Castlevania 1x04 Featured Television 

Five Thoughts on Castlevania‘s “Monument”

By | May 5th, 2020
Posted in Television | % Comments

What is a recap? A miserable little pile of spoilers!

With Trevor on the run and many of the Speakers hidden away in the catacombs, night has fallen, causing the two antagonistic forces of Castlevania season one to collide at last in the present day. How will this conflict conclude its first season?

Today we’ll dive into the fourth and final episode of season one, “Monument.”

1. Death of the Bishop

The season finale opens with the nameless Bishop, alone in his church. He is faced with several demons, chief among them a speaking one called “Blue Fangs” with, predictably, glowing blue teeth and eyes.

Over the course of their dialogue, it becomes clear that due to the Bishop’s many, many sins, God Himself has rescinded divine protection from his church, allowing demons within it. To his last breath, the Bishop still tries to weakly defend his actions and claim Lisa to have been a witch, but Blue Fangs outright tells him that he knows it is a lie, and that all he had done was help the demons themselves. For that, Blue Fangs and the other demons “love” him while his actions make God “puke.” The scene cuts away before Blue Fangs deals with his prey, but it involves at least one fatal bite, or “kiss.”

The Bishop himself is so loathsome that the rest of the episode barely even references him with the exception of Trevor calling out his actions for the people of Gresit to hear. In fact, he has yet to be given a name, showing he is little but a forgettable focus of hatred and more a means to an end for the rest of the series than a character in and of himself.

2. Unequal Rites

Back with Trevor’s frantic attempt to escape, we come across Sypha once more, with her revealing herself to be versed in magic as a magician, as the Elder said existed amongst her people. For understandable reasons, the citizens claim she is a witch, but she denies that accusation and calls herself a scholar of magic.

There is a major difference between these two types of magic users. Witches gain their dark power through infernal forces, whether by drawing them forth directly or by making pacts with being such as Satan or other demons. On the other hand, magicians such as Sypha are, as she aptly describes, “scholars” of magic, learning their craft through intense study much like one would learn scientific concepts. To exemplify this, Sypha’s spells involve the elements of nature itself, focusing in on the classic video game elemental powers of fire, ice, and electricity, rather than drawing upon death.

Through Sypha, magic is deliberately shown not to be inherently evil, though it can be used for immoral ends like many other forms of power.

3. Faith and Truth

Trevor finds the priest he cut the finger off of back in “Necropolis,” and explains to the surrounding civilians that they were going to attack innocents, becoming murderers in the process. Against the priest’s accusations, he reveals to the general populace that it was their own bishop who had caused all of their troubles with the demons, not the Speakers, and how it had all begun with the death of a “defenseless woman.”

Through the speech Trevor gives, he shows just how far he is from Dracula’s misanthropy. While Dracula seems to refuse to focus his hate in his grief, Trevor is willing to avoid all lies and just tell the people of Gresit the truth of what is actually happening, and how while they are in danger of becoming murderers in a frenzied mob, the only one in the crowd they are with who is definitely not innocent is the Bishop’s man holding a knife out to Trevor, who the latter had revealed had attempted to kill an old man. As a result of his speech, the populace dogpile on the Bishop’s priest, stabbing him to death. They are not innocent of killing, but neither are they attacking an innocent group.

On the subject of the priest, there is one more who does show up in the episode: a man who was “properly ordained in a church” and seems to be kind and thoughtful, capable of sanctifying water to make holy water for fighting demons. Through this one, relatively minor character, Castlevania shows that not every single person in their version of the Church is evil or willfully ignorant.

Continued below

4. A Pitched Battle

With help from the civilians, salted weapons, and frozen holy water, the citizens of Gresit, led by Trevor and aided by Sypha’s magic, are able to fight off the hordes of demons, finishing with Blue Fangs himself. The fight itself is not too long, but it does show the effectiveness of a monster hunter in fighting large quantities of monsters at once, as well as the ways in which ordinary people can face off against these creatures and survive as well. While Trevor has the consecrated Vampire Killer whip, his most important asset is his experience and skill rather than his armaments, and his showing of tactical acumen helps to demonstrate that while he is an expert, others can also fight the creatures of the night without either he or the creative uses of magic by Sypha if need be.

5. The Sleeping Soldier

The battle over, there is still one last loose end to tie up. On the way to get the Speakers out of the catacombs, Trevor and Sypha fall deeper than they had earlier, crashing down into a well-lit chamber with a coffin at its end. Out of it emerges the white-haired man from “Witchbottle,” who is identified as a vampire who has been asleep not for centuries, but for a year. He still has the scar on his chest from where Dracula had hurt him, but had been resting in his coffin for that year to recover from his wound, and appears to be extremely adept in combat on top of capable with telekinesis (moving objects with one’s mind).

Due to a misunderstanding, he and Trevor come to blows, with the end result being effectively a draw where both of them are just about to kill the other. However, the apparent vampire relents, identifying himself as Dracula and Lisa’s son Adrian Ţepeş, better known as “Alucard.” Despite apparently not wanting to do so, he claims that his father has to die to save Wallachia and perhaps the world, as it is what his mother would have wanted regardless of her feelings for her husband. To his own admission, “We are all, in the end… slaves to our families’ wishes.”

In the process of explaining, he also draws attention back to the apparent prophecy of the Sleeping Soldier, noting that it was said that the soldier would be met with a hunter (Trevor) and a scholar (Sypha), and that it was likely the Elder had kept Trevor in the city for that very reason.

Notably, when Alucard addresses Sypha asking if she knew the rest of the story, she blushes in apparent embarrassment. Given information players of the franchise may have, it can be inferred that part of the story involves what happens after the soldier and his companions save the world, involving the birth of the hunter and scholar’s child. But that is likely a story for another time.


//TAGS | Castlevania

Gregory Ellner

Greg Ellner hails from New York City. He can be found on Twitter as @GregoryEllner or over on his Tumblr.

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