As CDC doctor Ephraim Goodweather, Stoll is the beating, uninfected heart of a show that is dangerously lacking in brains. I can give you one good reason and one good reason only: Corey Stoll. If The Strain doesn’t care enough to follow its own internal logic, why should we bother to try? Vasiliy Fet’s goatee appears to change color from week to week. Vampires die in the sun except when they don’t. To wit: There is an entire city feeling the effects of a monstrous plague and yet the only ones interested in putting a stop to it are a senior citizen, an exterminator, two doctors, and (ugh) a hacker? (Did it occur to no one to maybe knock on the door of a fire station or police station?) The white worms are predatory and infectious, but no one bothers to wear masks or gloves. There was gravity on Tatooine, you know? On The Strain, it often feels like the rules are being made up as they go along. Don’t tell me where you are if you can’t even manage to get there! That wouldn’t be a big deal if the Toronto-filmed show didn’t lead off nearly every scene with a nonsensically specific bumper. “She’s in Astoria!,” Eph Goodweather declared before running off to find her. The live map he shared with his father clearly showed the phone in Brooklyn Heights. Worse, The Strain doesn’t even pass basic geography: Three weeks ago, Zach Goodweather was able to use an old, battery-drained laptop (OK) to track his mother’s iPhone (fine), despite the Internet being down (sure). I’ve seen New Yorkers more upset when the F train isn’t running than they are in Day 5 of a supernatural slaughterfest. Other times, the easygoing traffic on the Manhattan Bridge resembles a summer Sunday morning. Sometimes The Strain suggests that Manhattan, in the span of a week, has transformed into a dystopic failed state of roaming monsters, petty crime, and random explosions. Needless to say, The Strain is not a particularly smart show. “Yes, I am complicit,” he droned, with all the emotion of a Tandy 1000.) When Dutch recognized a ghoul from “a gallery in Soho,” a smart show wouldn’t have had her hesitate, it would have had her open fire immediately. Fitzwilliams, who last night delivered his long-overdue cry for independence without moving a single muscle in his body.

It’s a show in which even the most accomplished heroes pause to deliver a killer line before delivering the death blow (just so the big bad can safely get away), and where even the unturned characters speak and act like the undead. This is a show about vampires, yet the vampire masks appear to have been bought on discount at a Halloween superstore. But again and again The Strain’s tentacle throat-mouth writes checks its smooth bottom half can’t manage to cash. I actually admire The Strain’s gonzo joie de mort: It takes guts - or at least a pair of what Bolivar used to have - to attempt to pull off a vampire invasion of New York City on a basic-cable budget. The Strain ended its first season last night on FX much the way it began: striving for high camp and barely clearing the bar for lowbrow kicks. And then there are shows like The Strain, which are so deeply dumb that it’s hard to work up much of a reaction at all. Others infuriate due to clumsy incompetence. Some frustrate because of wasted potential.

To paraphrase a Russian with a better accent than Kevin Durand, every bad television show is bad in its own unique way.

Fet the strain