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Penny Dreadful 3.08. and 3.09. (Season and Show finale)
It will be a while until I’m sure how I feel about this. But here we go.
In retrospect, Vanessa repeatedly saying – to Dr. Seward, to the Orderly – that her first heroine was Joan of Arc (and that she first encountered the Shakespeare version, and later the saint, and was fascinated by the woman who was a witch and a saint at the same time – was massive foreshadowing. And for the kind of narrative this show was, plus for Vanessa’s ongoing struggle between God and the Devil, this certainly was one logical ending. The execution, no pun intended, is what makes me so torn. Starting with Vanessa basically only having two scenes in the finale, and none in the preceding episode. If my heroine dies to save the world, I want to see her work towards it. (Oh, and if we get a Dark Phoenix story, I do want to see some Dark Phoenix in action.) On the other – third? – hand again, there is a part of me that is fascinated by just how unrelentingly The Passion of St. Vanessa this show was, with a religious narrative like that pulled off in this day and age. And Ethan as the angry former believer who still does the exorcism on Vanessa in season 1 (the first time she asked him to kill her!) with the medal of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, does the blasphemous anti-Our Father mid season in s3 in his own rock bottom and regains his faith in time to become what Vanessa asks of him, the instrument of her delivery, complete with both of them praying the Our Father together. Even that Vanessa doesn’t commit suicide to achieve the same end works with how much of her struggle was about her faith; for someone as Catholic as she, it would damn her as surely as continuing to enable the apocalypse would.
(And then there’s there’s my inner tv shower who is frustrated we never got a single scene between Vanessa and Malcolm for the entire season, letters and telegrams not withstanding, because I am invested in that relationship, but that’s not the main issue.)
What I had no problem with and thought was a good narrative choice, despite having wished for something more bloody in previous reviews: Lily and the way she resolved things with Victor and Dorian, then went her own way. Let’s hear it for Billie Piper, people. In a show with the glorious Eva Green it’s easy to get overlooked, but not only was Lily a great character throughout the season (more consistent and better written than in season 2, because there was no need to disguise the truth about her), but Billie Piper rocked that monologue about Brona’s daughter which finally got through to Victor how truly monstrous what he intended to do was. That was a fantastic scene, and while I had hoped for some Dorian brutalization last week, upon reflection I like what followed better – Lily leaving him among the portraits to his inner emptiness and utterly rejecting that life and hollowness for herself. (Second time someone dumped you, Dorian. Maybe you should take a hint.) BTW, since the show is now over, this also makes Lily the first Female Creature in any version of the Frankenstein story which at the end of it is not only alive but neither with the male Creature nor the Doctor, but going her own way.
Victor at last clueing in to the fact that you can’t (or shouldn’t, if you have the means to) take people’s memories and personality traits in order to make them what you want them to be was late in the day, but happen it did, and so he freed Lily from the chains he’d put her into. (He must have known there was the very real possibility she would kill him for what he had previously done, which made the act not redemption but a first step towards same. In time to reunite with Malcolm & Co., which I suspect was the main reason Henry Jekyll was working at Bedlam. Speaking of Henry, I took the reveal that his family title is Hyde and that Victor, upon hearing that his father is dead, addresses him as Lord Hyde as a neat addition to the tale but not as saying that the transformation will never happen . I mean, Henry explicitly announces that as opposed to Victor, he will never stop, and Victor’s observation that Henry will never get the respect and acceptance in high society he craves is as good an explanation as any why Henry, in the future, will end up using the drug on himself.
