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[Penny Dreadful] I'll have to change the carpet [Season 2]
jungleroomx
It's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered User regular
It's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered User regular
Airs on Showtime, Sunday 10PM et/pt
What you will see in Penny Dreadful:
Gore, literature, theological discussion, Eva Green hamming the shit out of everything, depravity, sex (every kind imaginable), Timothy Dalton chewing scenery, a poetic, bombastic, and tragic Frankenstein monster, hints of necrophilia, Hammer Horror tropes, Egyptian gods, insects, and long stretches of slow-burn plot.
What you will not see in Penny Dreadful:
Modesty. At least, not for long.
Synopsis:
Set in London during the Victorian times, Penny Dreadful spends equal time providing some truly atmospheric vistas and sets, murdering the shit out of everything (nothing is sacred), trading quips, and watching its characters tortured by their own decisions. On the surface, the mixing of Victorian horror lore into a "team" sounds very League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but the way the show plays it is much more organic and complex. It's not often all the characters are together as each of them has their own demons (literally, sometimes) to deal with.
In Season 1, the subject was vampirism. Season 2, we have witches. Horrible, disgusting, vile witches who do horrible, disgusting, vile things that you may hate. I've read comments from people who stopped watching Season 2 because there was a certain plot point that was too horrible for them to deal with. Before you ask, yes, it's very bad. Nothing is sacred in Penny Dreadful, and the show will remind you of this over and over.
Characters:
Sir Malcolm Murray
Played by Timothy Dalton, patriarch of the loosely assembled group and man with more skeletons in his wardrobe than a graveyard, adventurer, and surrogate father to Vanessa Ives, Sir Malcolm is centered as the lighthouse from which these adrift ships may head towards, even if the waters he leads them into can be full of rocks and death.
Vanessa Ives
Played by Eva Green, tortured by her religion, desperately wanting it back but buffeted at every turn by a seemingly endless parade of evil verging on the ridiculous, Ms Ives calm and collected demeanor that is displayed in public is often shattered and broken when she is in the midst of crisis.
Ethan Chandler
Played (quite well!) by Josh Hartnett, a former soldier and gun-show stunt man with a propensity to black out and awaken with little memory of what happened. He is American, treated as quite the novelty in this series, and has a rocky relationship with his father. Seen as the protector, he is deadly in more ways than one.
Victor Frankenstein
Played (very deftly) by Harry Treadaway, we all know what's up with this guy. He has several creations in Penny Dreadful, not one of them is big and green with bolts sticking out of their neck.
Caliban
Played (with all the bluster and pomposity one could expect from) by Rory Kinnear. He is the Frankenstein monster, and all he wants is affection. He has the heart of a poet, but the capability to rip someone in half with his bare hands. Very faithful to the original Mary Shelley creation.
Brona Croft/Lily
Played by (a now understandable) Billie Piper... well, shit I don't want to give any of her arc away.
Dorian Gray
Played by (a shamefully underutilized, so far) Reeve Carney, Dorian Gray will fuck anything. He is sophisticated, charming, and willing to accept just about anybody as a potential partner (even Mr. Hartnett).
Evelyn Poole
Played by (the hammy equal to Eva Green) a crazy-ass Helen McCrory, she appeared briefly in Season 1 as a party psychic. She returns in Season 2 and engages in some horrific shit.
There really isn't anything like this on television. It likes to take time with its plot and let the characters be characters, not unlike The Wire, takes some big chances on the horror it uses, focuses on sexuality for a good portion on the series, and doesn't skimp on the dialogue. The cinematography is gorgeous, dark, and consistently good.
Give it a whirl. It's kinda silly, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.
jungleroomx on
+1
Posts
Doc is getting a tad creepy, playing with dead bodies not withstanding...
I love, love, love this show. And so far season 2 seems to be shaping up to be even better than season one. Evelyn Poole is one of the creepiest, scariest characters on TV.
It's just excellent. That bit with
The dreaded Set-Things-Up episode.
I mean I know it's going to be a key one going forward from here on out, but almost nothing happened really. Just, motivations, fleshing out current threads a bit, even a dead end.
I hope next weeks will advance things a bit more.
Eva Green is absolutely the main character at this point. Hartnett, Dalton, and Treadway are all pretty closely matched for second fiddle, followed by the rest of the characters after that.
