Blood Ties – The Devil You Know

By Nancy Mathews
At some point in a vampire’s life they must reflect on the one who made them. Typically these days our hot boy vamps have been sired by equally hot girl vamps in days gone by. Sadly, the boys seem to hold onto their humanity better than the girls, so inevitably they are pitted against each other in the present. Angel had Darla, Mick has Coraline, and darling Henry has Christina.

When last we saw Henry he was kicking Cellucci and Vicki off the case of the dead model at his door. It seems that his sire Christina had come to town and he wanted to deal with her himself, to avoid innocent bloodshed. This, you can imagine, did not sit well with Vicki.

I must digress for a moment – have you noticed that we don’t talk about Vicki’s eye issues anymore? Aside from the occasional taking on and off of glasses the fact that Vicki can’t see in the dark is completely ignored. Now I’m not surprised that this would fall by the wayside as it makes it a bit difficult to have her hang with Henry at night working cases, but I’m a bit disturbed by the fact that it was dropped so quickly. It is a plot point of the books, granted a somewhat weak one, but maybe they should have come up with a different reason for her to leave the force on the show if it was such an issue. I’m just sayin’.

Where was I? Oh yes, there are two more models murdered and then poised provocatively together. Henry dismisses this being the work of Christina as it’s too gaudy for a 600 year old, yet when we meet Christina she is lying in Henry’s bed, in a red satin hooker dress. Really, after 600 years would she be that obvious?

She swears the murders are the work of her vampire stalker. Henry tells her he’ll help her, but he’s not happy about it, and tells her to talk to Cellucci – to help him with the detecting, I suppose. She instead goes to visit Vicki to check out the competition. She tries her jedi, uh I mean vampire, mind trick on Vicki and it of course doesn’t work. They do the female equivalent of seeing who’s penis is larger and move on.

What I found particularly funny was later when Christina talks to Mike and does the trick on him and the mysteriously returned Dave (Dave I didn’t miss you). It worked just fine then, thank you very much.

Vicki and Henry both reach the conclusion that the stalker is actually a baby vampire. It would appear Christina has turned a young male model and then let him go out on his own before she trained him. Like a feral kitten. During the climax when Henry confronts baby vamp he tells a story where Christina turned him before he was sure he wanted to be turned, then upon seeing his sister and realizing she was a happy meal on legs became so disgusted with himself that he ran away. Then he decided to destroy Christina for what she turned him into. This really didn’t work for me, nor did I really understand why Christina couldn’t dispatch this kid herself. I suppose I should just accept that he was the McGuffin for the actual plot, which was really just to do some flashback scenes (which up to now Blood Ties had been pretty low on) and to get Vicki and Christina to meet up.

There was a bit of Vicki/Christina mash up at the end. Vicki pulled out her little sun weapon but was losing anyway. Henry got there in the nick of time and showed Christina the door and promised to kill her if she comes back. I’m guessing she will, of course.

Not my favorite story this season, hopefully we’ll get back to the fun stuff next week.

Nancy Mathews works very hard at masquerading as a grown up to go to work and raise her two sons. Once the sun goes down she reverts to the 10 year old that she actually is. You can follow her plans for world domination through the formation of an army of knitters on her blog, Bronxgirlknits.

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