WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for BBC's Dracula.
The BBC's production of Dracula took many cues from both the original novel and other on-screen adaptations before it. And it did really well -- at least up until the end of Episode 2 and pretty much the whole of Episode 3, when the lines became somewhat more blurred and opinions became dramatically divided. But there's still an argument to be made as to why the series was a great effort, despite its alleged failings.
In an era where mainstream vampires sparkle, are high school heartthrobs or drink synthetic blood, the BBC's Dracula is the closest this generation has seen to Bram Stoker and John William Polidori's original Gothic monsters, featured in Dracula and The Vampyre respectively. Before Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood re-popularized the supernatural romance genre, vampires were mostly scary and generally evil.
Stoker's Dracula was not a charming character at all. He was not much more than a cold-blooded monster who kept Jonathan Harker prisoner and fed on infants, then headed to Carfax Abbey and menaced Harker's betrothed Mina and her friend, Lucy. Polidori's "Vampyre," Lord Ruthven, was more of a "man about town," but still a blood-obsessed killer. And the Dracula most people have come to know, thanks to theater and Hollywood, seems to be a kind of hybrid between Polidori's character and Stoker's.
Previous on-screen adaptations of Dracula, like John Badham's Dracula in 1979 and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, have generally gone to one extreme or the other. Badham's version, played by Frank Langella, saw Dracula seduce Mina and Lucy with his oddly blow-dried hair and an accent that was more American than Romanian.
Coppola's '90s version was a lot closer in plot to Stoker's novel, but it significantly romanticized Dracula's character (played by Gary Oldman), portraying him as a lovelorn widower who "crossed oceans of time" to find love again. Christopher Lee's Hammer Horror versions saw Dracula as more fiend than friend.
The BBC's lovable psychopath played by Claes Bang finds the perfect balance between Stoker's savage killer and Polidori's dashing charmer. He is able to tear through the flesh of a wolf's belly, bathed in blood, and stand naked at the gates of a convent to menace a group of virginal nuns with his savage indecency just as convincingly as he's able to charm an old lady at a dinner table before he drains her blood on the Demeter's doomed voyage.
He's cold, calculating and callous enough to be a great villain, and just roguishly witty enough to be quite likable. Bang's portrayal delivers a deliciously devilish character that is both terrifying and fascinating. He remains true to the essence of Dracula without watering down the pure villainy at his core. This Dracula is no lovelorn hero; he's clearly bad to the bone. But somehow, it's still difficult to decide whose side you're on -- Dracula's or Agatha Van Helsing's.
When the show's events are compared to Bram Stoker's novel, rather than through various diary entries and letters, the beginning of the story is related by Jonathan Harker to Sister Agatha at a convent. And indeed, in the book, Harker did take refuge at a convent when he finally escaped the clutches of the Count. One striking difference here, though, is that in Stoker's version, Van Helsing -- or Doctor Abraham Van Helsing -- was an aging Dutch scholar. The reimagining of the character as a woman turned out to be a refreshing change -- thanks to Dolly Wells, who comfortably stepped into Sister Agatha's shoes.
According to showrunners, the gender swap was not premeditated or force-fitted in any way. A character named Sister Agatha appeared very briefly in Bram Stoker's novel. And when creating Dracula, showrunners, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss fleshed out this Sister Agatha's character independently, they originally referring to her as "atheist nun." But when the character took on a life of her own, she became a natural replacement for Doctor Van Helsing, making the good Doctor somewhat unnecessary.
Dolly Wells's character is more complex than Stoker's Van Helsing. Like Bang's Dracula, she has many sides. Somewhere beneath her cynicism and enquiring mind is a nun who once committed her life to faith. In Dracula, she's looking for answers in books and science that she couldn't find in the church. Agatha Van Helsing is as much dark as she is light, making her a protagonist that truly has the capacity and the desire to understand Dracula. And when she manifests through her descendant, Zoe Helsing, in Episode 3, to help defeat the Count in the show's climax, that understanding is what ultimately wins the battle.
Still, the show's conclusion was met with very mixed reviews, and many were baffled by the choice to bring the story into the present day. Did we really need to see Count Dracula using an iPad? And would Lucy Westenra's character not have been better off where she was originally placed, as Mina Murray's friend, back in the 1800s? Her flirtation with Dracula, incineration and return as a grotesque undead husk seemed a little pointless in the end.
So, if the conclusion was not for you, imagine for a moment that Episode 2 didn't end as it did -- with Dracula arriving in the present day to be captured by the Jonathan Harker Foundation. Then, imagine that the events of Episode 3 didn't happen either.
What you're left with is a faithful and well-thought-out take on the world's favorite Wallachian villain -- or antihero, depending on how you look at it -- and his nemesis Van Helsing, both with a few intriguing upgrades. Episodes 1 and 2 could both serve as independent Dracula films in their own right, with proud nods to Bram Stoker and the great vampire films of old. If it dispensed with its controversial ending, the BBC's Dracula could be (arguably) the best version of Dracula yet.
Executive produced by Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, Sue Vertue and Ben Irving, Dracula stars John Heffernan, Dolly Wells, Joanna Scanlan, Sacha Dhawan, Jonathan Aris, Morfydd Clark, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett and Claes Bang as Count Dracula. The miniseries debuted on BBC One Jan. 1 and is now streaming on Netflix.