Blade Sheathed!

And so Blade: The Series comes to an end on Bravo - in back-to-back episodes of violence and mayhem. This chapter of the vampire-slaying franchise may be closed, but the door is wide open for more live action Blade down the line.

Kirk Jones was suitably monosyllabic as the titular anti-hero and Neil Jackson was calmly creepy as his nemesis, the ambitious vampire with a plan Marcus Van Sciver. The duo finally came face-to-face after 13 episodes for an epic sword fight, while the real action was going on elsewhere: the long awaited catfight-to-the-death between psycho slut Chase (Jessica Gower, left) and the rather fit, ex-army gal-turned vamp Krista (Jill Wagner), who also happened to be a double-agent working for Blade.

Clearly the writers knew by this stage that the series wasn't coming back, so they upped the gore factor ten-fold. Yes, they even managed to top Blade ripping the jaw off a particularly mental vampire last week with a nasty piece of finger nail-related torture on Blade's sidekick, Shen (Nelson Lee).

Is it any wonder this didn't get picked up for a second series?

But what a pity. The show really had chutzpah. As a comic book character - even in the latest revamp (see what I did there?) - Blade never really grabbed me, but in live-action (through the three fantastic films and this series), he out-Buffy's Buffy for sheer slayage.

And unlike that Sunnydale lass, there's no messing around with other demons - it's vamps all the way. Yet, it never gets old. The films established, and the show ran with, the complex hierarchy and politics of the vampire world, as well as their network human 'familiars' (wannabes), and this provides a bottomless well of stories to draw upon.

Blade's vampires are much more organised than those of the Buffyverse and generally more disciplined, compared to the wild animals they were presented as (with a few notable exceptions) in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Blade's foes would be more comfortable in White Wolf's World of Darkness - the setting for its Vampire: The Requiem role-playing game, which is all about feuding vampire clans and bloodlines.

So, Blade is done fighting bloodsuckers in Detroit for now, but hopefully at some stage down the line he will resurface (in the flesh, not some sanitised cartoon) in another city and start doing that thing he does so well.