Last time on Vampire Hunters Anonymous, the Van Helsing sisters split up to make their way to DC separately. Axel (Jonathan Scarfe) and Violet (Keeya King) make their way forward with Violet still struggling with the loss of Julius. When they make camp for the night Axel goes to sleep only to wake up somehow alone and with no idea of how he got there.

He’s not alone when he wakes up and after escaping a shadowy apparition finds a badly beaten Vanessa (Kelly Overton). He gets her back to the farmhouse and as she heals she explains what’s going on. This is the Dark Realm that the Dark One inhabited before escaping. Now it is Vanessa’s prison where she experiences the worst of her memories.

The mysterious door standing in the middle of a field is an exit and the apparition some sort of jailer. Honestly, Axel takes all of that with barely stumble in his step which shows how crazy his life has been. While they rest Vanessa explains the setting, this is the farmhouse where Sam killed her friend Susan. That led directly to a choice for Vanessa on whether to kill him or not and she feels she made the wrong decision in allowing him to be turned.

Memory Lane

Van Helsing S05E09
Her story was a special kind of tragic

From here we find ourselves in a clips show centered on instances where Vanessa feels that she gave into her darkness. A theme that has been front and center this season and continues to be. We see Vanessa’s first death, then the horrible discovery that her daughter Dylan (Hannah Cheramy) was turned.

It only gets worse from there as we see Vanessa compromise to feed Dylan resulting in a man’s death. Next we watch the all too brief joy of turning Dylan back only to have her die in the sunlight in front of Vanessa.

Finding Your Truth

Axel & Vanessa Together Again

These are just clips to us but to Vanessa this is introspection it all becomes clear when she relives the death of her sister Scarlet (Missy Peregrym). Axel who was present shouted at her “You can’t fight the darkness. You are the darkness”.

That’s when she makes realization that she knows exactly what the shadowy guardian protecting the doorway is. She goes out and faces herself, her own darkness and accepts it. Whether or not she can remain in control we will have to see. After somehow rooting around in Axel’s mind she picks out a disguise to use as she goes through the portal to DC to support her kids.

Van Helsing is a gritty horror where the “heroes” rarely live up to the stereotypes of that term. They make terrible costly mistakes and sometimes do things which make it difficult to tell them apart from the villains. While I am not a fan of clip shows especially in a final season this achieved what it set out to do and it was nice to see Kelly Overton.