The Creature/John Clare loses his refound family as one of my commenters predicted he would: the Orderly’s son dies, Marjorie insists that her resurrected husband should get Dr. Frankenstein to perform his resurrection trade on the boy, too, and John Clare is horrified and says no. This makes character sense all around – of course a mother who’s just been through the lengthy death of her child and seen her husband return from the dead would ask for this, and of course self-loathing John Clare who knows he’s not who he was and whose only other base of comparison is Lily who when he last saw her talked casually of killing mortals by the dozens would reject it. (What neither of them brings up, and why I think John Clare made the right choice: as has been said repeatedly this season, Victor’s Creatures are immortal. They don’t age. An immortal child, before you can say Claudia from Interview of the Vampire and Kenny from Highlander, is always a terrible idea, especially for the person locked in a child’s body throughout eternity.) I think that was why he showed up at Sir Malcolm’s just in time to catch Vanessa’s funeral – he wanted to tell her about this, as his only friend and confidante, and that’s how he finds out she’s dead, which is an additional heartbreak but allows us to end with Rory Kinnear reciting Wordsworth as John Clare sits at Vanessa’s grave.
For all that sadness, the finale still doesn’t feel depressing in the way the s2 one did, not least because of all the reunions, new meetings and applied lessons learned. Catriona Hartdegen and Dr. Seward teaming up with Malcolm, Ethan and Kaetaney was great – as was Catriona, Dr. Seward and Kaetaney surviving the season and thus the show, for I had been afraid at least one of them would die. I loved Dr. Seward’s dealings with Renfield, especially the sequence where she uses hypnotism to guide him into a trance so she can get him to reveal where Dracula is; it’s both a callback to the novel (with a twist) and within the showverse a great pay off to the set up of Dr. Seward’s skills in that department. Catriona saving Malcolm from suicide-post-vampire-bite-to-prevent-vampirization by simply burning his wound via hot iron instead was equally great, and there was in general some sparkage between them which if he and the audience would not have been fixated on finding Vanessa I’d say was promising.
The reveal that Kaetanay, too, is a werewolf, and the one who turned Ethan is like the reveal of Ethan’s werewolfness in the s1 finale the least surprising reveal ever, because we’ve only been predicting it all season. Mind you, either Kaetanay can control his transformations better, or Malcolm was fine with travelling with a werewolf for months, which, since it’s Malcolm, he probably was. And may I say again: am I ever glad Kaetanay did not go the way of Sembene.
Minor detail I loved in the big showdown: that Malcolm, when Dracula makes his “Vanessa likes you, so you can all go now and survive if you want” offer, doesn’t take it for granted he should decide they should all die instead, but tells the others to go and leaves the decision to them. And before that, that he asks Dracula about Mina; Malcolm may have been a neglectful father to her who didn’t become obsessed until it was too late, not to mention that his relationship with Vanessa was always more intense, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her, or that his guilt ended when he killed her. Dracula’s statement that Mina only ever was a tool to get Vanessa in his utter disregard of her personhood, btw, is the best counter to any “Dracula is a feminist” claim which I’m afraid might be made. I think it also contributes to Dr. Seward’s and Catriona’s utter unimpressedness with him and determination to stay with the fight.
The Malcolm, Ethan and Victor conversation about Vanessa later: if it weren’t for the fact John Logan himself has said this is really the end and the show is over, because no Vanessa, no show, I’d taken Malcolm bringing up the Indian belief of reincarnation and asking the boys whether such a thing isn’t possible after all as a hint he will explore resurrection possibilities for Vanessa next season. As it is, I only thought that until googling and finding this interview with Logan about Vanessa and why the show ended this way. (Which, btw, is worth reading; I’ll quote from it at the end of this review.) Anyway, Victor, fresh from his Lily learned lesson, does not make the obvious offer, and Ethan is firm on Vanessa being where she wants to be. His later quiet sitting together with Malcolm in Vanessa’s room, and telling Malcolm “you’re my family now” together with neither of them intending to run again instead of facing their problems leaves them in an emotionally shattered and yet also open for comfort space; again, very different from the end of s2 with everyone alone. Not to mention that they now know a therapist who’s handy with a knife and has no time for male foolishness. I think I still want Malcolm/Vanessa’s Ghost for Yuletide, because he never had the chance to say goodbye to her (and vice versa). And then I want “John Clare meets Lily again, and they become friends” (emphasis on friends) as well as “Dr. Seward and Catriona do Victorian time travel”.
I’m not ready yet to let go of the show, I suppose. But I’m certainly glad to have had it for three years.
