WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Castlevania Season 4, available now on Netflix.
The Castlevania video game series has revolved around different generations of the monster-hunting Belmont family fighting Dracula and his armies across history. The Netflix original animated series, however, killed off the vampire lord right at the halfway mark, after a pitched battle in the Season 2 finale. Following the power vacuum left behind in the wake of Dracula's death among the monster community, the end of Season 4 reveals the true villain behind the animated series' story all along: Death itself.
As Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades roam across Transylvania, hunting monsters and protecting innocents, they come across a cult that appears to worship the personification of Death. Trevor warns Sypha that Death is an elemental force, one that previous generations of his family have encountered before whenever its insatiable hunger for human souls grows out of control. As Trevor and Sypha continue their odyssey, they also learn vampires are seeking to resurrect Dracula through black magic, raising the stakes as they scramble to prevent the dreaded warlord from rising from the depths of Hell.
Death's Ultimate Plan, and How St. Germain Is Involved
Unknown to Trevor and Sypha, two vampires named Varney and Dragan are spearheading the plot to resurrect Dracula, with Varney using a magical mirror to stay in contact with St. Germain, who agrees to help him. The time-traveling alchemist sought to resurrect Dracula to gain greater mastery over the Infinite Corridor, the extra-dimensional realm connecting universes and realities -- including Hell. Germain was motivated by the opportunity to rescue someone he loved who was lost within the Infinite Corridor, as well as his own undying curiosity to change the laws of nature through alchemy.
Varney constructed a composite body to house both Dracula and Lisa's souls, with Germain empowering the Infinite Corridor through the human souls lost in the battle against Varney's monster army around Dracula's castle.
Ultimately, Varney proves to be utterly untrustworthy in the final season, and not actually a vampire at all. Instead, the manipulative fiend is Death in disguise. Death had seen Dracula as the individual best suited to plunging the world into darkness and supplying him with a steady supply of souls to feed off of. Unbeknownst to Germain, Death relies on the fact that Dracula and Lisa sharing the same host body to drive them murderously over the edge, yielding even more souls than Death would have received should Dracula had stayed in his normal form.
How Death's Role Changes Dracula's From the Games
Historically, Castlevania has presented Dracula as its primary antagonist in virtually every single installment of the long-running video game series. The animated series' biggest Season 4 twist makes Dracula more of a victim, instead; a pawn in Death's master plan to keep himself sated at the price of humanity's existence by driving the vampire lord and his bride mad in a twisted form of unlife.
Germain's own obsessions are also played against to make him a willing accomplice in Death's scheme, unaware of the full scope and motivations behind the resurrection. With Death revealing himself, Trevor's warning to Sypha at the start of Season 4 was far from an idle one.
Castlevania stars Richard Armitage as Trevor Belmont, Alejandra Reynoso as Sypha Belnades, James Callis as Alucard, Theo James as Hector, Adetokumboh M'Cormack as Isaac, Jaime Murray as Carmilla, Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenore, Bill Nighy as St. Germain, Jason Isaacs as The Judge and Rila Fukushima as Sumi. All four seasons are available to stream now on Netflix.
