Penny Dreadful - 'Ebb Tide', 'Perpetual Night' and 'The Blessed Dark'

So very music video.

Okay, so they kind of spammed out the last couple of episodes, so I've held off on reviews until I could binge the final three, which are - as it turns out - the actually final three.

In 'Ebb Tide', Lily dispatches her army of the night to bring her the disembodied hands of their erstwhile abusers and Dorian is clearly having second thoughts about the whole arrangement, as the planned immortal coup becomes some sort of grass roots ultramilitant suffrage movement in which he is basically irrelevant (kind of the story of his life in Penny Dreadful.) Consequently, by the end of this episode he has delivered her into the waiting tranquilisers of Drs Frankenstein and Jekyll to be remade into a 'proper woman'.

"Shoot. Just shoot. Why doesn't she shoot? Do you think she
knows how to shoot?"

Elsewhere, Kaetenay has a vision of destruction, and Ethan returning to find Vanessa a vampiress. Dr Seward has a clash with crazy Renfield when she catches him listening to her recordings, in which she diagnoses Vanessa with some sort of massively multiple personality disorder.

Vanessa, meanwhile, counsels John Clare to love the him that he is now and return to his wife and child, also mentioning their past acquaintance, which of course he does not recall. He follows her advice and is incredibly accepted, telling his family the truth about what happened to him and being welcomed back into the home.

Vanessa then compares note with Catriona 'Cat' Hartedigan, and learns that Dracula is not that vampire. As a flesh-bound fallen angel, he has a reflection, can walk in the daylight, eat garlic and all that, but he can be killed. In fact, in human form he can be killed just like anyone else. So Vanessa gets her gun, goes over to the museum and...

Damnit, Ives!

And we end the episode with Lily a captive and Vanessa surrendering herself to a sweet-talking prince of darkness (who interestingly uses all the same lines as Hecate did on Ethan. 'I love you for who you are. I want to embrace the darkness with you. Lead me to the throne of Hell and I will follow. Love me, fear me, do as I say and I will be your slave.' Dramatic parallel, or did they just go to the same evil pick-up guru*.)

Still, it's not all doom and gloom.

"Who the Hell are you?"
"I believe I'm the woman who just saved your life."
Oh, sick burn!

Okay, actually it is all doom and gloom, and 'Perpetual Night' opens with London wreathed in poisonous fogs as Sir Malcolm, Ethan and Kaetenay return (so apparently Rusk is dead.) Rats swarm on the docks and frogs are thronging in Dr Sewards' office, where she faces down a would-be masterful Renfield and clobbers him proper.

Returning to the mansion, Ethan finds a slaughtered wolf in his bedroom - bastards - and the team are attacked by Dracula's scuttling minions, fighting them off with the help of Cat, who moves straight into take charge mode to cauterise a bite to Sir Malcolm's neck. She then goes off with Sir Malcolm and Dr Seward to question Renfield and find out where Dracula is.

Actually less scary than just Wes Studi. I mean, if you saw
this guy you'd be 'crap! werewolf!' whereas regular Kaetenay
you'd be all 'oh fuck! It's Wes Studi! Cheese it!'

Ethan finds Dracula and is mobbed by the scuttlers, but fortunately wolfs out and - joined by wolfy Kaetenay - slaughters a whole lot of minions before settling in for an expository chat in which Kaetenay explains that he once thought he was given his 'power' to save his people, but ultimately infected Ethan so that he could save the world.

Lily appeals to Frankenstein's better nature, telling him the story of her greatest pain - the death of her infant daughter; thanks for that - and he releases her, realising that his 'cure' is monstrous and breaking with Jekyll, who gives the parting news that his hated father is dead, rendering him the new Lord Hyde. No chemicals here; Henry is already Jekyll and Hyde combined. Frankenstein then leaves the test chamber and immediately runs into Sir Malcolm and company leaving Renfield's cell, so at least he won't be left out of the finale.

Oh, this isn't going to end well.

During the meanwhile, Dorian kicks Lily's army out of his crib. Justine stabs him in the heart for betraying Lily, which obviously does nothing to him. She refuses to go back to her old life, however, explicitly choosing to die instead of living as a slave to men. Lily returns to find her body on the floor and leaves Dorian to his hollow life. I'd kind of been expecting her to trash his portrait, but there you go. Neither of them does anything else in the series anyway, their plot ultimately a closed loop save for its brief intersection with Frankenstein's.

And thus the team meets up for the final clash with Dracula in 'The Blessed Dark'**.

Whatever else, the final 'two-parter' contains some of television's finest
'walking in fog' moments.

Actually, I think a bunch of the above may have happened in 'The Blessed Dark', but such is binge watching, and after the prep the meat of the finale is the showdown.

Kaetenay and Ethan go in through the sewers, because they're the ninjas, and get into a mad scrap with sewer minions, because they're not very good ninjas. The others confront Dracula, who tells them that Vanessa is his - so much for the whole 'I long to serve you' bit - but that they can leave because she doesn't want them hurt, and by the way I totes turned your daughter to use her as bait, lol. Unsurprisingly, Sir Malcolm isn't having it.

"Clearly some people got hurt."

The ensuing fight scene is actually pretty badass. I can not accuse Penny Dreadful of ever skimping on its action scenes. Sir Malcolm and Cat are pure fucking hardcore, while Dr Seward's childhood in tough, East Side New York has left her with top notch combat skills and after some early flailing even Frankenstein finds his metier in the form of a length of pipe. Team Wolf bust in just as things look bleak, and Ethan is sent to find Vanessa as Dracula enters the fray in person and starts lobbing our heroes - who make the error of attacking one at a time, which is a disappointingly bush league mistake for seasoned monster punchers - around the room like rag dolls.

Ethan finds Vanessa, who tells him that she needs to die to save the world. They recite the Lord's Prayer, he shoots her and Dracula goes off looking all sad.

"So... white walls again."

Funeral, poetry, the end.

I'm not even kidding. After three seasons we close on some sort of Anglican guilt trip. A lot of the series has been focused on faith, and in particular Vanessa's faith, but it's such a conservative salvation. Actually, that's pretty apt to so much of the series, which has always toyed with 'damn the patriarchy' while being a little too cosmically patriarchal to quite convince. It was disappointing to go back to Vanessa as a largely hapless pawn incapable of controlling her own power (although in fairness, this perhaps applies to all characters with power, including Gray, the werewolves and John Clare, whose son dies and whose wife kicks him out for refusing to get Frankenstein to transform the boy into an immortal abomination, by the by,) and disappointing that we'll never get to see the team joining Lyle in Egypt to battle mummies (barring spin off possibilities; Dime Novel, perhaps.)

I've never been Penny Dreadful's biggest fan, but it showed - and I would say squandered - a lot of potential in Season 3. While it wanted to be edgy, great chunks of its core concepts remained mired in stodgy conservatism - love is good, sex is bad; a woman's power exists to service men (or masculine entities); faith = conventional religion; minority characters service the narrative of the European leads - leaving the better aspects of the show somewhat adrift. It also took much too long to get to a place where the flawed (deliberately) characters were exposed enough to become sympathetic or likable, leaving Season 1 in particular hard to invest in, and Dorian Gray always seemed somewhat pointless here.

On the upside, the show was never less than lavish, with its mix of gorgeous interiors, grey streets and grim hovels, free flowing blood and brutal action. Alas, it never quite found its flow, and its swift ending after suggestions of six seasons (and a movie?) hints that perhaps it had terminally lost its way.

Here's hoping that Eva Green's next role has more opportunities for her to smile.

* A series of evil seminars given by Bowie's Goblin King, perhaps.