Tag: TV

And now it’s time to say goodbye to Penny Dreadful.  I came into this season with high hopes, and I’m happy to say that it has surpassed those raised expectations.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close.  It looked fantastic, and the cast was tremendous.
In the past, I had mentioned that I wanted this story to be wrapped up by the end of this season.  As much as I love the characters involved, I was ready to move on from the stories being told.  With the way this season ended, it looks like we’ll be with these characters for a little while longer.  The good news is that they have wrapped up some of the main storylines.  Or, at the very least, they have wrapped up the storylines that had begun to grow old.  I’m glad they have shed those two storylines and will be moving forward into season 2.

Now, let’s talk about this episode.

I had grown tired of Caliban’s demand for a mate.  Or, rather, I had grown tired of Caliban.  Puffing himself up around Frankenstein (“Demon! Make me a sammich!”) and wilting around others.  It got old in a hurry.  They worked hard to force me into giving him sympathy, but I never found any for him.  Until he had his moment of clarity, that is.  Caliban finally came to terms with the fact that the only person responsible for the monster he became was himself.  “The malignance has grown, you see, from the outside in.”  He let the ugliness turn inwards, and that’s on him.  He finally saw, and he all but begged the gun-toting doctor into ending his life.  “I would rather be the corpse I was than the man I am.  Go ahead.  Pull the trigger.  It would be a blessing.”
Feeling a bit of fatherly affection, Frankenstein lowers the gun and decides to make Caliban a mate: not because it was demanded of him, but because he genuinely cares for his creation.  I loved this.  Giving Caliban a bride came out of love instead of threats.
Of course, Caliban’s gain is Ethan’s loss.  Brona was fading fast, and Frankenstein merely helped her to shuffle loose the mortal coil.  Still, I think it’s the first time the phrase, “Her passing was a thing of grace,” was used after smothering someone with a pillow.  To her credit, Brona didn’t struggle.  Perhaps it was as graceful a passing as could have been expected, given her circumstances.  “I’ll take care of the body,” Frankenstein reassured Ethan.  “We know you will,” we all said.

A distraught Ethan stumbled to the nearest bar, seeking refuge in the bottom of a filthy glass.  He is confronted there by a pair of Pinkertons. Ethan’s father had sent them to bring him back.  He fights them off and escapes.  “We have underestimated our prey,” they proclaim, and track him down again.  But they made one grave mistake: they confronted him during a full moon, and the Pinkerton agency shrunk by two.
Finally, after weeks of anticipation, we get our reveal: Ethan is a werewolf.  We didn’t see the full transformation, but we did see him all wolfed out, and, to no one’s surprise, he looked pretty similar to Universal’s Wolf Man.  It was not a surprise, but it was a fun reveal.  Guess I’ll have to wait until next season to see if my Jack the Ripper theory was correct.

We also got an end to the Mina storyline.  In the big action sequence of the episode, the gang entered The Grand Guignol with malice towards vampires in their hearts.  We saw a vampire in the rafters in an earlier scene, and we find out that the entire theater is basically a vampire hive.  Ethan finds himself falling through a trap door (he never did learn to mind his surroundings) and being set upon by hungry vampires.  The entire group is overrun before long; it looks bleak for our heroes.  Until Malcolm confronts the leader vampire (not The Master! Not The Master!) and drives his cane through the monster’s heart.  At this point, all the underling vampires retreat into the darkness, Mina shows up, and they all live happily ever after.
Except they don’t.  Because, as we all figured out by now, Mina is a vampire.  She grabs Vanessa and is about to bite her, but Malcolm pulls out his fancy gun and shoots her.  As she lay writhing on the ground, she said, “I’m your daughter.”  His response of, “I already have a daughter,” echoed a conversation he and Ethan had in “Possession”.  And then he shot her in the head.

