Penny Dreadful - 'Good and Evil Braided Be'

"I am so fucking British."

Kaetenay and Sir Malcolm take the racist express to New Mexico in search of Ethan, who is now dreaming of his sort-of father showing up all bloody faced and yelling incoherently, which can't be good.

Rusk and the Marshals look over the scene of Ethan's escape. On the edge of town, Ethan tries to impress on Heckaty-poo the merciless nature of the desert and himself, but the latter is undercut when he's the one who gets upset by her murdering a man and his wife for horses. She lays it out that she's intent on following or leading him into hell to become the Devil's hitman or whatever with her as his worst gal, and is willing to murder literally everyone in the world for that to happen.

They flee across the desert, pursued by Rusk and the US Marshals. The latter are pretty useless, firing wildly at Ethan from half a mile away, stopping when they finally realise that there's a woman with him. Rusk is all poo-poo firearms, and cautions the Marshal that he might want to start believing in the occult. I really hope he doesn't die like a chump, if only because the Marshals are bigger arseholes than he is and I begrudge them the satisfaction.

Kaetenay and Sir Malcolm find the dead ranchers and are concerned about the company Ethan might be keeping.

"Well, this can't be good."

Back in London, Vanessa works some mojo on Dr Seward to try to convince her that her 'delusions' are the real deal; so far it seems like a no-score draw. Vanessa then goes on a date with Dr Sweet which leads to a circus mirror maze, where everyone else disappears and weird-looking-skinny ghoul gets all up in her face, telling her the master was with her 'in the white room where there is no day or night'. She decides she's too dangerous for Sweet to be around and dumps him.

John Clare is back in London. He sees Vanessa meeting Sweet and looks wistfully happy for her before heading off to look for his former family. After roughing up the current owner of the building, he finds them in a slum, his son dying of cholera, and like any good dad starts mugging passing strangers to give them money. Maybe next he'll start cooking high grade meth.

Sweet/Dracula pummels his goon for scaring off Vanessa and lets the other ghouls tear him apart in a feeding frenzy. The super-strength punch is an impressive and restrained use of practical effects to display Dracula's casual power, and the piranha pile is creepy as hell.

As David Balfour descends back into raving madness, Frankenstein proposes to use his research to make Jekyll's serum permanent.

No, I'm not including a picture of the bloody three-way. This
isn't that kind of blog.

Lily and Dorian bring Justine further into their plans, explaining their intention to basically murder and terrorise their way to secret power with an army of invisible women of the street, poo-pooing the gentle methods of the suffragettes. They give Justine the opportunity to kill her former tormentor, which she does, before engaging in a gore-slicked three way with her benefactors.

I know I've criticised the show for being sex negative before, but I'm not entirely convinced that one murder would really undo all of the psychological trauma of a decade of brutal abuse. Of course, it's equally possible that Lily and Dorian don't give a rat's arse about their recruit's psychological health.

Vanessa has Seward hypnotise her to recover memories of her time in an asylum, where the orderly who brought her food was the future John Clare (dun-dun duh!)

Season 3 of Penny Dreadful continues to be a massive improvement on what went before. Okay, Dorian and Lily are still pretty gratuitous, but at least they have a point at last. It is also hard to see how - if at all - the separate plotlines will come together, but time will tell.