Just the silliest thing

I complained a week ago about the Netflix series Midnight Mass, but I decided to hate watch it to the end.

I'm not quite there yet (last episode to go), and I did start fast forwarding over scenes where I could just tell there was going to be another tedious monologue, but I have to say I am completely puzzled as to how anyone gave this ridiculous mess a good review.  It's like Stephen King on a complete nonsensical bender (and that's saying something, given that I have read about how more extreme in "suspension of disbelief" elements his novels generally have been compared to their movie versions.)

To me it makes no dramatic sense at all -  and I will say why after this:

SPOILER ALERT 

The whole premise of the story is that a old priest suffering dementia (or perhaps just "Jerusalem syndrome") who is made young and capable of regeneration after being bitten by a vampire he happened to stumble upon in a cave in the Israeli desert (as you do), and his very conservative/zealoty woman parish helper, manage to interpret your classic demonic looking vampire as in fact an angel of the Lord,  and the end times are here, or...something?  And hey, let's ship said demon vampire "angel" back home in a crate, where we'll slip some regenerating blood into the parish's communion wine, so that the character who from the start looked and sounded like a young woman pretending to be old one can actually stop putting on that "old woman" voice, and other regenerative miracles will happen.   Mind you, the regenerated priest (eventually) can't go out in the sun or he fries, and he has an incredible urge to drink blood, but somehow this can still be interpreted as a Good Thing from God and let's keep sharing it with the parishioners.  And nutty conservative woman flunky is happy to go along with it all.  In fact, she's played as the main villain, but I for one never understood why she was so on board so quickly with the priest's plan.

I mean, it's just really ridiculous - especially when said vampire reveals himself to the community at the climatic mass and at least half (actually, nearly all, I think) of the congregation goes all Jonestown and decides to drink the poison being passed around by bad woman, because, hey they know they'll come back to life because a friggin' demon vampire has just appeared and spread his giant bat wings, and of course they would trust him and the excitable priest - who they just realised is the old priest with 50 years off the clock.   (How no one ever said "hey, you know your voice sounds exactly like our old priest" I don't know.)   I didn't even really get exactly why poisoning everyone seemed a good idea - she is shown as having a predilection to poisoning things earlier in the show, but even so.   Her references to Revelation hardly seemed a convincing explanation to me, given a distinct lack of references to vampires in that book. (Not that anything in the show convinced me.)  

Yeah, yeah, they just watched someone drink it and apparently die and come back - but who knows for how long?   "Give me that poison, I wanna die painfully for 5 minutes too."

Obviously, the writer/director is going for a "religion - even in apparently nice sincere Catholics - can turn  into a death cult under the wrong influence" vibe, but the way this happens in this show just makes no sense at all.   I mean, couldn't you at least have the vampire physically look normal and not like a freaking demon from the start?   Stumble upon his true appearance by accident?   Have him speak with charm?   He could be the charming assistant priest, instead of flying around the island looking for random victims sometimes, and other times running around in old priest get up.   Couldn't the effect of being bitten be a bit less obviously vampiric, so that the downside doesn't so patently wipe out the apparent upside?

I mean, the one core story element - the regenerating vampire blood being slipped into the communion wine - is a nice creepy idea - but there is zero plausibility as to how a non talking demon vampire convinces anyone that he's there from God.  

Anyway, I'll watch the last episode, which I hope is really bad!

Update:   watched the last episode, and it continued to be full of bloated monologues, plot points that didn't make much sense, and bursts of ridiculously high quality choral signing from the island's new vampires.   

The priest gets to be regretful, and to explain that he was just trying to give everyone eternal life and avoid death (which, you know, isn't all that common a goal amongst Catholic priests - but I suppose it might have some psychological plausibility if it wasn't via a vampire demon thing you found in the desert drinking your blood.)   

I went over to Reddit to read comments about it.  Again, to my puzzlement, many people liked it, or at least found it creepy, but there are amusing aspects - such as a key plot point that everyone thought we were meant to infer, but one of the writers turned up and said "no, you're wrong, and stop blaming the director for misleading you."   

Some people commented on something I noticed - hardly anyone on the island seemed particularly likeable.   Mike Flanagan, the director/writer, seems to specialise in mopey characters, prone to using 500 words when 50 would do.    

I think Netflix should stop giving him money.