With Season 1 of Guillermo del Toro’s ‘The Strain‘ receiving mixed reviews, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m taking the latest news about the second season with a mixed reaction. While I’ve been enjoying the series so far, pacing issues aside, there seems to be a big hit and a big miss of what del Toro has had to say on the second season. One part fits in well with the overall theme on the show while the other is a departure of what has always been announced from this 3-5 season series.

Let’s take a look at what he had to say before I go further:

“We started shooting last week. We’ve been prepping for about two months. I’m going to, god willing, direct the prologue of the first episode and some second unit and direct the black and white Mexican wrestler B-movie pictures that appear in the season, because one of our characters is a masked Mexican wrestler [laughs], so it will be a lot of fun for me. The pilot is being directed by Gregory Hoblit whom I admire and loved his work for many decades. We start, I think, with a really great episode.

We’re about two days away from being done, second and third are in the pipeline, the sets are looking fantastic, we’re doing a lot of new makeup effects, we’re doing a lot of surprises. We’re going a little more off book this season than the last season. The last season went quite a bit off book on the last third, but this season we are introducing new characters even to the books and some characters are going to have really interesting arcs. Eph is going to a much darker place after losing Kelly. It’s a really interesting new world. And it’s great to be back on the show and see everybody back, like a family reunion.”

I love that filming has started and that they are going to have Eph going to a darker place. While you can never expect television to stay one hundred percent true to the source material as ‘Game of Thrones‘ has shown us time and time again, the plan has always been for ‘The Strain’ to follow the story line. That being said, the series already went off book last season but at least it was with the familiar characters and not completely introducing new ones that weren’t in the graphic novels. Will we be getting a Daryl Dixon kind of character that fans love or are these just fresh meat to add to the body count by the season’s end?

What are your thoughts of the expected tone and direction of the second season of ‘The Strain’? Do you think it sounds like del Toro is taking the show in the right direction? Share your thoughts below!

Source: Blastr