Evelyn is incredibly fucked and I can't wait to see her die, hopefully by means of
Yeah, practically nothing happened in the most recent episode, but the cut wife episode before that was probably my favorite the show has ever done. Just beautiful, a focused and self contained short film that happened to add a lot to Vanessa's character.
What a fantastic show. I loved the twist on Dracula the first season had, and the Frankenstein storyline is probably the most faithful to the novel I've ever seen on film. I hope, one day, we'll get an honest to goodness Dracula on the show.
The Cut-Wife episode was so good. Patti LuPone just owned that role. I love how they're getting a lot of broadway influenced people into the show, because it fits with the bombastic theatrics that the show bases itself on. Rory Kinnear kills it as Caliban, or John Claire as it is now, and is both ridiculously over-the-top and sympathetic at the same time. He grew up reading drama, it's all he knows. It's amazing.
I'm only sad there's not much more discussion here about the show. Hell, season 2 is running a cool 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
In the Cut Wife episode,
I'm a bit confused as to why Evelyn didn't just tell that landlord guy to bring her Vanessa. She had her dead to rights and then just let her go. Maybe she has a plan for her, I'll wait and see. I'm also curious about what will happen once Vanessa opens up Chekov's Book.
The doc is going to ride the extra special brand of creepy train all season, isn't he.
Yeah he's swinging for the fences. The whole show is. They didn't start over after the tonal shift in the first season and they've continued to push the boundaries in the second. I hope this episode on Sunday we get something like the seance or possession episodes we got last season.
Also, they need to let the dog out, if you get my drift.
The slow burn of this show can be kind of infuriating, but the payoffs have always been pretty substantial. Example: Grand Guginol last season.
If you remember last season they put everything on a course that people thought was certain, slowed the tempo a bit, and then just went batshit crazy.
Holy shit.
This episode was great.
I'd like to reiterate that just when I think Penny Dreadful has run out of ways to present itself as the most incredibly fucked up show to ever be on television, they go and do that fucking voodoo doll and that end scene.
This show is such a fucking honey badger.
@DasUberEdward it's only 8 episodes for S1, so it's not like there's a lot of choices there.
S2 is really really good.
What they did to Gladys is just so... jesus christ.
I'm kind of miffed at how utterly marginalized Sir Malcolm is this season, playing almost no part other than a bafoon falling for Evelyn.
But I guess that would require a lot more screen time, and compromises will have to be made somewhere when the focus of the season is so clearly on Vanessa and the Frankensteins.
I assume he'll snap out of it eventually, though. It's kind of odd no one connected the new woman in Malcolm's life with the attempted one in Ethan's/the witches. Though, I suppose he only told the mole...bah.
And damnit Doc. Just damnit.
Dorian Gray's whole subplot went nowhere and had essentially no purpose except to be a flimsy pretext for sex scenes. Frankenstein's subplot was okay-ish but didn't actually have anything to do with anything else that was happening (I'm pretty sure the brief scene in episode 7 where Ethan teaches Viktor how to shoot is literally the only bit of emotional interaction Viktor ever had with any cast member other than Caliban, who in turn never interacted with anyone other than Viktor). Ethan didn't have much of a clear role and mostly served as a source of ridiculous "twists" that came out of nowhere and affected nothing. Malcolm's arc was stalled for a long time in the middle and its resolution didn't really ring true to me. Even the main vampire arc wasn't all that interesting, largely due to their being no real sense of agency on the part of the antagonists (the cast would just occasionally wander into an abandoned warehouse and shoot some thralls for no special reason).
I haven't watched the second season yet, but I probably should. This show was always right on the verge of "this would be really good if the writers would get their shit together and focus", and maybe they've had time to cut their teeth and figure things out by now. And I guess even if they fuck it up again there's even odds that Eva Green will salvage it somehow.
I could swear that Vanessa had run into Brona while she was out with Ethan at one point.
Edit: yup, apparently episode 1.4
We haven't gotten a lot of breathing room this season.
And I agree with a lot of people here about Dorian, but he does serve to flesh out London quite a bit more than if he wasn't here.
But dude needs to present his purpose soon or I'm just going to fast forward his scenes.
I wonder how this whole ball thing will play out. I have a feeling it's not going to be good.
Probably a perceptive prediction.
Do we think next season is going to be Ethan and his past?
I do hope so.
I'd like to see more of the characters fleshed out aside from Vanessa and Malcolm.
I hope Ethan just turns that Pinkterton guy into a corpse the second they met again.