There’s a moment roughly halfway through Castlevania’s final season when, at the height of an arduous, suitably bloody, and rather fantastic fight sequence, one character yells at another “This is about Dracula, isn’t it!?” And…
For all the monstrous threats the heroes of Netflix and Powerhouse’s animated take on the world of the Konami video game icon have faced over four seasons—from corrupt churches and the big Vlad himself to eldritch horrors and beyond—arguably the greatest challenge Castlevania faces is in bringing things to a close.
Set just a few weeks after the events of the third season, Castlevania season four opens with an aimlessness that quickly becomes the thematic thrust of every major character and group we’re re-introduced to over its first few episodes.
That’s an awful lot of self-reflection and sense of purposelessness, however, so thankfully there is some lifeblood of intent in the opening of the series that provides much needed forward momentum: one is a familiar character, in Bill Nighy’s returning alchemist Saint Germain, continuing his quest to find his former lover in the mystical Infinite Corridors, at any cost.
Given that we’ve just needed to explain the setup for six different focal points for the series over the course of the last three paragraphs, you might not be surprised to hear that there is simply far too much unfolding over the sluggish course of season four’s opening episodes.
It’s almost abrupt, given the opening episodes’ intense focus on him, but it allows Castlevania to pivot to the duelling, eventually intertwined threads of Alucard and Greta’s defense of the latter’s besieged refugees, and Trevor and Sypha uncovering Varney’s plots in Targoviste.
This is in part thanks to the majority of the action set pieces of the season taking place there—and that action is better than it ever has been in the series, both in its scale and in its slick, graceful choreography.
This energy is, delightfully, maintained as the show reaches its climax, and comes down from the giddy heights of its final, truly incredible action moments to have a period of introspection and reflection that works at this point in the series, rather than interfering with its build up.
For better or worse, Castlevania goes out in a thoroughly Castlevania-y manner: a show that knew itself almost from the get-go better than any of the many video game adaptations in its wake.
And I still don’t quite get all the extraneous characters , given how well the core trio have always been handled.