Penny Dreadful - 'Verbis Diabolo'

"We are men of action; lies do not become us."

So, apparently Ives lost the pray off, as represented by drawing a scorpion in her own blood, so Sir Malcolm recommends she do some charity work in a soup kitchen of sorts. Here she meets the Creature and discusses philosophy and religion. Meanwhile, Evelyn Poole gives Sir Malcolm the mystic love whammy, while Frankensteni tries to rehabilitate the new Creature by leading her to believe she is his amnesiac cousin (and thank fuck, she's lost the bloody Oirish accent.)

Recruiting antiquarian linguist and occult dabbler Lyle, Team Fuckwit plot to steal the only known sample of the Verbis Diablo from the British Museum in a desperately dull heist which involves nothing more dangerous than pretending Chandler is being snuck in to see the Museum's collection of porn (because in Penny Dreadful, everything has to connect to sex somehow.) Speaking of, Dorian Gray is chatted up by a painfully abrupt transsexual prostitute in a scene which just cements my conviction that the character is basically just there to be the one getting laid if there's no other sex this week.

It is revealed that Lyle is working for Poole, but I confess to being off my game by this stage as Hecate Poole brings her mother a baby, whose heart is placed in a doll of Vanessa Ives, for which scene absolutely fuck you, Penny Dreadful; you are not good enough to earn that sort of nastiness. This is the show's problem in a nutshell; it's all shock and no substance. Given the ruthlessnes and brutality of our heroes, there could be a complex exploration of the nature of good an evil, but Evelyn Poole casually murders subordinates, bathes in the blood of slaughtered girls, snogs her daughter and puts baby hearts in ventriloquist's dummies, which pretty much eliminates any need of discussion. Sure, Chandler is a moody loner who occasionally blacks out and massacres a pub full of people, but the other guy eviscerates babies.

As well as subtlety, the show falls down on the characters, none of whom are really interesting enough to hold the attention. Ives continues to vacillate between strength and weakness with no real rhyme nor reason, and Chandler's New Mexican stoicism is a bar to involvement. While I hated the first season's fixation with running Dorian Gray through the full gamut of pants, I liked Chandler most when Gray broke through some of his reserve, and the focus on Sir Malcolm and his relationship with the missing Mina made him one of the more accessible - while still one of the least likeable - characters.