VAN HELSING – Episode 103 – Stay Inside – SPOILERS ⁓

“If I am flesh sunning on rock
if I am brain burning in fluorescent light
if I am dream like a wire with fire
throbbing along it
if I am death to man
I have to know it”
-― Adrienne Rich, August

From the hospital’s roof, Axel (Jonathan Scarfe), Vanessa (Kelly Overton), and John (David Cubitt) see John’s wife Wendy (Fiona Vroom) tied to a tree. The vampires surrounding her tell them to turn Vanessa over to them or they will kill Wendy. John is all for turning Vanessa over to them. He tries to take Axel’s gun from him, and is restrained by others. Axel silences him by shooting Wendy dead before the vampires can turn her. John is enraged. He attacks Axel and in the process irreparably damages the windmill providing power to the hospital’s vampire-repelling UV lights. Battery power will only last three hours, so Vanessa accompanies Axel on a mission to scavenge generator parts from a ship in the nearby harbour.

The humans trapped in the hospital display an everyone-for-him/herself attitude (exemplified by John’s willingness to save his wife at the expense of everyone else). Axel’s military discipline enables him to maintain control, with the help of Sam (Christopher Heyerdahl), who is large and carries a baseball bat.

Julius (Aleks Paunovic) is the local vampire boss. He reports to Dimitri (Paul Johansson). In the three-weeks-ago flashback that opens the episode, Julius discovers that the Yellowstone ash cloud blocks the sun’s UV radiation, enabling him to move about freely in the daytime. He goes on a spree of killing and turning humans, one of whom is Phil Fleichman (whose last name is not revealed until “Pretty Noose” – episode 3.5). After being turned, he goes home and kills his children, leaving his wife alive. Three weeks later be bites Vanessa and is turned human again. Vanessa will turn Julius human in “In Redemption” (episode 2.2).

Newly-rehumanized Phil (Vincent Gale), known to the vampire community as “Flesh”, retains clear memories of all his experiences as a vampire, and might have suicidal tendencies because of that. When Vanessa and Axel return from their scavenging mission, Julius’ vamps are planning to attack the unprotected hospital. Flesh confronts them alone, and frightens them away with tales of Vanessa’s transformative powers, “I’m human. I bleed,” he says, cutting his arm to demonstrate. “The dead girl turned me.” Flesh no longer has rapid healing ability, and is later seen stitching the cut on his forearm.

The vampires leave, allowing Axel and Vanessa to return to the hospital. On the way there, Vanessa unties Wendy’s body from the tree and carries it inside.

In the Van Helsing universe, vampirism is a disease which has almost no incubation period, and is transmitted through exchange of bodily fluids, Anyone bitten by a vamp is immediately turned except for Vanessa, whose fluids turn most vampires human again. In “Seen You” (episode 102), Doc looked at Vanessa’s blood through a microscope and saw an organism that might have been a parasite moving through the blood on the slide.

When a feral (a vampire who drinks animal blood to survive) bites Vanessa, the creature dies almost immediately. Ferals are so named because they absorb physical and behavioural traits from the animals they consume. The feral bitten and killed by Vanessa in this episode is played by Roland Pidlubny, who will return to the show next epixode as another vampire named Scab.

Axel later explains to Vanessa how to kill vampires of any sort. “Get them in the heart, get them on the ground, get their heads off,” he tells her. “It’s the only way you can make sure they’re not gonna heal up and circle back.”

As a favour to Axel, Vanessa tries to get Doc (Rukiya Bernard) to bite her, and when that doesn’t work, she bites Doc. Shortly thereafter, Doc is cured, indicating that her saliva works as well as her blood as a curative. Doc does not tell anyone her full name (Sarah Carol), until “Crooked Falls” (episode 2.12).

If Axel had not shot Wendy, Vanessa would have been able to cure her too.

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All episodes of VAN HELSING can be streamed on TUBI. The show is also available on Blu-ray and DVD.