This whole interaction bothered me a little bit, if only because Malcolm and Vanessa had a conversation earlier in the episode in which he told her, “If I have to sacrifice you for Mina, I will.”  The obviousness of it all really annoyed me.  It was trying to raise the stakes in a situation in which the stakes were already plenty high.  We found out that his relentless pursuit of Mina was partially due to the guilt he felt over his son’s death.  Why did they need yet another conversation about what he would do for his daughter?  It seemed like they were really working hard to set up the whole, “I will choose my daughter over you,” storyline, only to pull the rug out from underneath us.  Only I knew he wouldn’t let Vanessa die.  They were trying to make it a more emotional moment, but it actually damped it a little for me.

Where was Dorian during all of this?  He tried to get back with Vanessa (“I gotta have that booty, gurl,”), only to have Vanessa reject him (she wasted his flavor…damn).  He cried, then he looked at the tear on his finger.  Maybe I’m heartless, but I laughed really hard at that scene.  After the credits rolled, Dorian started a harpsichord emo band and they totally ruled.  Glass Harmonica solo!

Some random thoughts:

– Ethan and Vanessa, hanging out by a brick wall, smoking the marijuana like a cigarette.  I thought Ethan was going to start talking about how the pimpin’ he got in his blood came from his family tree.  Is wolfin’ the same story?  Was the wolf gene passed down, like it was from Harold to Scott?  Or was it more of a “Jordy bit Oz” situation?  I suppose we’ll have to wait for the second season for that.

– The scene of Ethan praying over Brona was really sweet.  I never totally bought into their relationship (mostly because we didn’t see them together very often), but I really liked that moment.

– I loved Malcolm buying automatic weapons in a secret room.  Even when Bond isn’t playing Bond he still has his own personal Q.
He also hit on a psychic and lied to her.  In a gun store.  Malcolm Murray’s game is unmatched.

– Vincent (the owner of The Grand Guignol) dropped a couple terrific lines in this episode.
“Show business.  All bitches.”And, after being forced to fire Caliban, “Remember us better than we are.”  I feel like that could’ve been the tagline for this series.

– I have no problem with Billie Piper, but she has some pretty big shoes to fill as The Bride.  Elsa Lanchester was amazing, and that’s the standard she’ll be held up to.
Her and Caliban have to move away, right?  They can’t very well allow them to roam the streets and have Ethan (or any of her former johns) run into her.

Your line to work into casual conversation this week: “The monster is not in my face, but in my soul.”

Penny Dreadful is done, but The Strain starts on July 13.  Get excited.

I apologize on the tardiness of this.  I was out of town for the past week-and-a-half and had no way to watch this until yesterday.  I’ll have my episode 7 recap up tomorrow.

Between the flashback episode and being gone for a week, I had almost forgotten about Ethan and Dorian’s night on the town.
Almost.
This episode opened with a sweet scene between Ethan The Gunfighter and Brona The Lunger.  He kissed her bloody lips and pledged to take care of her until the end of time.  When he said, “I love you with all my heart,” she responded with, “And I you.”  It was a really sweet moment.
Brona also asked Ethan where he had been the night before.  He responded simply with, “I went out with Mr. Gray,” which is the mildest possible way he could have described his evening.  I am now stealing that line for whenever I have a particularly crazy night.  (Because we accountants are known for our hard-partying lifestyles, you see.)

Dorian, meanwhile, is busy hopping from one conquest to the next.  He appears at Malcolm’s mansion in search of Vanessa, and woos her with one of my favorite exchanges of this episode.
“Do you have time for an adventure?”
“Now?”
“Is there any other time?”
He takes a picture of her, and they end up making a dinner date.  Dinner with Dorian only ends one way: sexytime with Dorian.  As near as I can tell, Dorian’s character description reads like this: “have sex with everything that moves.  EVERYTHING.”  I’m putting The Master on the list as Dorian’s next conquest.
But Vanessa isn’t like other girls, and the night doesn’t go quite as nicely as Dorian had planned.  In the throes of passion, Vanessa lost herself to the demon within.  She has made comments about needing to be in total control of herself to keep the darkness at bay.  In that moment, she lost control.  (I also like to think that the demon is brought on in a moment of true happiness.  Where is Jenny Calendar’s Gypsy Curse Gang when you need them?)
Eva Green has absolutely owned this show, and she has been terrific when she’s able to let the crazy out.  The episode ended with a possessed and disheveled Vanessa staggering into Malcolm’s room and promptly levitating and spinning in place.  She’s interesting because she sleeps above the covers.  Four feet above the covers.

