The Passage Review: I Want to Know What You Taste Like (Season 1 Episode 6)
It’s probably time to start calling the virals “vampires.”
On The Passage Season 1 Episode 6, “I Want to Know What you Taste Like,” Winston is on the loose and creating more virals just like him along the way. We’re seeing some standard vampire lore in the way all of these vampires act and in the way they are harmed, which I appreciate.
Much of it is classic and expected, like the way the vampires react to sunlight. Yet still, much of this feels authentically scientific.
There’s obviously a supernatural element, but there’s a natural feeling to the “science experiment gone very, very wrong” idea that makes The Passage feel more appropriate for its current audience than other vampire stories might.
All of that said, the vampires aren’t the most interesting part of this story. The way Amy fits into everything makes it much more dynamic, and the relationships between all of the characters are the thing that keeps us coming back.
Amy’s powers are revealing themselves little by little. She’s become the one person who could actually be more powerful than Fanning. Her ability to read minds is one thing, but that scream that can interfere with Fanning’s power has already become the saving grace more than once.
Brad, meanwhile, still just wants to protect her. He’s taken her on as a responsibility and he’s acting as her father as much as he possibly can. The problem is that she has little reason to consider him an authority figure.
Amy: You’re not my dad. You’re just some guy who tried to kidnap me.
That hurts, but it’s not wrong either. It’s worth it to take a pause and realize that how she got into this to begin with.
She’s also smart enough, and brave enough, to realize when her abilities to help outweigh Brad’s focus on wanting to protect her from the people involved with this project.
She has a pretty clear understanding of what she’s able to do and why that matters. Of course, she’s also stubborn, and it would do her some good to listen to Brad at least some of the time. It’s almost frustrating to watch how stubborn and reckless she is, and it’s already become a little bit of an overdone pattern.
The highlight of the episode comes from their bond at the end. Brad understands grief too, and he finally shares that with Amy. I do hope he gets her book back.
We also learn that if Amy is to be protected, then getting rid of Fanning isn’t going to be so simple. Jonah and Sykes make the decision to kill the vampires by exposing them to the light, only to realize — almost too late — that doing so would also kill Amy. As we see with Winston, when a vampire creates virals, if they die, the vampires they sire die along with them.
As powerful as we know Amy now is, she can’t survive without Fanning.
There’s another idea that they consider earlier on the episode, which is to use Amy’s blood to create a serum that would work against Fanning, which sounds like it makes sense. That’s made even more urgent by the fact that Elizabeth is going to turn full vampire soon.
Not enough time is spent developing Jonah and Elizabeth’s relationship. We’ve seen it some, and know a good bit of their history, but their connection doesn’t feel compelling because we haven’t been given reason to care for the two of them as a couple just yet.
One of the big missteps this show is that it moves too fast. Even as they slow down to spend time on flashbacks and to spend time fleshing out certain characters, there’s so much more that could be developed if the pace were slowed down even just slightly. Too much is being glossed over too quickly.
I think that would be the case with Brad and Amy too, or even just with Brad’s backstory. It’s easy to forget that he is the one who tried to kidnap her early on.
We do get some of that development with Sykes on this episode, which is a great thing, and her bond with Babcock makes everything else that much more complicated.
The horror movies, the pizza, the bonding over the semi-colon tattoos — we’re managing to feel invested in all of these characters in a way that keeps them in the grey. We do feel bad for Shauna Babcock.
We feel bad for Tim Fanning. We feel bad for Nicole Sykes. There’s a reason to feel connected to all of them and to root for all of them, even when they’re monsters.
The one clear, ridiculous villain other than the vampires at the moment, is Horace Guilder, who is almost more of a caricature of a villain than an actual villain.
Much of what he says is unbelievable, and it’s a bit difficult to take the guy seriously. He’s clearly meant to be one-dimensional, but that intention is taken way too far.
We’re left with more cliffhangers at the end of this one — Brad is knocked out after being separated from Amy, and we’re unclear on what that means for Lila as well. (Her situation on this episode is another element that would have benefited from a slower pace, by the way.)
Babcock visiting Sykes is the perfect note to end on, though. She’s the perfect level of creepy and intriguing, and the connection to the horror films makes for an eerie, poignant final line.
What did you think of this episode of The Passage? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Passage airs Mondays at 9/8c on FOX.
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Ashley Bissette Sumerel
Ashley Bissette Sumerel is a television and film critic living in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is editor-in-chief of Tell-Tale TV as well as Eulalie Magazine. Ashley has also written for outlets such as Rolling Stone, Paste Magazine, and Insider. Ashley has been a member of the Critics Choice Association since 2017 and is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic. In addition to her work as an editor and critic, Ashley teaches Entertainment Journalism, Composition, and Literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.