Castlevania – Season 1

"I don't care."

A young woman begs Dracula to teach her medicine, and to come out of the shadows to teach humanity to be better; to escape the bonds of superstition and ignorance. Some years later, she is burned as a witch by a tyrannical priest, unleashing Dracula's fury upon all of Wallachia.

After giving a year's grace to clear out, in order to properly raise an army from hell, Dracula sets about his dread work, unleashing nocturnal beasts upon the towns and cities of Wallachia. In the city of Gresit, itinerant former vampire hunter Trevor(1) Belmont falls in with a group of Speakers – nomadic oral historians and occasional magicians – who have been accused by the Bishop – the same who burned Lisa Tepes(2) – of bringing down the demonic infestation by being insufficiently god-fearing. Trevor protects the Speakers and fights the Bishop's clerical leg-breakers. Then he and Magician-Speaker Sypha Belnades lead the townsfolk against the attacking demons, before falling into the catacombs of the wandering Castle Dracula and waking Dracula's son Adrian(3) from his slumber to aid them in the destruction of his father.

And that's it. Just four episodes in this opening season of Netflix new animation. Atmospheric, dark, and packed with as many f-bombs and sassy comebacks as they could get Richard 'Thorin' Armitage to set to audio, it's pretty damn good. The cast is excellent, although Armitage is the clear standout just because he has the best writing. Everyone else is pretty sobre and serious, but Belmont gets to snark like a boss. Armitage is a really good straight actor, but for full value you really need to let him sass a bit, and this show lets him roll. The line 'Ask your floating vampire Jesus' is one for the ages.

 

"Fine. We'll do the badass walk, but I still don't care."

While overtly anti-clerical, deep down the series reserves its scorn for false shepherds. The Bishop is dedicated not to God's work, but to his own glory, and reminiscent of Pratchett's Deacon Vorbis. His acolytes are bruisers and assassins in clerical garb, and the one 'proper' priest is genuinely able to bless water so that it burns demons. This is much more interesting than just dismissing religion altogether.

Anyway, that was all there was so far. A longer Season 2 is expected next year. I just hope they keep the cast intact.

(1) A good, solid Wallachian name.

(2) Yes, as a married woman she went by 'Mrs the Impaler'.

(3) Another fine Wallachian name, although he also goes by Dracula's favourite impenetrable alias, Alucard.

iZombie - Season 3

So... was Blaine's hair always that colour?

Season 2 of iZombie wrapped up an ongoing conspiracy plot involving an energy drink that makes people into zombies, and introduced another, as PMC Filmore Graves was revealed to be a front for the coming zombie state, devoted to staving off 'D-Day' (discovery day) until they are ready to establish a zombie homeland.

Man this review requires a lot of use of the z-word.

Liv and her crew ally themselves with Filmore Graves, while Ravi keeps working on his cure. Major joins FG's zombie strike team, since no-one else will give the Chaos Killer a job, even if he is only the Chaos Kidnapper, and then has to be cured (the first cure having terminal side-effects.) Relief when he turns out not to have lost his memory is tempered by the realisation that ex-pusher turned zombie underworld leader Blaine has been lying about his own amnesia, including to his sometime lover Peyton, who becomes a full-time cast member this season. Also unfortunate is the fact that the remaining stocks of the cure go missing before Liv can be cured, the last having been given away by Major in a fit of do-right altruism. In addition, word of the zombie massacre at the Max Rager party gets out and anti-zombie activism becomes a thing, leading to the murder of a zombie family who turn out to have been old friends of Clive.

iZombie has a lot of good points, although most of them are mirrored in other series. It is, however, one of the very few series where a man (Ravi, in this case) acts like a dick over love and no-one cuts him an ounce of slack. Rose McIver's chameleonic ability to shift persona with Liv's brain-diet remains impressive, as is the fact that when she calls to warn the FG team that they are heading into a trap, their uptight, military leader accepts the word of a proven source, instead of dismissing her as female or a civilian. I've lost track of the number of lives lost to warnings being dismissed that way. I still don't trust FG, and suspect them of stealing the cure. Fortunately, there is a Season 4 on the way to answer lingering questions.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Return

Gypsy, Crow, Joel Robinson and Tom Servo

It's got to be twenty years since my University pal James 'Gonzo History' Holloway first introduced me to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a ramshackle series in which a captive held aboard the 'Satellite of Love' – first Joel Robinson, played by series creator Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, played by head writer Mike Nelson – was forced to watch terrible movies by a pair of mad scientists in the bowels of Gizmonic Institute – first Drs Clayton Forrester(1) and Larry Erhardt, then the latter was replaced by hapless goon TV's Frank, who in turn was replaced by Dr Forrester's mother Pearl, who went on to become the lead Mad in the later seasons, assisted by allegedly intelligent gorilla Professor Bobo and the allegedly non-corporeal Observer – for reasons which were nebulous at best. The test subject would watch the movie in the company of two robots, Crow and Tom Servo, and make fun of it while visible in silhouette. The show began its life on local TV before graduating to Comedy Central, a theatrical movie and a final run on the old Sci-Fi Channel(2), oft known as the channel where good series went to die, eventually closing down at around about the same time I first saw it.

