Van Helsing – Season 3 – review

Director: Various

First aired: 2018

Contains spoilers

The SyFy post-apocalyptic series returns and it manages (for the most part) to keep the pace that it achieved in Season 2. I say ‘for the most part’ because it has scattered some of the characters and therefore some of the pacing is lost as we shift focus from one group to another. However overall it worked.

Of course, the main focus is the two Van Helsing girls, Vanessa (Kelly Overton, True Blood) and Scarlet (Missy Peregrym, Dark Angel: Love in Vein & Reaper: I Want my Baby back) and the position season 2 left them in where Vanessa was in trouble, captured by a research group, and Scarlet had released a vampire elder, sworn to serve the Van Helsings and sent him to her rescue.

Sarah and Julius

After Scarlet saves some of their motley crew of survivors, Scarlet and Vanessa manage to get back together. However we discover that Julius (Aleks Paunovic, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) and Flesh (Vincent Gale, Sanctuary & Bloodrayne 2: Deliverance), by dint of being vampires, being cured by Vanessa’s bite/blood and then being bitten by the new daywalking vampires, have become immortal – returning from injuries as severe as their brains being blown out or following from a high rise building.

the Oracle and Sam

As for the daywalking vampires; the vampire who was experimented on is biting feral vampires, returning some of their cunning and intelligence and creating an army. This daywalking gift eventually gets to the sisterhood – a group of female mystical vampire warriors. They too start swelling ranks, castrating males before making them one of them. The Van Helsings themselves are hunting the elders down and we get to see a range of vampires through this including a psychic vampire, jiangshi (although these are just very fast Chinese vampire warriors, rather than the hopping vampire) and a mysterious vampire Oracle (Jesse Stanley), who is looking to create a new vampire elder. She has a connection with Sam (Christopher Heyerdahl, also Sanctuary, Matthew Blackheart Monster Smasher & Are You Afraid of the Dark: Tale of the Midnight Madness) that goes back to his twisted childhood. Whilst Sam is front and centre in some episodes he feels a tad underused perhaps and certainly Mohammed (Trezzo Mahoro) is pretty much side-lined through the season, whilst playing a vital role in the finale.

Vanessa has red-eye

I mentioned the focus shifting due to the spread of the supporting characters and this is true. Some of the storylines seemed too shorthand (Axel (Jonathan Scarfe) accidentally finding and losing his sister (Sara Canning, the Vampire Diaries) didn’t have the build it might have had and lost emotional punch because of that). The season felt bloodier than previous ones, but that could just be me forgetting previous gore levels. The central mythology is now being brought into view, but don’t expect all the answers in this season. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US