Title says everything, namely in the past three episodes, we learned Blade’s past before vampires call him Blade while he is on his Philippine adventure to find Deacon Frost. And as a Filipino, did they got the Philippines correctly? All I can say is, I was at rage while watching the fifth episode.
I love that they explained Blade’s past to those who don’t read the comics or watched some of the Blade films. It explains the viewers on why he decided to become a vampire hunter. One of the main highlights in Blade’s life includes his meeting with Noah Van Helling, an obvious descendant of Van Helling, an old professor who helped the Harkers fight Dracula in the original novel and Blade’s childhood. Until now, I still pity Eric’s childhood. Finally, at the end, Makoto now understands Blade’s struggle, which is good in my opinion if they want to keep Makoto in the series without her trying to kill Blade.
Now to the ranting about his adventures in the Philippines, for starters, they were able to copy Manila’s poverty atmosphere since we have the carideria (
a place were people eat), the tambays (
a shortened term for stand-by, or in simple terms, a jobless individual). The dumpsite in which we saw kids pick up trash for them to live and the standard abusive husband that most Filipinos grew up watching thanks to soap operas. My only disappointment in the Manila setting is that as far as I can recall, politicians in Manila don’t have private armies.
Now to my biggest disappointment, how they depict Siquijor. The last documentary about Siquijor that I watched was sometime in 2006-2007 in which we learned that Siquijor has paved streets, people wearing modern clothes and they are trying to get rid of the image that their place is filled with aswangs (
the proper Filipino equivalent of a vampire). But look what we got, they depict them as primitive individuals! I am fine with them wearing traditional costumes if it is for battle but the fact that they depict them in that level of primitivity is quite disappointing in my part.
They can just depict those three Filipinos as the descendants of the original berdugo (
my sub says verdugo, but I will use berdugo here since that’s the proper Filipino term) and now they carry guns and other modern equipment. As for how they depict a village in Siquijor, it looks more like somewhere in South America and not in the Philippines. The only thing accurate about Siquijor is that the place is actually called, “
Isla del Fuego” back then thanks to the fireflies that surround the island at night.
And to my major disappointment, the manananggal. In classic Filipino folklore, a manananggal is a kind, beautiful lady at day and at night, she splits her body into half to look for pregnant lady and with the use of her tongue, she will eat the child inside the mother's womb, but if you want a more brutal one, she will eat any baby or eat any human that she likes to devour. To kill it, you must find her other half that most of time is secluded in area that hunters can’t find and pour salt or ash in it so that she can’t reconnect with it and thus, she will die once the sun rises. Instead, we have a giant monster that can turn guys into a manananggal, what’s more is that her other half can walk! To top it all off, they must
SEAL it and not
KILL it with salt or ash! The only thing accurate they got about the manananggal is that it’s a flying monster that attacks people and her splitting her body into half is disgusting.
Did I mention that the biggest WTF moment in the Siquijor episode is that Blade and Makoto used a
SPEEDBOAT to travel from Manila to Siquijor! Most Filipinos would rather take a ship ride from Manila to Bacolod or Iloilo then take a boat or bus ride to Siquijor! Granted that a speedboat can do it but knowing the weather conditions here in the Philippines right now (
the fourth episode depicts the country in its rainy season), it’s quite impossible for them to do that feat.
Now back to Deacon Frost, I love his plan! I mean, since Frost wants to conquer the world, then they must use the blood of a vampire that is not vulnerable to sunlight and that is Blade. As for their battle, as always, Frost still owns Blade in every angle that leads Frost to extract more of Blade’s blood sample for his experiment. The fifth episode also introduces that there is a group of vampires called, pureblood which my guess are descendants of actual vampires and Frost case is that he is once a regular human before he became a vampire. As for the three Filipinos, namely, Lupit, Cimarron and Hagibis (
every time he makes an appearance, I tend to sing one old song from the group called, you guess it, Hagibis), they were awesome. Too bad, the boys didn’t last for more than one episode, while Lupit lasted for at least two episodes.
Overall, the last three episodes were good in advancing the plot of the series and explaining why Blade decided to kill vampires. The only problem is that their accuracy in depicting the Philippines was at least 60-70% accurate and the rest felt like they didn’t do any proper research regarding the country.