 

Crow, Mike Nelson and Tom Servo

 After a couple of decades in the wilderness, with various cast members creating the Rifftrax website – essentially stripping the concept to its bare bones and providing just the riffs to be listened to alongside the movie – and a Flash series centred around the bots, as well as doing non-MST3K stuff like writing a novel about fictitious killer rats(3), Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign which eventually funded the creation of fourteen new episodes of the series, featuring a new test subject – Jonah Heston, played by comedian Jonah Ray – and new Mads – Dr Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), daughter of Clayton and self-described 'third generation supervillain', aided by Max, aka TV's Son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt), and a crew of skeleton themed mechanicals and musicians – who trap him on the dark side of the moon in order to drive him mad and perfect Kinga's 'liquid media' technology so that she can rule the world of broadcasting in some fashion.

Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), Crow, Gypsy, Voice of Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah (Jonah Ray), ... I have no idea who that guy is, possibly a puppeteer, Voice of Tom (Baron Vaughn), Joel (Joel Hodgson), Max (Patton Oswalt), Tom

 The show is basically the same. It's shot on digital and streamed via Netflix, so it looks much nicer than the usual YouTube VHS grab, although not so different from the recent remasters released officially. There's a new big band version of the opening music ('Love Theme from MST3K') performed by the Skeleton Crew, and it kind of throws me every time that Day is singing her own lines instead of lip-synching. It's also a bit of a shock to have the SoL's control bot, Gypsy, speaking with an actual woman's voice instead of a man's falsetto, and Tom and Crow are both more mobile thanks to the involvement of Jim Henson puppeteers and just the general advance of puppet technology. There are cameos from old cast members and others, including Mark freaking Hamill as a space carnival huckster, because why not. We even get some sort of running plot about Kinga planning to marry Jonah in a blatant ratings grab, while Max schemes to usurp her affections.

But at the core of it, it's the same old MST3K. We open with the invention exchange – dropped for most of the Nelson run – and then Kinga and Max explain how bad the movie is going to be. Jonah and the bots sit – mostly; Tom is now able to levitate in the theatre to mime interactions with the screen, and Gypsy drops in to throw out a joke twice an episode – in the theatre and riff at the movie, interspersed with skits and commercial break-style bumpers to maintain the expected pace on a streaming service. It's an incredibly affectionate recreation of the original, with a similar sense of humour evident in the riffing.

And then Jonah gets eaten, but I guess we'll look at the implications of that(4) next season, if there is one.

Meet the new Shadowrama, same as the old Shadowrama.

Season 11 – the show is internally numbered as a continuation of the original, including a nod to the 200^th episode – begins with Reptilicus, a Danish kaiju movie with a more than passing resemblance to British kaiju effort Gorgo (riffed in the original series.) This is high art, however, compared to Cry Wilderness, a shitty bigfoot movie with unexplained native American shenanigans and big game hunters and I don't know what else. Also, the Reptilicus episode features a catchy song about the kaiju of the world.

The Time Travelers is a low budget, downbeat scifi with a tacked on ending and a deeply annoying comic relief character. Avalanche is a disaster movie with actual stars (an aging Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow,) although the film is most notable for how long the Avalanche takes to arrive and how quickly it's over. During the episode, Joel and the Bots' attempt to curtail the trend of monster/disaster mashups by getting copyright on as many titles as possible.

"But the cowboy didn't like him so he shot him in the fa-ace!"
"Wow, that's meta."

Following the trend of taking its sweet time to get to the point, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is two-thirds of a western about the rivalry between a Texan rancher in Mexico and the local big noise over cattle and dames, before the frankly bizarre appearance of a third act allosaurus.

Starcrash is a 1978 Star Wars knockoff which shows that the perils of trying to knock out an effects heavy knock-off in double quick time were not discovered by the Asylum in the age of video. It stars Hammer Horror sexpot Caroline Munroe, master thespian Christopher Plummer and 80s heartthrob-turned-CBeebies bedtime story reader David Hasselhoff, which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write.

Yes, this happened.

The Land that Time Forgot is, by MST3K standards, a classic of the adventure genre, in that it is actually shown on TV with a fair degree of regularity. Starring American matinee idol Doug Mcclure at the height of his British monster movie period, it follows Mcclure and a crew of British character actors who hijack the U-boat and, due to the machinations of the German crew, end up in an isolated land filled with dinosaurs and cave people, as you do. Just in case we thought the show was getting mainstream, this is followed by Italian sword and sandal dickery The Loves of Hercules, in which a woman is cuddled to death by a tree; for realsies.