Now, key quotes from Logan’s interview:
“I was just joking that Flaubert said ‘Bovary, c’est moi.’ And I say, “Vanessa Ives, c’est moi,'” noted Logan
And:
Logan: This is a show about Vanessa Ives and her struggle with faith — how one woman grapples with God and the devil. Midway through the second season, when we were filming it —so about two years ago— I realized where we were heading. A woman who loses her faith in the second season, she has to grasp her way back. What that would take? To me, that was an apotheosis — she would find peace finally with God. I realized that’s where the show was heading, and so I talked to Eva about it and then I talked to David.
There was no doubt in your mind that it had to end?
Logan: No doubt in my mind. Eva Green really is my muse, and I set out to write a story about a very complicated character that I love deeply. She represents so much of what I am, what I hope to be, what I fear I am. I’m deeply invested in that character. Then I met an artist, Eva Green, who inspired me more than any actor I’ve ever worked with before, and that became the show for me. To continue it past Vanessa’s death would be, for me, an act of bad faith.
and
I’m an Irish-American writer, and the idea of damnation and salvation are in my DNA. That’s really what this show is about and really that’s a subject I will always return to, because at the end of the day, I don’t write to darkness. I write toward redemption. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “Penny Dreadful” or “Just Kids” or “Skyfall” — you have to write to the light.
Given a certain common element of Penny Dreadful and Skyfall, I’ve got to wonder now whether someone who loves her will kill Patti Smith in Just Kids…
In retrospect, Vanessa repeatedly saying – to Dr. Seward, to the Orderly – that her first heroine was Joan of Arc (and that she first encountered the Shakespeare version, and later the saint, and was fascinated by the woman who was a witch and a saint at the same time – was massive foreshadowing. And for the kind of narrative this show was, plus for Vanessa’s ongoing struggle between God and the Devil, this certainly was one logical ending. The execution, no pun intended, is what makes me so torn. Starting with Vanessa basically only having two scenes in the finale, and none in the preceding episode. If my heroine dies to save the world, I want to see her work towards it. (Oh, and if we get a Dark Phoenix story, I do want to see some Dark Phoenix in action.) On the other – third? – hand again, there is a part of me that is fascinated by just how unrelentingly The Passion of St. Vanessa this show was, with a religious narrative like that pulled off in this day and age. And Ethan as the angry former believer who still does the exorcism on Vanessa in season 1 (the first time she asked him to kill her!) with the medal of St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, does the blasphemous anti-Our Father mid season in s3 in his own rock bottom and regains his faith in time to become what Vanessa asks of him, the instrument of her delivery, complete with both of them praying the Our Father together. Even that Vanessa doesn’t commit suicide to achieve the same end works with how much of her struggle was about her faith; for someone as Catholic as she, it would damn her as surely as continuing to enable the apocalypse would.
(And then there’s there’s my inner tv shower who is frustrated we never got a single scene between Vanessa and Malcolm for the entire season, letters and telegrams not withstanding, because I am invested in that relationship, but that’s not the main issue.)
What I had no problem with and thought was a good narrative choice, despite having wished for something more bloody in previous reviews: Lily and the way she resolved things with Victor and Dorian, then went her own way. Let’s hear it for Billie Piper, people. In a show with the glorious Eva Green it’s easy to get overlooked, but not only was Lily a great character throughout the season (more consistent and better written than in season 2, because there was no need to disguise the truth about her), but Billie Piper rocked that monologue about Brona’s daughter which finally got through to Victor how truly monstrous what he intended to do was. That was a fantastic scene, and while I had hoped for some Dorian brutalization last week, upon reflection I like what followed better – Lily leaving him among the portraits to his inner emptiness and utterly rejecting that life and hollowness for herself. (Second time someone dumped you, Dorian. Maybe you should take a hint.) BTW, since the show is now over, this also makes Lily the first Female Creature in any version of the Frankenstein story which at the end of it is not only alive but neither with the male Creature nor the Doctor, but going her own way.
