Pretty Awful
The first time I came across the title Penny Dreadful was somewhen last year when cleolinda mentioned she was catching up on this series on her livejournal (which I followed for her Hannibal recaps). I got the drift that it was some drama dealing with literary characters in the Victorian era starring Eva Green, but somehow never looked into it. Two weeks ago, for some reason I referenced the show to my mother, and thought how odd it actually is that it didn’t catch my eye, given it deals with supernatural Victorian shenanigans, and that my fondness for Kuroshitsuji has been going strong for two years now. So over the course of a rainy cold weekend at home, I caught up with all of season one and two, the penultimate episode of which aired yesterday. And it certainly was an experience.
The main idea behind this series isn’t new - pit a variety of classic Gothic novel characters against each other to maximise the horror. Universal has been doing it for ages (yet not learned a lesson from it, given how stubbornly they are trying to re-kickstart their monster franchises, last instance being Dracula Untold), and Sean Connery made his last movie work the wonderfully horrible comic adaption League of the Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was a flop both with the critics and the audience. A certain podcast has been discussing whether, in respect of comic adaptions now actually being both good and successful, riding on Marvel’s coattails, a second shot should be taken at this team (which included Alan Quatermain, Tom Sawyer, Dr. Jekyll, Mina Harker, Dorian Grey, Captain Nemo, and the Invisible Man), to which Mason replied “Well, we have Penny Dreadful for that, haven’t we? It’s silly, but it’s fun.”
Penny Dreadful as a term refers to the Victorian equivalent of pulp fiction, short stories published as cheap booklets, usually featuring gruesome stories or murder mysteries. The series picks up the first episodes in a London post-Jack-the-Ripper with a horrible, mysterious murder, and the appearance of what seems to be a supernatural investigation team, formed by Sir Malcom Murray (ex-Bond Timothy Dalton) and Miss Vanessa Ives (Eva Green). While the former bullies the police into handing him confidential information, the latter hires Wild West Show sharpshooter Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) to assist in a nightly raid against unholy creatures. Looking for a doctor’s assessment on what exactly they are fighting, they make acquaintance with Viktor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), who is not bound by moral or religion and engaged in his own scientific projects on the side. Ethan learns that Sir Malcom is looking for his missing daughter, Mina Harker, who he believes was kidnapped by the leader of the creatures, and Mina’s old friend Vanessa is helping him by using her unusual gifts. Slowly, the supernatural underworld of London begins to swallow all of the characters, each of them bringing their own pack of past guilt to drag them down.
This series started airing only weeks after NBC’s Dracula had ended - a cancelled show starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula, who came to London posing as Nikola Tesla The Prestige’s David Bowie an American businessman dealing in wireless energy with the hidden agenda of taking revenge on the Order of the Dragon that once cursed him. It was a steampunk-esque take on the Bram Stoker lore with the interesting plot deviation that Van Helsing and Dracula were working together in this version, and Renfield being Dracula’s Afroamerican (REPRESENTATION!) and hypercompetent bodyguard and right hand. The show was slightly ridiculous and suffered from the obvious disagreements Rhys-Meyers had with the director on the term “overacting”, but it was fun, in a way, and pretty to look at.
Penny Dreadful has a Mina, too, and a Van Helsing, and vampires, and Sir Malcom has an African (REPRESENTATION) hypercompetent Battle Butler. Different from the NBC take, however, it is a British-American co-production, which gives us some beautiful shots of the English countryside especially in season 2, and has been renewed for a third season already. The production values are definitely higher, it has big name stars going for it, and 50 minute long episodes. So, what could go wrong?
Oh boy.
OH BOY.
There is one thing a show like this just cannot, must not, do, and that is taking itself one hundred percent seriously. Seeing how I first encountered it in a Hannibal context, let me elaborate on that:
Hannibal is dark and disturbing, but at the same time very self-aware of how impossible many things are. The murders staged are often too elaborate to fit the timeframe they are given, and Fuller openly admits that he doesn’t care for realism here and sees Hannibal as an almost supernatural creature, a fallen angel from his point of view. That is also why Hannibal is incredibly self-aware and leaning on the fourth wall almost constantly, down to looking straight into the camera like he’s on The Office at times, and constantly makes cannibalistic puns he can get away with as if they are unheard by others in the scene (unless they are Chilton). From his dated suits to his “I would love to have you to dinner”, he seems to be aware he is the odd one out in a otherwise serious crime show, and that’s how it works. Had they tried to make all of it entirely serious, it would have been a very different show. The way they set it up, it is a bored demonic, hyper-aware being enjoying toying with humans who have their own, much darker world.
