We also learn a lot more about Setrakian in this episode. As was revealed last week, the elderly pawnbroker is a Holocaust survivor, and when Eichhorst gloatingly comes to visit him in jail (turns out, interfering in a CDC investigation isn’t taken too lightly by the authorities), we realize that these two know one another. Setrakian previously combatted the Master and Eichhorst while interned at a Nazi concentration camp, failing to kill them then but definitely putting a dent in their plans for world domination. “The great game is overdue,” Eichhorst tells him. “Not while I’m still breathing,” comes Setrakian’s steady reply.
Though the vamps have the upper hand this time, having successfully crossed into Brooklyn and infected the plane survivors, Setrakian is still determined to send them back into the darkness. We also figure out the owner of the heart in Setrakian’s lab – it belonged to someone near and dear to him, whom Eichhorst captured and murdered. “A230385,” as Eichhorst mockingly refers to Setrakian, also previously managed to dispatch a high-ranking vamp and dump his “parts” in the North Sea, so blood has been spilled on both sides of their war. At the end of “The Box,” though, Setrakian’s still in the can, while Eichhorst is gleefully running around with the Master.
Meanwhile, Eph and Nora spend the majority of “The Box” playing catch-up. They discover the body of the man crushed like an overripe watermelon by the Master’s hands, investigate the worms to find that they are perfect disease-carrying agents and discover the morgue to be completely trashed after last week’s feeding frenzy. The pair are also faced with the challenge of keeping the four plane survivors – Captain Redfern (Jonathan Potts), lawyer Joan Luss (Leslie Hope), rock star Gabriel Bolivar (Jack Kesy) and nebbish family man Ansel Barbour (Nikolai Witschl) – contained, which proves impossible after documents are falsified to suggest that carbon monoxide poisoning caused the plane deaths. Only Redfern wants to help Eph and Nora, so he admits himself to the hospital, where tests they run find that his body is transforming at a terrifying rate. “Boiling, skin’s crawling, and I feel like I swallowed a razor,” Redfern gasps, and it’s also revealed under UV light that he’s covered in the same secretions from the plane.