Victor at last clueing in to the fact that you can’t (or shouldn’t, if you have the means to) take people’s memories and personality traits in order to make them what you want them to be was late in the day, but happen it did, and so he freed Lily from the chains he’d put her into. (He must have known there was the very real possibility she would kill him for what he had previously done, which made the act not redemption but a first step towards same. In time to reunite with Malcolm & Co., which I suspect was the main reason Henry Jekyll was working at Bedlam. Speaking of Henry, I took the reveal that his family title is Hyde and that Victor, upon hearing that his father is dead, addresses him as Lord Hyde as a neat addition to the tale but not as saying that the transformation will never happen . I mean, Henry explicitly announces that as opposed to Victor, he will never stop, and Victor’s observation that Henry will never get the respect and acceptance in high society he craves is as good an explanation as any why Henry, in the future, will end up using the drug on himself.
The Creature/John Clare loses his refound family as one of my commenters predicted he would: the Orderly’s son dies, Marjorie insists that her resurrected husband should get Dr. Frankenstein to perform his resurrection trade on the boy, too, and John Clare is horrified and says no. This makes character sense all around – of course a mother who’s just been through the lengthy death of her child and seen her husband return from the dead would ask for this, and of course self-loathing John Clare who knows he’s not who he was and whose only other base of comparison is Lily who when he last saw her talked casually of killing mortals by the dozens would reject it. (What neither of them brings up, and why I think John Clare made the right choice: as has been said repeatedly this season, Victor’s Creatures are immortal. They don’t age. An immortal child, before you can say Claudia from Interview of the Vampire and Kenny from Highlander, is always a terrible idea, especially for the person locked in a child’s body throughout eternity.) I think that was why he showed up at Sir Malcolm’s just in time to catch Vanessa’s funeral – he wanted to tell her about this, as his only friend and confidante, and that’s how he finds out she’s dead, which is an additional heartbreak but allows us to end with Rory Kinnear reciting Wordsworth as John Clare sits at Vanessa’s grave.
For all that sadness, the finale still doesn’t feel depressing in the way the s2 one did, not least because of all the reunions, new meetings and applied lessons learned. Catriona Hartdegen and Dr. Seward teaming up with Malcolm, Ethan and Kaetaney was great – as was Catriona, Dr. Seward and Kaetaney surviving the season and thus the show, for I had been afraid at least one of them would die. I loved Dr. Seward’s dealings with Renfield, especially the sequence where she uses hypnotism to guide him into a trance so she can get him to reveal where Dracula is; it’s both a callback to the novel (with a twist) and within the showverse a great pay off to the set up of Dr. Seward’s skills in that department. Catriona saving Malcolm from suicide-post-vampire-bite-to-prevent-vampirization by simply burning his wound via hot iron instead was equally great, and there was in general some sparkage between them which if he and the audience would not have been fixated on finding Vanessa I’d say was promising.
The reveal that Kaetanay, too, is a werewolf, and the one who turned Ethan is like the reveal of Ethan’s werewolfness in the s1 finale the least surprising reveal ever, because we’ve only been predicting it all season. Mind you, either Kaetanay can control his transformations better, or Malcolm was fine with travelling with a werewolf for months, which, since it’s Malcolm, he probably was. And may I say again: am I ever glad Kaetanay did not go the way of Sembene.
Minor detail I loved in the big showdown: that Malcolm, when Dracula makes his “Vanessa likes you, so you can all go now and survive if you want” offer, doesn’t take it for granted he should decide they should all die instead, but tells the others to go and leaves the decision to them. And before that, that he asks Dracula about Mina; Malcolm may have been a neglectful father to her who didn’t become obsessed until it was too late, not to mention that his relationship with Vanessa was always more intense, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love her, or that his guilt ended when he killed her. Dracula’s statement that Mina only ever was a tool to get Vanessa in his utter disregard of her personhood, btw, is the best counter to any “Dracula is a feminist” claim which I’m afraid might be made. I think it also contributes to Dr. Seward’s and Catriona’s utter unimpressedness with him and determination to stay with the fight.