And that’s what Penny Dreadful fails to do, entirely. This series tosses Universal’s original Wolfman, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into the same pot along with The Exorcist, peppering it with Egyptian and Biblical references, adding medieval witchlore and Eva Green, and then bake the whole thing in a dough of grimdark. If you have a character introduce himself with dramatic music swelling and a too-long beat with “My name is... Dorian Grey” and are 150% serious about that, you messed up somewhere, especially if he already is a social butterfly in your universe and not a newcomer to town. Names are hidden too long in an attempt to create tension, and always revealed right before a cut and a beat, and everyone with half a brain has long since figured it out already, anyway. Of course he’s Dorian Grey. Of course he’s Abraham Van Helsing. Of course she’s Mina Harker. I complained about the same thing with Dracula, set a year after Jack the Ripper:
“I thought we had killed the last one of that kind in London, after he killed all these women. Gruesome thing, that, in Whitechapel. And then these letters to the police. Signed From Hell. Jack the Ripper, che.”
It almost seems as if the writers couldn’t help going Geeeeet it?? :D :D even though everyone who paid even a little attention will immediately make the connection without this clumsy “As you know, Bob” exposition.
The odd thing is, Penny Dreadful doesn’t really know if it wants to avoid this trope or no. We literally get no backstory whatsoever on what happened to poor Keanu Reeves Jonathan Harker in this version - given Van Helsing appears in a different context, it seems we can’t really take Bram Stoker’s version for reference, so your guess is as good as mine, and the same thing goes for Frankenstein’s backstory. The show clearly expects you to be familiar with these stories and legends, yet at the same time tries to be coy about Ethan being a werewolf which is glaringly obvious. There is a scene where they are in the zoo and for some random reason wolves are running free (why?? wejustdon’tknow.gif) and he can will them into submission, and yet the reveal is treated as a plottwist in the last episode of the season. Maybe the big surprise was supposed to be that he didn’t change into Taylor Lautner, I don’t know.
The biggest issue is, however, that the show can’t decide to settle on one mythology, which also happened to Supernatural, badly. With Mina being kidnapped by a “Master” that creates vampires, this appears to be some version of Dracula, yet the plot reveals he is actually after Vanessa Ives, wishing for her to bear his children and become “the mother of evil” as foretold in an Egyptian (!) myth of the unholy union of Amunet and Amun-Ra. This eventually leads to a The Exorcist-style possession of her, including walking on walls and levitating and mutilation which they attempt to battle with a catholic priest, and season two reveals that when Lucifer was cast from heaven, another brother of his was as well, and while the former ended up in hell, the other became a vampire on earth, and the only weapon against them is LUPUS DEI, hound of god a.k.a. Taylor Lautner I mean a werewolf. DON’T ASK ME, I DON’T KNOW EITHER.
All of this seems to be made up as they go along, and gives me Gora-vibes of screenwriting. Someone clearly went “Oh, Victorians were all about Egyptian stuff! We should include random hieroglyphs and ominous Egyptian gods!”. Someone added “Yeah, but you know, even though Vanessa as a catholic in anglican England is an odd one out, we should totally include classic devil possession and exorcisms and Lucifer myths, because Catholic Church vs. Vampires works always in movies and books, right?”. And yet another one said “I saw Van Helsing with Hugh Jackman yesterday, uh, how about we do that whole thing with werewolves being the only thing that can kill vampires? Only the vampire is now, uh, like Lucifer’s brother?”
And some executive producer said “BRILLIANT” and approved of all this, nevermind the fact that all of this makes no sense whatsoever regarding the timelines. Are the Egyptian gods supposed to be just names for Lucifer and co.? How does the rest of Egyptian mythology tie into this? If we are given no other information on Mina and Jonathan, has Vlad Tepes anything at all to do with vampire myths? What colour is green? The show tries to flesh out a mythology of its own, being dead serious about it, but merrily handwaves everything about it. Going back to Hannibal - if you only vaguely say “in my mind, he’s Lucifer and can do basically anything, but he’s mortal, and I won’t explain anything else”, okay. But if you try to explain the origins and myths behind it, those should make sense, or else, just skip it if it’s not relevant. If your endgame of course is Lucifer vs. the world, it sort of is relevant and you should pour some more effort into your lore. It’s not as with Supernatural, where they wrote from season to season for ten agonising cycles now, but a show with so far only seventeen episodes. If you can’t manage coherency on that scale, you’re dreaming too big.
This lack of foresight also shows clearly in something of the latest episode, actually, which is the problem of full moon. In the first season, we see Ethan wolf out three times, which probably might match the narrative (maybe). In the second season, however, there is a full moon in two consecutive episodes, and we really don’t get the impression a month has passed, as everything seems super urgent and beat after beat. Did the evil guys take a week off for holiday purposes? Who knows, but the plot demanded wolf transformation, so full moon it is, constellations be damned!
