What is a recap? A miserable little pile of spoilers!
Last time, we caught up with recent events involving our heroes before they set out on their quest, while also looking deeper into the workings of Dracula’s war against humankind. What new elements will arise going forward?
Today we’ll dive into the second episode of Castlevania season two, “Old Homes.”
1. Homeward Bound
Set on their goal, Trevor Belmont, Sypha Belnades, and Alucard decide to go to the Belmont Hold, a basement under what was left of the destroyed Belmont estate that contains the combined knowledge of centuries of Belmonts. There, they hope to solve the problem of finding a way to kill Dracula, starting with preventing his castle, which he can teleport through a magical-technological mixture, from escaping before they can enter it.
Despite allying themselves together, Trevor and Alucard are not exactly the best at avoiding getting on each other’s nerves, leaving Sypha as the implicit “den mother” of the trio keeping them out of trouble. However, Alucard does have at least some trust in Trevor, and more respect to and from Sypha for his relative kindness, and asks the former not to make him regret working together. By Trevor’s reckoning, “Everyone regrets it eventually,” which says a lot about how his work as a monster hunter usually goes.
2. Carmilla Arrives
The apparent last of Dracula’s generals arrives from the Austrian region of Styria: Carmilla. A manipulative female vampire, she sees her fellow vampires of the council, especially the loudmouthed Godbrand, as imbeciles, and treats them accordingly, insulting their failings in Gresit within moments of her arrival as the reason why she deigned to come to Dracula’s aid in the first place, followed by pushing Dracula’s patience intentionally immediately afterwards by directly insulting Lisa’s memory to his face. She asks if the human woman was being kept as a “pet” on account of never being turned into a vampire herself, despite having a child with her, and why vampire society was going to war with the entire world if that were the case.
However, she is wily enough to keep him from killing her in private by claiming to be “helping” him to have an opportunity to address the concerns of his generals regarding Lisa, and that the comments were meant to unsettle “a room full of men” (never mind that there were clearly female vampires in the crowd). As for why she has arrived, Godbrand had been keeping her aware of the castle’s position, wanting to sleep with her himself (something she denies as a possibility in any but the direst of circumstances), with her having been held up by villager rebellion in her region before.
Carmilla’s origins in fiction come not only from the Castlevania franchise, but from the novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, a story that actually predated Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years and has been adapted several times. Interestingly, her game incarnation never has actually been present in any of the games set within the late 1400s, making her an atypical addition to this court, albeit one to help add another familiar name.
3. Alucard’s Despair
One night with the heroes around a campfire, Alucard explains certain elements of about the enormity of their mission from not just a standpoint of difficulty, but also moral reservations and sacrifices.
He tells of his mother, Lisa, from whose humanity he gained his immunity to sunlight unlike other vampires. Through the discussion, he explains the basic events of how his parents came together, including how his father agreed to teach his mother medicine (despite Trevor’s insensitively sarcastic and disbelieving remarks about Dracula starting with “bloodletting”).
As he notes, Dracula is still “a man of science, a philosopher, a scholar, and those things our society have forgotten three times over,” and that much will be lost with his death. Besides being a killer who must be stopped, Dracula is still a fount of immense knowledge that could have been used to help the world if he had not gone mad, and Alucard believes he truly might have done so if Lisa had not been murdered. By destroying him, they will be setting humanity back and forcing it to develop at a far slower pace than it could with the help of his information.
Continued belowAs he further explains, Dracula even has plans for darkening and making permanent clouds as well as “great, strange flying machines” to pull shrouds to block out the sun, in order to make for a world of “endless, invented night” in which the creatures of the night, vampires included, can live without humans. But as viewers would know, his increasing ambivalence makes it unlikely that Dracula has any real plan to use those schematics he has pulled up himself.
4. Love Hurts
Isaac, the other of Dracula’s human generals, is indulging in self-flagellation to keep himself focused and be aware of choosing his own actions rather than having them dictated to him, using a spiked belt to scar his back. He remembers time long ago, when, a slave of a cruel master who knew the ways of alchemy, he was beaten for “stealing” his books despite wanting to learn in order to help him out of love. On that revelation, he had been beaten even more to show how worthless love was to the man, and murdered the master in a rage with his bare hands.
It seems that Isaac’s reasons for joining in the crusade against humanity is a twisted take on an obsession with love, as he believes a world without humans such as that which Dracula would create is one that is “pure,” with only loyalty and love remaining, such as that Dracula had for his wife. To that end, Isaac helps to create and reanimate night creatures, such as the group sent toward the town of Arges (which had been destroyed by Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard in the previous scene).
5. You Can’t Fight Here! This is the War Room!
The bickering amongst the war council is a continued problem throughout the episode. From before Carmilla’s arrival, with the assembled vampires hating working under humans, to after the failed attack on Arges, which splits the council in its focus. Some of the conflict is rather humorous, akin to a gothic version of some kind of conversation out of Seinfeld as they discuss vampire weaknesses, but others are far more dire. The conflicts, along with how Dracula is the one to stop them both times, are clear evidence that without him they would fall into fighting one another or leaving for their own domains rather swiftly.
The fact that Hector and Isaac both have different opinions on where to go next does not help matters at all. On the one hand, Hector and Carmilla both believe in shifting focus to the river town of Braila, an assault that would effectively seal off Wallachia from exodus by sea. On the other, Isaac believes in continuing to try attacking Arges due to its reputation as an old and respected town.
Isaac further explains that on another note, he had heard from the night creature he resurrected that Alucard was among the party that killed the others. Considering that a Belmont was reported as being within the city where Alucard had been entombed for a year, it stands to reason that Alucard has allied himself with this Belmont, and that if they are seeking to stop Dracula, that they may be heading toward the infamously rumored trove of magic and weapons stockpiled by House Belmont for centuries. Understandably unnerved by this revelation (not to mention irritated by Godbrand’s lack of information concerning the Belmonts themselves or the threat they pose to vampires), Carmilla suggests immediately putting a watch on the Belmont estate in case the lone Belmont survivor and Dracula’s son come to reclaim the stores.