The Malcolm, Ethan and Victor conversation about Vanessa later: if it weren’t for the fact John Logan himself has said this is really the end and the show is over, because no Vanessa, no show, I’d taken Malcolm bringing up the Indian belief of reincarnation and asking the boys whether such a thing isn’t possible after all as a hint he will explore resurrection possibilities for Vanessa next season. As it is, I only thought that until googling and finding this interview with Logan about Vanessa and why the show ended this way. (Which, btw, is worth reading; I’ll quote from it at the end of this review.) Anyway, Victor, fresh from his Lily learned lesson, does not make the obvious offer, and Ethan is firm on Vanessa being where she wants to be. His later quiet sitting together with Malcolm in Vanessa’s room, and telling Malcolm “you’re my family now” together with neither of them intending to run again instead of facing their problems leaves them in an emotionally shattered and yet also open for comfort space; again, very different from the end of s2 with everyone alone. Not to mention that they now know a therapist who’s handy with a knife and has no time for male foolishness. I think I still want Malcolm/Vanessa’s Ghost for Yuletide, because he never had the chance to say goodbye to her (and vice versa). And then I want “John Clare meets Lily again, and they become friends” (emphasis on friends) as well as “Dr. Seward and Catriona do Victorian time travel”.
I’m not ready yet to let go of the show, I suppose. But I’m certainly glad to have had it for three years.
Now, key quotes from Logan’s interview:
“I was just joking that Flaubert said ‘Bovary, c’est moi.’ And I say, “Vanessa Ives, c’est moi,'” noted Logan
And:
Logan: This is a show about Vanessa Ives and her struggle with faith — how one woman grapples with God and the devil. Midway through the second season, when we were filming it —so about two years ago— I realized where we were heading. A woman who loses her faith in the second season, she has to grasp her way back. What that would take? To me, that was an apotheosis — she would find peace finally with God. I realized that’s where the show was heading, and so I talked to Eva about it and then I talked to David.
There was no doubt in your mind that it had to end?
Logan: No doubt in my mind. Eva Green really is my muse, and I set out to write a story about a very complicated character that I love deeply. She represents so much of what I am, what I hope to be, what I fear I am. I’m deeply invested in that character. Then I met an artist, Eva Green, who inspired me more than any actor I’ve ever worked with before, and that became the show for me. To continue it past Vanessa’s death would be, for me, an act of bad faith.
and
I’m an Irish-American writer, and the idea of damnation and salvation are in my DNA. That’s really what this show is about and really that’s a subject I will always return to, because at the end of the day, I don’t write to darkness. I write toward redemption. It doesn’t matter whether it’s “Penny Dreadful” or “Just Kids” or “Skyfall” — you have to write to the light.
Given a certain common element of Penny Dreadful and Skyfall, I’ve got to wonder now whether someone who loves her will kill Patti Smith in Just Kids…
no subject
We talked about this at home when we watched the episode where he returns to London - he seems to have come to terms with the way he looks, and suddenly, we have scenes where people treat him normally, like the man who just has a friendly chat with him on the wagon. Almost as if he allows himself to see the kindness of others now, too.
no subject
I reread the book annually, because I teach it, and the saddest thing is how the Creature never really has a conversation with anyone but Victor or Walton or very briefly with blind M. de Lacey, because the sight of him makes everyone either flee or attack. The utter loneliness of it.
no subject
no subject
I was never a big fan of Frankenstein movies -- was more of a Dracula person -- but I've gotten really interested because of teaching the book so often. (I teach writing and literature to engineering students and it's a great text to talk about scientific ethics and responsibility and etc.) One of the reasons I'm so preoccupied with John Clare and with Lily is because I do think it's one of the more interesting interpretations to date.
no subject
That sounds totally interesting. I love classes that crossover disciplines.
I read more vampire stuff all in all, but I'm usually all for artificial life - clones, robots, androids, whathaveyou. In that respect, it's odd that I never really latched onto Frankenstein.
I love Lily. I wish there had been more of her. I was very put off by Caliban's violence in Season 1, and there is a lot about his storyline I don't like stylistically. But as sad as the place is where he ends up, I am glad that it is much less nihilistic than that of the original creature.