Demons: Suckers

Given that Demons is about the last of the Van Helsings, it was inevitable that our heroes would eventually find themselves tackling some neck-biters.

Once you get over the trite title, Suckers is the strongest episode to date, but still falls short in some serious areas of credability.

A quarter of an hour in and we finally have confirmed our suspicions that Mina is the Mina Harker from Bram Stoker's Dracula, but subsequently Ruby discovers that new vamp-in-town Quincey (Ciaran McMenamin) is also a character from the book as well.

Like Supernatural, Demons has put its own spin on this archetypal undead. However, Lucy Watkins' script rewrites vampire lore so that "only a vampire can kill a vampire", which leads to some dreadfully contrived technobabble about obtaining some of Quincey's "dead DNA", somehow charging it with electricity to "bring it back to life", then coating a bullet with it, so that when he is shot he is "infected" by his own "living DNA", loses his vampiric traits and ages to his correct age... and dies!

No, I couldn't really get my head round it either.

What I also couldn't quite understand is why when Galvin and Luke are off trying to obtain a sample of Quincey's DNA from the abandoned factory he is lodging in, they send Ruby - who has no Slayer-type skills - to trail the vampire! Naturally he spots her and corners her in a seedy bar and proceeds to... chat to her about what it's like to be a vampire.

There was a great story buried somewhere in the depths of Suckers, under layer upon layer of desperate contrivance not to be just another Buffy clone - when it would have played much better if they'd stuck to stereotypical vampire tropes and let the story, and the strong Dracula connection, carry the day.

Also, the plot's obsession with Quincey meant that his sidekick (the Dru to his Spike, in Buffy terms), Anika (Katrine de Candole) is forgotten about after the climatic confrontation - although she was only "slowed down" by Galvin's stake through the heart. And their "ghoul" (in the World of Darkness sense), Zippy the aged punk (Peter G Reed) with a detachable head, disappears completely from the third act.