Headscratchers / Blade II

• If Blade knew that Scud was a traitor the whole time, then why didn't he kill him earlier? It's not as if Scud's betrayal gave him any kind of advantage. For that matter, why did he seem surprised when the bomb didn't work, and why didn't he detonate it when it was still in the vampire's head?
  • Keeping Scud alive means Blade can backtrack his communications to the other vampires. Its actually a fairly common technique in the intelligence community to hide the fact that you've discovered an enemy mole and use him to ferret out his contacts, feed them false information, or otherwise use him against his handlers without them realizing it. As for not detonating the bomb, Blade probably didn't expect Scud to actually tamper with it, and had to switch detonators. By the time he switched detonators, Scud had the bomb instead.
  • Blade outright says, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." .
  • There's also the fact that for Scud to maintain his cover, he needs to keep helping Blade build vampire-killing equipment. Equipment Blade would have still been able to use and replicate once Scud had outlived his usefulness (to either the vampires or to Blade himself). Blade probably rather enjoyed using a vampire double agent to make vampire-killing weapons.
    • And for that matter why did Blade still have the detonator on him? When they brought him and Whistler to their lair they took their guns, gadgets, and Blade's sword, but they did take the detonators?
    • Vampires all have a sense of the dramatic. The servants instructed to frisk Blade were probably told to leave the detonator, as according to Scud, it was harmless. (And even if it wasn't, it could kill at most one person.) That way Scud could have done his little dramatic reveal, everyone could have smirked at Blade's stupidity and probably done a shared evil laugh. Just turns out Blade wasn't stupid.
• The vampires need to team up with Blade in order to destroy the new, superpowerful vampires. Alright, fair enough. When they go to a vampire nightclub, Blade expresses disbelief since he can't see its sigil, causing the vampires to state that his activities have forced them to adopt more secretive methods. Makes sense. Then they explicitly teach him how to see through their new line of defense. Wait, what?
  • They can just come up with something else. Though I have the hilarious image of 'em putting sigils on dozens of likely-looking buildings in every city. The actual nightclubs will be hidden behind a party supply store.
  • Desperate times. They need Blade's help to defeat the super-vamps and they're already running on a severe deficit of trust. If Blade had asked them how they know this place is a vampire club and they had said "just trust me, it is" Blade would have become suspicious. He might have concluded that the story about the super-vamps was all an elaborate charade and the moment he stepped through the door of the "club" a hundred machine guns would open up on him or something.
  • They also appear to need a special device to see in this spectrum in the film. In the series, though, they just have to focus a little to see in UV.
  • They were planning on betraying him the whole time. Even Nyssa, whose only shock was that Nomak was her brother and, thus, that her father was prepared to kill his own children; though she had come to respect Blade, she seemingly knew both that the Reapers were designed and that they were going to harvest Blade's blood. They are Genre Blind, but not Too Dumb to Live
    • I'm not sure that Nyssa knew about the Reapers' origins; consider her reactions to the foetuses when Damaskinos reveals them.
  • The crux of the plan was to kill Blade and harvest his blood as soon as the job was done, so Damaskinos was probably not too concerned.
• It's fairly obvious that Vampires are redeemable and are not necessarily always chaotic evil. They're more akin to drug addicts and criminals. If they got their fix, a peaceful solution could easily be found. For instance, humans could donate blood at certain pre-determined levels and the vamps pledge to not kill humans. Yet, no one ever seems to suggest or even think of the possibility of a solution like this.
  • Individual vampires might be redeemable, but the vampire hierarchy and organization isn't willing to acknowledge humans as equals, which this would imply. The leaders are power hungry, arrogant, and they want to have power over humans.
  • Blade does lose any character development he might have gained in the second film, but his quest to destroy vampires is still pretty justified. Even though every German soldier in WWII wasn't a true believer, they were still fighting to support an evil empire. Vampires that support their society's evil actions must be fought like enemy combatants. We also don't see any hint that there are peaceful vampires who only feed on voluntarily donated blood. If there are, then Blade's not going after them.
  • What it really boils down to is that Blade's a Sociopathic Hero who enjoys killing vampires for its own sake. This makes sense, as Whistler's entire quest for vengeance stems from victimization by a vampire drifter. Blade's basically just the extension of Whistler's desire for revenge; it's not surprising that he doesn't consider the idea of seeking coexistence since he's been taught since very young that vampires are altogether monstrous and unworthy of life, and that killing a turned vampire is an act of mercy. The second movie is in fact the only time Blade ever is introduced to vampire culture and has to consider the idea that they are individuals as well. Evidently he decided that although Nyssa was perhaps an exception, vampires still, on the whole, deserve a painful death.
  • The overwhelming majority of vampires are clearly depicted as remorseless psychopathic serial murderers, and even the "redeemable" ones like Nyssa are likely responsible for hundreds if not thousands of deaths, and she still was part of a plot to betray him. Turned vampires seem especially bad which is likely in part because they are usually chosen from familiars, ie. people who want to be evil bloodsucking monsters, so they pretty much do deserve a painful death. The vampire cultural in Blade II is downright terrifying - genetic experimentation, nightclub with murder and feeding, arrogant Mad Scientists out to make vampires even more dangerous....even most of the individual vampires are utter dicks. And they barely age, are murderous, and secretly rule the world and engage repeatedly in homicidal debauchery. He's not a Sociopathic Hero for killing them.
