There’s no use complaining that vampires today aren’t what they used to be. The days when they were just rat-faced reprobrates or metaphors for the degenerate central European aristocracy are long gone. Nowadays, pretty much any character type can be a vampire. Even Marge Simpson has sported fangs.
You’d think this would be a good thing, since it means vampires can now get a little character exploration; and if that’s your thing, there are plenty of places you can certainly find it. Too often, though, it seems like vampirism just becomes a crutch, an excuse to goose the action in a story. But boring and irritating people do not automatically become more fun to hang out with just because they’ve picked up a blood lust and the power to jump really, really high. I hope any real-life Draculas looking to widen their social circle by increasing their cohort class keep that in mind.
Gonzo’s Trinity Blood in some ways and respects tries to take vampires seriously. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world where vampires have re-emerged and established an empire in eastern Europe, from which they face off in a Cold War against a Vatican-led assemblage of human states in the west. Plot-wise, episodes are tenuously linked by political intrigue as the vampire and human states grope toward a state of détente while terrorists try to manipulate them into fighting a war. Story-wise, it plays out with human and vampire characters getting to know and respect each other. In practice, though, it mostly emerges as 24 episodes of eye-rollingly lame emo dramatics punctuated by a few half-glitzy fights.
The main character in Trinity Blood is Father Abel Nightroad, a member of a special Vatican order with a loosely defined portfolio of police, espionage, and diplomatic powers. Father Abel affects the mien of a meek, cheerful, and rather clumsy priest; in fact, he is a Crusnik, a kind of super-vampire that feeds on the blood of vampires themselves, and with other members of the AX he investigates and fights terrorists and infiltrators, many of whom either are vampires or are armed with the now vaguely occult technology of the pre-apocalyptic world. His job sometimes brings him into conflict and sometimes into cooperation with officials from the empire of the Methuselah (as the vampires prefer to be called); in the last half of the series he acts as a special diplomatic courier on a mission to normalize relations with the empire. His closest aide and confidante becomes Sister Esther Blanchett, a nun he meets early on and goes to great lengths to save from embroiling herself in a potentially ruinous anti-vampire vendetta. That’s because, for all his power to maim and terrify, Father Abel is laboring under some immense personal guilt that he is trying to expiate by protecting innocents without surrendering himself to mindless vengeance and destruction—and it’s a standard he would like to see others embrace.
In concept, Father Abel is an intersection of several intriguing if not especially novel conceits: the monster chained by conscience; the warrior sworn to pacific ideals; the criminal reformed and turned against his erstwhile comrades. Unfortunately, by and large he only remains a set of conceits instead of becoming the complex character one might hope for. Largely that’s because the makers of Trinity Blood have chosen to explain him instead of letting him develop in action: too often they shove him into a sticky situation where he has to tell someone why he is acting or not acting in a certain way. Typically, this takes the form of wordy after-action reports where he gets moody and irritable with guilt as one wide-eyed female naïf or another listens and gasps and coos sympathetically. It doesn’t help that his human and Crusnik halves are kept almost as firmly segregated as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; it’s hard to be a “complex” character when the aspects most in tension have barely a nodding acquaintance with each other.
Father Abel still remains an attractive character; this is more than can be said for most of the supporting cast. His task force is headed by the flinty-eyed Caterina Sforza, whose expressions of personality mostly begin and end with her monocle. At least she doesn’t ceaselessly rant and bully like her brother, who heads the Inquisition—but then, most of the people on his staff are screamers, too. Those agents of the Vatican or the Empire who don’t always express themselves at the top of their lungs usually have their faces frozen into squints, grimaces, and glares. I know saving the world is a tough, full-time job; still, you ought to be able to do it without looking like you’re suffering from a painful and permanent bowel blockage. The rest of the non-villainous cast—mostly nuns but also the small boy who has been manipulated onto the papal throne—consists of effusive weepers. As for the villains themselves, they are all too effete and prone to gloat when they should be polishing off the heroes. That they aren’t given pampered felines to stroke while monologuing is an inexplicable oversight on the directors’ part, as in every other way they conform to the most hackneyed stereotypes.
Early episodes are given over to stand-alone stories that introduce characters, situations, and back stories. Later episodes are mostly multi-parters that gradually bring the series-long arc to a climax. Some episodes are better than others, and some—like the hopped-on-goofballs, Peter Pan-inflected “Never Land”—stand out from the rest with their tinctures of eccentricity. By and large, though, there’s not a lot to distinguish one from another.
Production values are generally good, but there is not nearly enough action, or action that is particularly striking, to overcome the vast stretches where characters just talk or screw their faces up in a way meant to connote thought or emotion. In his Crusnik form, Father Abel is appropriately fearsome, and he’s given a really cool scythe as a weapon. Alas that there is more suggestion than execution in the actual fight scenes, which generally use a sequence of poses and close ups to indicate that a battle is afoot.
Eventually, it turns out that most of the political theatrics between the Vatican, the Empire, and the terrorists are the expression of a 900-year-old intra-family quarrel between characters who are suggestively named Abel, Cain, and Seth—a revelation that, all at once, makes the show more interesting (because more personality driven) and more irritating (because it collapses the purported geopolitical stakes). The changes come far too late to make much of a difference, though, except to catapult the story into an irritatingly obscure climax. The conflict within a vampire family would make a fine starting point for a series, even one as lavishly dressed in Catholic and Byzantine imagery as this one. But that’s only if it remembered (as Trinity Blood does not) that if you’re going to treat vampires as people, you had best give them recognizably human passions and foibles and let the story grow out of those. Otherwise, to make your characters into vampires is just to reduce them to a special effect. And Trinity Blood doesn’t even make the effects that special.