PT Mindslap.

Yongary: Monster from the Deep is the Korean Reptilicus, and is followed by a two-episode spectacular. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is a slow, dull fantasy movie, and I'll be honest, I'm astonished that this one was never covered in the original series. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II is an almost entirely unrelated dull fantasy movie that is slightly less slow, has more blatant T&A, but doesn't have a score by James Horner(5). Neither is as excruciating to sit through as the soul-crushingly dull Carnival Magic, but Mark Hamill sings in one of the skits, so that's topping the best of lists right there.

We continue with the deeply meta streaming service Christmas episode, featuring The Christmas that Almost Wasn't, in which Santa hires a lawyer to help him launch the department store Santa craze and prevent his landlord foreclosing on the workshop. Then we finish with another Mcclure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth's Core, in which Mcclure wears a suit reminiscent of Mark Hamill's space huckster and accidentally ends up in a hollow Earth when he and bumbling academic Peter Cushing try to drill through a hill in Wales, discovering human tribes – including Starcrash's Caroline Munroe – oppressed by psychic pteranodons.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Call it a comeback; I say it never left.

(1) No apparent relation to the lead in the 1950s movie version of War of the Worlds.

(2) Rather than the current SyFy Channel, home of crappy monster movies.

(3) Mike Nelson's Death Rat, by Mike Nelson

(4) I'm pretty sure that the implications will be 'none'.

(5) The score in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is actually the one composed for Battle Beyond the Stars, but Roger Corman was never a man to waste material, be it ever so inappropriate.

Stranger Things - 'Chapter 6: The Monster', 'Chapter 7: The Bathtub' and 'Chapter 8: The Upside Down'

The Monster

Okay; it's time to wrap up another one, as I address the last three episodes of the astonishingly eighties Stranger Things. I'm going to try to be brief.

In 'The Monster' Nancy escapes from the tree with Jonathan's help. They have a plan to go a-hunting for the monster, but Steve sees them together and his friends paint the town with graffiti accusing her of being a slut and him of being a perv, which precipitates a fist fight and arrest. Steve goes on to come good, realising that his buddies are colossal dicks, but this delays the monster hunt until Hop and Joyce get back from visiting a woman who claimed that her daughter went missing instead of miscarrying, and believed - before she became catatonic - that her daughter had powers. Hop links this to reports of a girl with short hair telekinetically wrecking our favourite knife wielding junior high bullies. It is during this confrontation that Elle admits to having opened the gate that let the monster through, and states that she is a monster.

This is the end...

This brings all of our heroes together for 'The Bathtub', with Nancy radioing Mike to arrange a meetup and Hop rescuing the kids from Hawkins' goons, because it turns out he is some kind of ludicrous badass. They put together an impromptu iso-tank to float Elle in, so that she can focus enough to locate Will and Barb. She finds the former in the Upside-Down version of Castle Byers, but the confirms that the latter is 'gone', actually seeing her dead with things crawling out of mouth, which is pretty yick; like... Exorcist level ick.

Either at the end of this one or the beginning of 'The Upside Down', Hop and Joyce head to Hawkins to storm the gate, while Nancy and Jonathan go monster hunting at last. With help from Steve, Nancy and Jonathan bludgeon, trap and burn the monster, but it vanishes back into the Upside Down. Hop and Joyce are caught, but Hop trades Elle's location and their silence on Hawkins' involvement, in exchange for being allowed in to find Will and a promise to leave the boys out of it.

"Your soul is mine!"

Goons descend on the school and Elle kills a shitload of them - seriously, like... 90% of the casualties in this series are Elle-inflicted - and the blood attracts the monster, which kills the rest of the goons before going after the kids. The boys make a ludicrous stand with a catapult, but Elle steps in and makes it explode. However, this costs her all of her energy and she vanishes along with the monster, leaving Mike devastated, if marginally less confused.

Joyce and Hop rescue Will and bring him home, but a mystery car picks up Hop, implying that there was more to his deal than he let on. Nancy is happy for Will, but sad for Barb.

Oh.

Some months later, at Christmas, the boys reach the end of another campaign, in a scene which suggests that they are expecting more than just monster killing now. Jonathan comes to collect Will and receives a new camera from Nancy (and, unspoken, from Steve, who is dating Nancy,) and all seems happy. Except that Hop is leaving food for someone or something in the woods, and before Christmas dinner, Will coughs up a slug and flashes momentarily into the Upside Down.

To be continued...

