decide to go, “I’m now… subverting your expectations, woo!” So, it’s now Agatha lecturing Dracula on how the power of the sassy trumps the menace of a hairy dong any time, until Jonathan and Mina decide to become colossal idiots and hand Dracula the win. Hey, there are two more episodes to go, after all.

The next episode, Blood Vessel, is about Dracula’s passage on the Demeter to England. Jonathan and Mina by this point have been unceremoniously shoved off-screen for good, so that Agatha, the creation of Mr Gatiss and Mr Moffat, can now take center stage as the main antagonist of Dracula. Even then, the bulk of this episode sees Dracula draining dry a procession of bland, one-note, and unlikable characters with so little effort that I can only yawn and wonder whether the whole thing is a metaphor for how this episode sucks so much. That or this episode is all about catering to people that have a fetish for hot guys that like to suck and swallow, I don’t know. At any rate, Dracula is handed a win because nearly everyone on the ship is a colossal idiot.

Finally, there is The Dark Compass, which sees the two writers attaining their final form of expectation-subverting douchenozzles: the episode jumps 123 years into the present, when Dracula is pitted against Agatha’s descendant, Zoe Van Helsing, while Lucy Westenra, Quincey Morris, and  Jack Seward are reduced to being young, annoying, and often idiotic clichés one would typically find in a Netflix teen romantic comedy. I especially cringe at how Lucy is now a shallow and vapid 180 from the nice and understanding character in the original story. These people decide to turn this character into a black person, and then turn the token black character into a skank. At any rate, this one drags like a third-rate episode of a vampire melodrama, until the last ten minutes or so when Zoe actually nags Dracula into offing himself. Seriously, up to that point our vampire daddy has been pure evil, and all of a sudden, he realizes that he’s just Kylo Ren needing the love of a good woman to give him the redemption he didn’t even know he seeks until our heroine tells him so.

So there you have it, folks, Dracula. What’s the point of the whole thing, aside from giving an opportunity for Netflix and BBC One to pad the slots in their programming schedule? Considering that Netflix and BBC One are involved in this show, it’s shockingly not too much of an overflowing broken toilet spilling performative wokeness like I imagined. Then again, that could be because of the way this show unintentionally turns all its characters of color into morons. Aside from Lucy being a vapid skank, we also have the idiot Adisa that for some reason has to step outside a protective circle to try to shoot Dracula instead of shooting that thing from within the circle, and Dr Sharma that shows up and then is gone without making any ripples in the show.

Then we have Agatha and Zoe. They’re essentially the same character, and on paper, these two are undoubtedly meant to be kick-ass female leads that are full of sass and what not. Unfortunately, Agatha is an actually hapless character that fails to achieve anything of note in the entire series. To be fair, that’s because of the idiots she is stuck with, but the fact remains: she fails in everything she tries to do. Strong female character there, indeed! Zoe, on the other hand, exists solely to nag and lecture Dracula before getting rewarded with his monster dong—she’s suspiciously like a self-insert character of every fanfiction writer that wants to be shagged by a hot vampire. It’s also hilarious and kind of sad in a way, how Mr Moffat and Mr Gatiss are all “We’re so progressive because on our show, Dracula is shown to be horny towards both men and women!” (Anne Rice is likely wondering by now whether she is a joke to them), only to then shy away from showing any explicit sexual interactions between Dracula and various male characters. However, there is nothing coy about Dracula shagging Zoe!

In other words, this show is the sad embodiment of modern-day show business, with the people (more often than not white straight males) involved bragging loudly about how progressive they are to include characters of color and various rainbow flavors, only to reduce these token characters into stereotypes and keeping them on the down low while still pushing the same old values they denigrate and denounce in public. This is an insulting kind of pandering and begging for head pats, and sad to say, the level of such fake performative wokeness is actually pretty low for a show that has the involvement of all the usual suspects that do this 24/7. It’s still obvious and, worse, incompetently done, but the fact that it’s not as bad as other BBC One and Netflix shows is more of an indication of how bad those platforms are as opposed to how good this show is.

Also, the three episodes all have stark different tones that it is hard to imagine them to be in the same series. The first episode feels like a higher-budget super B-grade The Asylum production, while the second episode is a more standard monster-hunting-the-victims show that is ruined by boring, one-note characters that die off pointlessly. Seriously, the second episode is a painfully long episode padded with filler just to drive home that Dracula is moving to England, when a single scene would have sufficed. The third episode is more of a really bad vampire soap opera cobbled together from rejected scenes from a scrapped Underworld sequel.

Finally, Dracula. Claes Bang is hot, there’s that, and I’m throwing in one oogie for that and for the show getting him naked in the first episode. Hey, I’m easy. However, Dracula here goes from camp to third-rate Buffy-speak ejaculator and back again that his character feels more like an amalgamation of several versions of Dracula than a single cohesive vampire daddy. Worst of all is him becoming way out of character in the final moments of the third episode to go all “Oh! I received a short lecture from Zoe and now I realize what I really am and what I must do!” on me.

As I’ve asked earlier, what’s the point of this latest take on the Dracula lore? The Dracula here is a messy, schizophrenic interpretation that fails to exude any believable seductive charms due to the corny and cringe-heavy lines he has to say in this show, and the way he meets his fate in the final episode is up there in the credibility-ruining tier of humiliation. Van Helsing is turned into a female, but the female in question is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to achievements. Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, and other familiar cast of characters are ruined or reduced to imbeciles in minor roles, which won’t be so bad in itself if this were done to promote more interesting elements in the story. However, this is done to push a female character that ends up being a dud in every way that counts!

In other words, this is fanfiction, but even then, Mr Moffat and Mr Gatiss fail in presenting good or interesting fanfiction. I can only wonder whether this series is green-lighted for tax write-off or money laundering purposes.