Home Reviews

The Strain Review: “For Services Rendered” (Season 1, Episode 7)

This week's deliciously tense and scary episode of The Strain leaves off on such a spectacular cliffhanger that it would feel disingenuous to kick off this review by talking about anything else. I'm talking about a strigoi SWAT team (?!?!?!?). Up until "For Services Rendered," The Strain has been relatively straightforward in its depiction of the series' bloodsuckers. Outside of Eichorst and the Master, who exhibit enhanced intelligence for reasons that the show has yet to explain, the strigoi are rabid animals, predators driven solely by their compulsion to feed. They can't speak and never betray an ounce of emotion - one reason Eph and Nora have come around to the idea of decapitating them is that they feel infected individuals lost anything that made them human the moment that the stinger went into their neck.

for services rendered the strain

Recommended Videos

It would appear that Eph, Nora, Setrakian and Jim (more on him later) aren’t in their fight against the Master alone. These strigoi seem to be fighting to contain the strain rather than spread it, a fascinating development indeed. Now, we don’t really know yet what their opinion of humans are – the leader certainly seemed to relish looking over the kids – but an encounter between Setrakian and the SVU would make for some very juicy drama.

Leaving that thought behind, let’s get back to talking about “For Services Rendered.” Excitingly, this episode managed to incorporate large amounts of flashbacks to the Treblinka concentration camp while still keeping all its balls in the air as far as the present battle to contain the strain goes.

If there’s a common thread linking characters this time around, it’s imprisonment. A younger Setrakian is incarcerated at a prison camp, under the watch of the sadistic (though human, for now) Eichorst. Due to his skills in carpentry (in a nice touch, discovered after he made a wooden Hand of Miriam, designed to protect him from evil), Setrakian is brought to a private cell and set to work drawing designs on the wooden box that will later be inhabited by the Master. His new accommodations are a different type of prison than the camp barracks, but Setrakian remains hopeless.

Eichorst periodically comes in to check on the status of the box and to mock Setrakian’s situation, going so far as to offer him a choice between continuing to work or attempting to kill his captor. “It’s much easier to do nothing, safer,” Eichorst hisses gloatingly when Setrakian doesn’t move for either. The older Setrakian has voiced his regret at not killing Eichorst “when he had the chance” in past episodes, but I don’t think that this incident is what he’s referring to. Obviously, there’s more to their story. It’s interesting, though, that the captor/captive relationship between the two grows into something more, with Setrakian feeling secure enough in his position as carpenter to call Hitler “a megalomaniac who declared himself dictator.” In that discussion, we see a hint of the fire that burns brightly in the older Setrakian.