    • Note that, in all their various super-high-tech attempts to eliminate vampiric vulnerabilities, make their kind unbeatable in combat, and/or elevate themselves to godhood, not one of the factions Blade goes up against ever even seems to consider, y'know, removing their bloodthirst as a possible line of research. This, despite their being well aware that Blade's serum came close to achieving this goal: a serum that was developed using nothing more than a cheap, kludged-together biochem lab Whistler'd thrown together in a garage.
  • Even if Vampires are not automatically Always Chaotic Evil it still makes sense that the majority of the vampires we see in the films are evil, because of Sampling Bias. In this universe only people who are bitten and survive become vampires, so the only people who would be added to the ranks of the vampire nation, besides the occasional rare human who manages to escape after being bitten, are the people the vampires CHOOSE to turn. And of course, they would largely choose to turn people who would embrace the vampire lifestyle, people who already show sociopathic murderous tendencies, or who would sacrifice their morals for power and long life, like their many familiars. Any "normal" non sociopathic person who became a vampire would likely not last long, either taking care of themselves through suicide, being killed by other vampires, or finding some way to live in hiding without the need to kill, if they don't eventually give into their urges. So it is actually reasonable to assume that the vast majority of *active* vampires in the world embrace their vampirism and are consciously evil.
  • We don't see Blade killing any vampires that are getting their blood through nonviolent means.
  • The first movie showed that the elders were perfectly content with living in somewhat harmony with the human population as they warned Frost about trying to become more prominent as the humans would make their lives a living hell. So, though they may not have been "good guy" vampires, they were logical and knew not to push their boundaries too far and found a common ground with the humans.
    • That "common ground" was massive corruption that they used to cover up their freewheeling murder of humans (you think that was animal blood in the sprinkler system at the rave?). The vampires in the first movie were not living in harmony with humans, they were just quietly oppressing humans with the help of human collaborators willing to sacrifice their own kind for power and wealth.
    • The vampire elders call out Frost for having the nightclubs, since they would prefer to avoid attracting attention, even if they do not care about the humans dying.
• At the end, Blade has to let Nyssa die, as she is infected by the Reaper bite from Novak, to finally kill off the Reaper strain. But...during his little "tour" through Vampire HQ, Novak munched on a good few dozen people. There'd be loads of Reapers downstairs, ready to start the whole problem up again.
  • All those people were explicitly confirmed to be human 'familiars', which CAN be drained by Reapers- but only vampires who get assaulted can become Reapers. Presumably human familiars are less likely to betray Damaskinos than vampire goons.
  • How do you know it doesn't work on humans?
    • Because the lawyer specifically says "The vampire victims don't die. They Turn." Plus, you don't KNOW that Blade didn't go back through the entire building re-murdering every single one of them. The film cuts to black.
    • That doesn't mean Humans don't turn, just that vampires do. Nyssa was emphasizing the threat that the reapers posed, so that Blade would care about stopping them before they munched on all the vampires first. On the other hand, how easily a human would turn into a reaper is still open to question. A vampire can turn in as little as 20 minutes, but a human's body doesn't change as quickly (e.g. no regeneration). I'm probably thinking too far into this, but maybe the reaper virus can only work on a vampire because they can mutate fast enough and survive the process.
  • Blade probably either went back in and killed them, or he just closed the place up and waited a few days for them to die of their accelerated metabolisms, or, and this is probably the most likely, planted a bunch of explosives and blew the place to hell at high noon.
• When Nyssa examines the Reaper, a species that has never been dissected before, she describes it in a way that she would a lecture that she's done a hundred times. How the heck is she supposed to know that only the tongue carries the virus?
  • She probably has access to some biological knowledge of the Reapers, considering that they were created by the vampires. Damoskinos probably forwarded what they knew about the Reapers' biology to the team, so she would have some working knowledge of their capabilities.
• The vampires attempt to dissect Blade in order to obtain "the key" to his unique condition. Wait, don't they know that Blade was born the way he was because his mother was bitten at the end of her pregnancy?
  • They may know that, but a direct analysis might let them directly recreate the condition genetically instead of going through all that tricky setup.
    • A tricky setup that would do absolutely no good for vampires that already exist.
  • They want his blood so they can replicate the unique daywalker traits, and apply them via genetic therapy to all vampires. The whole point of the movie is that they tried that already, and kinda-sorta failed with Nomak.
    • The novelisation of Trinity elaborates on just how much of a fluke Blade's mere existence actually is; apparently Frost had a habit of drinking from older vampires as well as humans that caused some subtle mutation in his own biology that other vampires have been unable to properly identify. Blade even reflects that he's heard tales of vampires trying to recreate the circumstances of his origin, but they ended with either the vampire mother eating her human infant after it was born or the vampire foetus draining its mother from the inside; Blade's survival was a relative fluke that nobody on either side has any true idea how to replicate.
• Why the hell does Nyssa peacefully let herself be bitten at the end of the second movie? She could at least have tried to run... I mean, dammit, 10 seconds later and Blade woulda saved her hot sorry ass.
  • Because she wanted to die. She expected her brother to kill her, not turn her into a Reaper.
    • Why did she want to die? Does the film ever provide a motivation? It's been a while so I might just have forgotten.
    • Her father's betrayal of Nomak and lying to her pretty much destroyed her perception of the world. In that moment, the halfbreed Daywalker she'd been training for years to fight became more respectable and worthy to her than the entirety of the society and culture she grew up in. Everything she'd lived for was shown to be a lie so she didn't want to live with that.
• After being cured, Whistler reaches behind a medical scale to retrieve his wedding ring which he presumably stashed there. Thing is... they aren't in their old hideout. They aren't even on the same continent. Did Blade just ship across the Atlantic a giant medical scale for no reason just coz it had Whistler's wedding ring ducktaped behind it?