According to the lovely Jill Wagner, SpikeTV's Blade: The Series is not going to come back for a second season. "I was just informed today that there will be NO 2nd season of Blade: The Series," she told the site ComicBookMovie.com. Also according to this article, ratings for the show started out well, but slipped as the season went on. Ah, well, at least we can still see her in those Mercury commercials.

Indeed, Ms. Wagner also let that information slip to our former TVS colleague and current Netscaper Ryan j Budke. Not sure if that was before or after he helped move her furniture.

(Just kidding, Ryan...)

(S01E12) Blade, we hardly knew you. But we got to know Krista, Chase and Marcus pretty well. Some other folks too, but they're mostly dead. I mean dead dead, not just undead. I'm hard pressed to think of a series with a body count this high, but I had fun. In this, our final first-season installment, we still need to get the purebloods out of the way, so that Blade can battle Marcus just as nature intended.

Marcus, by the way, thinks Blade is playing right into his hands, and Shen tries to convince Blade that they have Marcus right where they want him thanks to Krista. Then, from that as a premise, spectacular (well, considering bugetary limitations, anyway) season-finale stuff happens.

(S01E11) Woo hoo, the last episode before the season finale (as show promos are so fond of saying). So far Krista's been turned into a vampire, seen her whole family killed, had her hand sliced off and grown back, etc. Marcus, meanwhile, has discovered the cure to all the ills of vampirism, and declared war on all enemy houses. And Blade has ... Well, Blade is still Blade. Basically he seems to run around killing non-essential vampire day-players far from the central story arc of the series. But that was before this week. Blade comes along nicely this time, bags a major player and Sticky gets more dialog this episode in some well-played scenes with Collins than he's had in the rest of the series combined.

Now explain to me how the purebloods have managed to survive all these centuries when they so easily get duped into believing that Chase has converted to their side against Marcus. If that isn't enough, why in the world is Marcus so sure a bomb on the company Lear jet is gonna do the trick to wipe out Charlotte and her crew of purebloods. Right after the crash Charlotte and her assistant "Lurch" wick away a few drops of blood, feed on nearby campers and are back on their way. It's not even that close a call for them -- though it did make Charlotte very thirsty. Good plan Marcus.

(S01E10) First thing we learn this week is that there are clubs in Detroit where a vodka tonic still only cost an inflation-fighting four bucks. Secondly, if you frequent such clubs, be prepared to encounter masked super-villains who channel Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and collect teeth.

Krista gets locked up by Shen and Blade to detox from her sex and blood feast with Marcus last episode. This is a gruesome episode, with lots of dungeons, torture and references to historical sadists like Gilles de Rais. It fails to be very scary and this torture-fest made me impatient for them to bring back Richard Roundtree, or for at least some mention of all the other threads they've put on the back burner, if not dropped altogether. Where's Boone been lately?

(S01E09) Krista goes off drinking out of grief for her mother (that cancer cure attempt really didn't work out all that well last week) leaving Krista more isolated than ever. Well, not quite solo, as visions of her dead relatives show up to haunt her. A friend of Shen's show up at the Bladecave and delivers a lot of exposition to bring us up to speed on the real goal of Marcus's Aurora experiments -- to wipe out the elitist purebloods.

(S01E08) Turns out the purebloods aren't all child vampires anyway, as another one show up this week: Alex. He is played by Kavan Smith, who's now the hardest working man on cable original scifi television, as he also plays Major Lorne on Stargate Atlantis and Agent Garrity on The 4400.

So Alex the pureblood is a smoothie and way into Chase. He tries to buy Chase from Marcus -- for Chase's own good, of course. Marcus' is about as unpopular with other vampires as he is with Blade. Jessica Gower who plays Chase, shows Marcus -- and us -- her backside, just she we can be sure that she's totally healed from her near-ash experience in Berlin with Blade a few weeks ago.

(S01E07) SpikeTV ran the first Wesley Snipes Blade movie tonight, leading into this episode. Not sure that's such a good idea, especially as it ends with a spectacular fight scene between Snipes and Stephen Dorff (playing Deacon Frost). Poor, indifferently executed fight scenes are an ongoing fan criticism of the show. The effect was sort of like seeing Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, right before an episode of Alice would be -- the Linda Lavin sitcom just isn't gonna hold up that well.

Fortunately, this time we have a good episode, maybe the best since the pilot. Unfortunately, that's partly because much of it is set in the past, with a different set of actors. Maybe Eric: The Young Blade Chronicles would make a good spin-off.

(S01E06) My DVR picked up the last five minutes of Spike's timely lead-in for Blade tonight: Lethal Weapon. Seems there is no escaping Mel Gibson this week.

