Episode: “…Dracula”,
in which Leonard Nimoy reads a bit of Stoker, shows a bit of footage from Nosferatu and picturesque shots of
Romania (well, they would be picturesque if “In Search of” didn’t always look
like dark, grainy misery) to convince us that Vlad Tepes was the real
inspiration for Count Dracula, a theory that a lot of modern theorists think
has been overstated. But why let historical facts ruin the eerie thrills of
Nimoy’s graphic descriptions of impalement and all that gratuitous moog
synthesizer music? And the effort to imply that Vlad the Impaler wasn’t nearly
as nasty as his bad rep suggests is refreshingly even handed.