While Vanessa is showing Dorian the darkness within, Ethan, Malcolm and Sembene decide to check out a “plague ship”.  Upon entering, they find a bunch of lifeless female bodies.  Malcolm inspects every one, looking for his beloved Mina.  “Not her.  Not her.”  I franticly shouted, “Who cares?  Kill them while they’re down!”  But it was no use.  They walked through the bodies without a care in the world.  This isn’t a field of posies, fellas.
Sure enough, the bodies all rose and attacked.  This is why you don’t walk unprepared into a nest of vampires.  Still, the three of them were able to fend off all attackers.  It was a tremendous scene.  Far and away the best action sequence of the series.
Someone kicked a lantern, and, while the ship burned, The Master emerged holding a screaming Mina and bolted.  Malcolm is still holding onto the belief that Mina can be saved, but Sembene is taking a more measured approach, ie., we’ll probably have to stake, decapitate and burn her.  For some reason, Malcolm is not overly excited about this thought.

Ethan snapped on Malcolm and dropped the line, “You’re pretty goddamn sure you know what’s going on all the time.” Through this show, Malcolm and Vanessa have been the mysterious, all-knowing entities behind all of this business, but that image is starting to crack a bit.

We get to see a bit of Frankenstein, Caliban, and Van Helsing in this episode.  I’ll tell you this much right now: Caliban is really getting on my nerves.  He’s an imposing, threatening, demanding figure around Frankenstein, but timid everywhere else.  He demands that Frankenstein make him a mate, but he doesn’t take advantage of the opportunities right in front of him.  His actress crush visits him in his lair and opens up to him, only to have him hide and not say more than two words to her.  I realize that she’s not undead, but he could have at least tried to say something to her.  Instead, he leaves her a book about Lucifer (her brother’s name, apparently) and watches from the shadows while she opens it.  As far as first moves go, it was pretty weak.
Caliban is not interested in working on anything for himself.  He wants a mate created for him.  I know dating is hard, but it’s a pretty big step from, “That girl may not like me,” to “I will be alone until someone is created specifically for me out of dead bodies.”  He wants Frankenstein to do for him what he is unwilling to do for himself.

While Caliban is totally screwing up with the actress, Frankenstein is hanging out with Van Helsing.  I love their rapport.  Very natural.  Frankenstein sees Van Helsing as a kind of father figure, and the childless Van Helsing looks upon Frankenstein as a son.  Eventually, Van Helsing educates Frankenstein about vampires by holding up a copy of “Varney, the Vampire”, a very popular penny dreadful (you can download it here) and saying, “[the author] missed the facts but caught the truth.”
Their night ends in heartbreak when Caliban shows up and snaps Van Helsing’s neck to speed up Frankenstein’s process.  That scene felt like a punch to the gut.
It’s worth noting that Frankenstein is working on creating a mate for Caliban.  Earlier in the episode, he’s scouting potential female bodies to use.  Try asking a question every now and then, Caliban.

I really liked this episode.  Where the last couple felt like they were running in quicksand, this episode really seemed to move things forward.  I’m really excited to see what the last two episodes have in store.

A final note:

Frankenstein drops a Percy Shelley line (“No more let life divide what death can draw together”), which led me to look into the timeline.  As you’re no doubt aware, it was Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein, and now her creation is quoting works from her husband.  It was all very meta.  Anyway, I wanted to see when the pieces were written.  Mary’s Frankenstein was originally published in 1818, and Percy’s Adonais – the poem the line was taken from – was published in 1821.  So Frankenstein would have been in existence when Percy Shelley wrote that line.  Good to know.

Your line to work into casual conversation this week: “The dead travel fast.”