On the ongoing subject of Blade's relative unimportance to this show, especially compared with Krista (Jill Wagner), I will give that theme a rest this week and merely refer you to insightful comments posted last week by techjitsu and others. I live in hope of a Blade-centric episode one day, and this almost promises to qualify at first, as the daywalker has to transport a pregnant woman (Vanessa) whose unborn baby Marcus wants for something to safety. Or take her someplace, they are on a train to Paris anyway. Turns out Blade (Kirk Jones) is taking her to see a doctor he trusts. "Delivery" -- get it? Their travel is punctuated by several brief fight scenes, and it turns out she's not actually pregnant -- at least in the conventional sense.

Krista goes to an art opening with Marcus, and has one of her signature poignant moments, this time while looking a depressing painting made by a fellow Gulf vet. Her uncle shows up, and tells Krista her Mom has taken ill.

Chase (Jessica Gower) survived! Now Marcus sends Krista to Berlin the complete Chase's mission to bring the pregnant woman back to him. Krista objects, briefly. OH COME ON!!! Marcus has a whole frikkin' clan of vampires that he allegedly controls and he sends Krista?!? Again?!?!

(S01E05) Another episode, another Krista dream-sequence to lead into the opening credits. Fun fact: Krista's blood ritual lasts four hours and forty-two minutes longer than the previous longest blood ritual on record. But it's worth it -- Boone's destination is discovered. So Krista and Chase SWAT-up and are off to Louisiana for a showdown. Hmm. Anne Rice country. Where next week -- Sunnydale? Boone escapes.

(S01E04) A big chunk of Blade's past is revealed when the daywalker gets captured by survivors of a street gang that had rescued him as a homeless kid years before. Blade then spends the entire episode chained-up, getting the bejesus beat out of him. Turns out the gang - now called the Bad Bloods - is where Blade got his signature look. His tats are gang tats.

Blade repaid his adopted bro's by turning them all into vampires. Not nice -- but remember he was just a kid. The ganstas don't let him forget that, and keep calling him "little one" which has to hurt at least as much as does the beating he takes. Also, seems getting turned by Blade makes you persona-non-grata in the undead community - so these dudes have been hunted into near-extinction by Chthon and the other vampire Houses. Now the Bloods want to trade Blade to Marcus in exchange for peace in our time. Great! Just what I needed, another faction to try and keep track of. But it's a pretty cool wrinkle added to Blade's history, and anyway, the gang looks to be history itself after tonight.

Meanwhile, Krista, for her half of the episode, is still pained, conflicted, and smoking hot.

(S01E03) For those who forgot to tune-in or record Blade The Series opposite the second half of Nightmares & Dreamscapes, or were perhaps still digesting the Project Runway premiere (don't lie, you know who you are): SpikeTV's resident daywalker Blade (Kirk Jones) and newbie hemoglobin-addict Krista (Jill Wagner) had to fight their separate battles this week. In order to find out more about the Aurora vaccine, Blade hunts down an ex-guinea pig one used by head Detroit-vamp Marcus's -- a sort of tweeker dude called Sands, while smashing progressively harder barriers (hotel room drywall, then brick wall, then big iron door) in the process.

(S01E02) In the opening shot of this one we see Detective Boon (Bill Mondy) yanking out one of his newly-acquired fangs and poking his way through the plastic baggie that has imprisoned him. Right away, I know we're in for more twists. Boone was a goner last week, when he awoke bagged and tagged for Aurora testing. Now, why the dude has to pull out his tooth to rip the plastic with it, I don't know. Nor do I know why House of Chthon researchers don't ship their test subjects in fang-proof packaging. Anyway, Boon is back -- doubling the tally of series regulars that are newbie-vampires.

Kirk Jones (the-artist-formerly-know as Sticky Fingaz) doesn't have as powerful a screen presence as Wesley Snipes, and sometimes disappears into the background of the show (and even to get overshadowed by his own leather get-up). But kudos to the creators for going with a guy that has his own style and is no Snipes wannabee. Blade does seem like he is only making cameo appearances in his own show so far. I guess calling it Krista: The Television Series doesn't have the same recognition factor.

While I'm not a huge comic book reader, I've been a big fan of the Blade character since the first movie with Wesley Snipes. The detail behind the vampire's history and lore almost puts to shame even what Anne Rice has written (yeah, I know I'll be attacked viciously in my sleep for that comment). Blade brought vampires to the 20th/21st century way of thinking.

When I heard a Blade series was in the works, I was both skeptical and excited. Excited because there would be a real chance to tell more of the story of Blade, but skeptical because, well, Spike TV was going to air it. Luckily, and thankfully, they've pleasantly surprised me.