‘The Strain’ recap: Beware of your loved ones

If the episode is titled “Loved Ones,” should fans of the hit FX thriller “The Strain” expect an overabundance of missing momma melodrama?

Yes, and this is not such a good thing.

Dr. Ephraim Goodweather, leader of the renegade vamp killing gang and disgraced Centers for Disease Control official, still loves his now-at-large wife, even though she’s technically his ex and she already has a new live-in boyfriend.

And their young son, Zach, keeps asking for her, tracking her iPhone and sending Eph out on a fruitless mission to find her.

She’s a vampire, people! Give it up!

Excitable fans might find themselves shouting that and several other choice things at the screen during Episode 10, which feels like a slog through emotional mud. Too much about Eph’s righteous search, his regrets and his frayed family bonds.

All together now: Yawn!

There’s very little Abraham Setrakian, which is always a mistake, and no Thomas Eichhorst at all, definitely a misstep since the Nazi-turned-supervamp has become one of the great TV villains.

Even the screen time for Vasiliy Fet is unsatisfying this week, mainly because he can’t quip much with surly hacker Dutch, and he skips a prime opportunity to punch the ever-tortured Eph upside the head. What a waste.

Viewers do find out the sequence of events that led to Eph’s ex-wife, Kelly, turning into a nightcrawler, and that has some must-see elements. So, on to the high points.

No one likes the new boyfriend anyway, right? And it was always going to be easy to believe that Matt brings the vampire plague into Kelly’s (formerly Eph’s) house. Well, he does. And when he attacks Kelly in the kitchen, she reaches for whatever is handy and comes up with a serrated blade from some Sur La Table gadget. Once she slashes him across the face, she unwittingly releases a spray of infectious capillary worms.

So the drama lives up to its billing or, more specifically, its billboards, when one of those worms slithers right into Kelly’s eye. There should have been way more screaming in that scene, but viewers can add their own.

With her transformation begun, Kelly goes hunting for Zach, her dear one, and lands at her BFF’s house. Diane, who would never otherwise shut up, gets a stinger to the throat, as does her kid. Kelly has the fervor of the newly converted, so she’s not in control. But chances are she knows, even in her vampiric fever, that the crappy new world will be a better place without Diane’s constant yack, yack, yacking.

The fact that Eph finds the newly turned vamp Diane -- and kills her again, for reals this time -- is not all that sad. She wasn’t a very nice person. He realizes, though, that Kelly had already been there, causing the destruction he had to clean up, because she left her necklace in Diane’s clutches. Cue the hero’s breakdown.

While Eph is following a bloody breadcrumb trail, Fet and Dutch are planning to bust into the high-security Stoneheart Group, hack into evil billionaire Eldritch Palmer’s computer system and unbreak the Internet. It plays out just as ridiculous as it sounds, with Fet “charming” his way past the front desk with a weird rat-like smile that we’ve never seen before and hope to never see again. Both renegades end up at gunpoint.

There’s an absurd chat with Palmer, in which he blathers on about his immortality and Dutch’s invisibility, and she gets in a nice backhand across his sallow face. But the scene mostly serves as an introduction to a potential new ally.

Fet and Dutch learn that Palmer’s brawny manservant, Mr. Fitzwilliam, isn’t as much of a lackey as he seems. Instead of filling them full of holes, Fitzwilliam lets them go, saying Palmer is “misguided” in his plans to kill the world via vampocalypse. Fans have long suspected that Fitzwilliam will join the Scooby ranks. It’s looking quite possible now.

In another bit of foreshadowing, Kelly hears the call of the Master. With half of New York likely turned into bloodsuckers by this point, why would the Master single her out among the hordes?

There’s plenty of explanation about that in the second book of the bestselling trilogy from Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan on which the series is based. (Book 2 is called “The Fall,” by the way, and the title is painfully accurate).

But all viewers see is a scene where the Master and Kelly meet in the dank tunnels under Manhattan. It’s not a stretch to think that Kelly will be more important than the average vamp.