Castlevania Season 4 Review

The attacks are led by a new villain named Varney, a hacky vampire who fights in Dracula’s name but really just wants the respect of his bloodthirsty cohorts. The legendary Malcolm McDowell voices the character, and he does a fine job bringing Varney’s…colorful, expletive-heavy vocabulary to life. While Varney hardly seems like a threat at first — a has-been fighting an old war that’s already left him behind — his mission to resurrect Dracula does lead to one of the show’s best twists. But I won’t spoil that here.

Season 4 adds quite a few new characters to the mix. Ratko (Titus Welliver) and Dragan (Matthew Waterson) are fierce vampire soldiers who pose a real challenge for our heroes but really exist mostly to trigger fight sequences. Zamfir (Toks Olagundoye), like Varney, is holding the line of a war that’s come and gone, and makes for a somewhat interesting third in Trevor and Sypha’s battle with the vampires.

But the standout newcomer is Greta (Marsha Thompson), who is on a mission to lead her people to safety after monsters destroy their village. She’s a fierce fighter but also cunning and warm, and the one character who’s already thinking about the future. While Trevor, Sypha, Alucard, and Carmilla are still stuck fighting Dracula’s wars, Greta wants to find somewhere new, a place to rebuild and start a new life.

It makes sense then that her best scenes are opposite Alucard (James Callis), who’s largely given up on living, exiling himself in his father’s castle. Season 3 kind of sidelined Alucard, giving him a storyline that didn’t seem to go anywhere captivating until its bloody end, but the fourth season more than makes up for that. While season 3 teased a dark turn for Alucard that would bring him closer to his father’s legacy, season 4 mostly lets all that go, turning the dhampir into the action hero he was always meant to be. Here we see him with sword and shield in hand, cutting his way through tons of creatures and monsters — and the bestiary feels massive this season, with quite a few nods to the video games — as he’s given new purpose. Ultimately, Alucard, a hero cursed by a name and a castle, gets the ending he deserves.

The show also closes the book on Carmilla, Hector, and Isaac. Even when stuck in her castle with nothing to do, Carmilla remains one of the best characters in this series. Carmilla fans annoyed with the fact that the show locked her away in her castle for the entirety of season 3 won’t find much solace here. In fact, the first half of season 4 barely spends time with the character at all. But Castlevania more than make up for that in episode 6, which features the best battle sequence of the entire show. It may be one of best fight scenes in animation history! A storm of swords, blood, and guts drenches the screen in red, and at the center is Carmilla with her bloodshot eyes, blade in hand.

Despite drawing plans to take over the world of man once and for all, she suddenly finds herself in the middle Isaac’s quest for revenge, but Carmilla is such a great character that she easily outshines everyone else on the screen. That said, Isaac and Hector do enjoy some of the better writing this season. For Isaac, nothing can really top his epic fight with Legion last season, but he does end up in a satisfying place. Hector too gets one final shot at redemption, and were there more seasons coming, I’d be interested to see what happened to him next.