Predictably, once the group is below ground, armed to the teeth with lights, guns and swords, things don’t exactly go according to plan. After barely avoiding getting flattened by a train, they discover a tiny, claustrophobic tunnel that only one of them can fit through at a time. Eph, grumbling the whole time, goes first. He has good reason to be pissed off though – before discovering the tunnel, the group came across a strigoi nest, and in an utterly heartbreaking moment, Eph numbly recognized one of them as Kelly. The Master took everything away from Setrakian, we know, and it seems that Eph’s involvement in this fight has made him one of the ancient vamp’s punching bags as well.
Once Eph is through the other side of the tunnel, he makes a mistake that dooms the entire expedition. The Master, always a skilled manipulator, makes him hear Kelly crying out to him for help, and gullible as he is, Eph takes the bait. Walking into the darkness, he finds himself by the Master’s ornately carved coffin, the same box that started everything back at the airport. Angered and confused, Eph brandishes his sword and screams to the strigoi filing in around him, “What are you waiting for?” He knows, in that moment, that he’s probably not getting out of there alive, and the anguish of that realization is clear to see on Corey Stoll’s face.
Soon, the Master himself appears, crawling on the ceiling and then dropping down to land with terrifying force in front of Eph. Immediately, our hero goes for him with the sword and then the gun, but the Master disarms him without a trace of exertion. Though the makeup on the creature is a little rockier in this episode than in past ones, the Master is still a very intimidating sight, and his rattling voice sent shivers down my spine. Eph is gripped by the throat and lifted up, but Setrakian arrives before the Master can decide how to kill him.
Unfortunately, the old man can barely raise his sword, and the Master whispers something that makes it all the harder for Setrakian to stay standing. It’s Vasiliy who ends up saving the day, tossing a strobing light bomb (reluctantly built by Vasiliy with some snarky instruction by Eph – now that’s teamwork) into the center of the area. The Master vanishes into the night as his disciples fall to the ground in pain.
So, though all of them have survived, it’s far from a victory for the group. All of them are pretty ticked off at Eph, no one more than Setrakian, who destroys the box with a sledgehammer, declaring, “I won’t rest until he is destroyed, and now, neither will he!” The old man still has plenty of fight left in him, but the Master is long gone, and the group is just about able to restrain Setrakian to prevent him from running into a cave full of strigoi and dying a death by a thousand stingers.