Also, the witches only have power at night, so let us make sure the characters sit the whole day discussing how they won’t be able to fight at night so they only move at dusk. It makes sense in context not.
This lack of genre-savviness is even worse given that the show once does attempt to be all self-aware, which is when a theatre director complains to The Creature that no-one cares about Shakespeare any more, but everyone just is into “these awful Penny Dreadfuls”, and that his stage now performs an adaption of Sweeney Todd rather than Twelfth Night. This creates an obvious paradox, as with all these booklets published, so should have been stories about vampires (Carmilla?) and undead creatures, even if due to them existing in this universe as people, apparently at least Dracula and Frankenstein do not, for whatever reason. This would have been a good point to acknowledge it, given that romantic poets constantly are referenced, mentioning that these authors either died young with unfinished manuscripts, or wrote different books, but alas.
Season one’s finale then takes place in said theatre as another attempt at being aware of the “theatrical” and contrived nature of this show, but it falls flat in face of all the seriousness it tries to convey in general. Season two then doesn’t even bother and wants to be entirely serious, failing entirely due to design choices. The vampires were generic whitefaced brides with fangs or creepy scarred and bald things with red eyes, and the showrunner is very proud on how he moved on to create the witches, which are... creepy scarred and bald things with green eyes.
- “One of the great challenges to us, and to all the departments, was in trying to find a way to present our witches, because we didn’t want old crones with tall black hats,” Logan says. “So we tried to find a Penny Dreadful version of witches, which is on one hand both terribly attractive and also terribly frightening. Because I think that’s the sweet spot of this show, that things can be beautiful and horrifying simultaneously-like all the characters.”
In their human versions, they have curly hair and do ridiculous hissing, and that's literally all. Design choices are something that bugs me in general - while admittedly my mental image of Dorian Grey doesn’t exactly overlap with Oscar Wilde’s version, I’m still fairly sure that this incarnation who looks like a 90s boyband member, from the middle parting down to the random necklace, is even further from it.
Nevermind The Creature, who looks like he went to a Gothic make-over gone wrong with that weird lipstick, and for some reason never uses his long silky hair to simply hide his scars like that, given he hardly looks that different apart from that.
The show also follows the Game of Thrones recipe for success, which is “throw a random sex scene into about every episode and you’re good”, obviously going for the whole “Oh, the repressed Victorians were actually super kinky deep down uwu” angle. Most of the time, the sex has no relevance other than being there for the audience to enjoy, and Dorian Grey’s entire purpose in the first season was to bang half the cast. Yes, even Josh Hartnett, and we get a top-or-bottom discussion later. His sex with Vanessa triggers her possession, and Frankenstein comments it might be due to a sexual trauma she experienced in her childhood - one more example of the show completely frolicking about without picking up it’s mythology. Vanessa’s origin episode has her lobotomised for madness, and have actual sex with the devil in the tradition of medieval witch myths, and we get pre-Freudian guesses at traumata, and then jump straight back at exorcism. If only they settled on one of these interpretations, it would be an interesting premise, but this show just wants ALL. Modern psychology? Check. Age old superstitions? Check. Mysterious foreign mythology? Check.
There is so much promise to some parts of the story, and mainly that is the first season’s core duo, Sir Malcom and Vanessa. He hates her for ruining Mina’s first marriage, and she resents him for how he treated his children, but in order to rescue Mina, they work together. Their mismatched father-daughter dynamics culminate in him mercy killing Mina and declaring “he already has a daughter”, and it was marvellous. In a show where one main appeal is “everyone has to bang at least once”, we got one relationship that was deeply rooted in family dynamics, and it was honest and bitter, and I wouldn’t have minded a more monster-of-the-week show with just them continuing to hunt down evil, but noooo, we have this weird Lucifer-and-his-unnamed-vampire-brother plot.
Sir Malcom and Miss Ives are judging you and your horrible plot, show.
If you’re a fan of Eva Green, you’ll certainly get more out of the show than I did, because she carries most of the scenes. I applaud her “Mut zur Hässlichkeit”, the bravery to look absolutely horrible in many scenes (I repeat, The Exorcist episode), and while she mainly vaguely scares me in most scenes, those in which she is genuinely sweet are heartwarming. Sadly, not even this dynamic duo can save this trainwreck of a plot.
Summa summarum, Penny Dreadful is an attempt at being a serious and dark show about famous supernatural characters and two OCs battling the apocalypse, ending up falling flat on its nose by taking itself too seriously and thinking itself so wonderfully smart. It has so many loose ends which could have been woven into something amazing with all the promise and budget this show has, but it squanders it on sex scenes, cheap shock moments, and ~Victorian aesthetics~ instead of putting its mind to use it more creatively. What a crying shame. Says Wordsworth.