Stranger Things is a glorious love letter to eighties scifi horror, and - coming back to something I mentioned talking about The Exorcist - it is much more horror than a lot of more conventionally horror-themed series which focus on pretty vampires making out. Although initially the female characters occupy the conventional roles of the 1980s, they grow through the series into strong and dynamic roles, and while it's a small thing, the fact that Nancy continues her relationship with the chastened Steve - and the fact that Steve is complex enough to be chastened - is important.

Overall, the series walks the line between loving the eighties and being the eighties very well, although the boys seem a little too okay with Elle melting people's eyeballs. I especially felt that Mike's confusion over his relationship with Elle and the conflicting desires to bring her into his family and take her to the Snow Ball was very well played. This is perhaps unsurprising, as Finn Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown are the stand outs of this series, bringing a real intensity to Mike and Elle and their relationship.

The Exorcist - 'Lupus in Fabula'

Evil One got mad Jenga game, yo.

There are a lot of supposed horror series out there that are actually urban fantasy or paranormal romance. The Exorcist is not one of those.

We open with Angela finding Casey talking in her sleep, but in a man's voice that warns her that her mother is watching. Angela films this, and Father Tomas uses the video as evidence to try to get permission for an exorcism. The Church, however, insists on therapy as a first step, despite the fact that no known mental illness results in centipedes nesting in your bed(1) and making crank calls to your mother, let alone empowering the sufferer with mad Jenga skillz and the ability to crack a shinbone at forty paces.

Meanwhile, Father Tomas comes home to find that Father Marcus has broken into his house and established himself as his difficult roommate, like The Odd Couple if the slobbish one was a disgraced former child exorcist squatter with boundary issues. He finds the letters from Tomas' childhood sweetheart and encourages him to break this off, as any secret shame, however objectively innocent, will be used against him by the demon. we also learn that Marcus was taken in by some mad sect of the church as a child and thrown into the exorcism game, which is why he's a mess who annotates his Bible and keeps a scrapbook of horrors.

"Goodnight Marcus, God bless. We'll most likely send you into a cellar to
exorcise a demon in the morning."

Marcus gets Angela to dose Casey with holy water, but Casey holds it down through dinner before vomiting green and centipedes down the toilet(2). Meanwhile, Marcus realises that there are other demons in town, many of them, possessing the homeless. He tries to exorcise one of them, but it turns out that he's lost his mojo and the demon notes that he was the one they all failed, until he lost Gabriel. Tomas goes to see his sweetie, Jenny, who hits on him, which makes him realise that Marcus may be right about this shame thing. So one of our priests has no faith and the other has too much shame. This is going to go well.

The possessees commit a series of home invasion homicides, harvesting organs from their victims, and Casey is visited by a kindly, paternal-looking guy whom no-one else can see, which suggests that the demon has got at her in the first place through the void left when her father's head injury (not Alzheimer's) left her without a strong father figure and her sister's accident deflected what was left of the family's attention from her.

(1) Do you have a problem with giant centipedes? This isn't your show.
(2) Seriously; centipedes. Also vomit.

The Exorcist - 'And Let My Cry Come Unto Thee'

Casey (Hannah Kasulka), Kat (Brianne Howley), Henry (Alan Ruck) and Angela (Geena Davis) Rance; Brother Bennett (Kurt Egyiawan); Father Tomas (Alfonso Herrera); and Father Marcus (Ben Daniels).

The Exorcist is the latest in a long line of movie-to-TV adaptations, some of which have been great and some of which haven't. On the basis of the series opener, 'And Let My Cry Come Unto Thee', it could well be one of the former.

Points for nerve, opening with a direct homage to the movie.

Father Tomas is young, hip, and cares about his parishioners. He keeps in touch with a pre-priest girlfriend and looks after his sister's kid sometimes. Run, sister. Get away and take the kid with you. I suspect being priest adjacent will not be healthy. Because he is so approachable, he is approached by Angela Rance, whose daughter Kat was injured in a car accident and now seems changed, and whose husband suffers from what appears to be Alzheimer's or something similar. Angela believes that Kat's troubles are caused by a demon.

Well, Tomas knows his stuff and cautions her that demons are religious metaphors rather than actual infernal beings, but she is insistent, and soon after he begins to have dreams in which he sees a priest performing an exorcism in Mexico City; an exorcism that ultimately and tragically fails. That priest is Father Marcus, the kind of hard-drinking, chain-smoking exorcist who works without backup and will pull a gun on any Vatican City pen-pusher who wants to stop him doing his job. During a home visit, Henry tells Tomas, apparently out of nowhere, where to find Father Marcus in a retreat for troubled priests. Marcus is perturbed by the story that Tomas tells, and warns him that he is stepping into something huge, and that it is not God guiding him there but the darker power. If Tomas is smart, he'll get out while he can, and if this is God's sign to Marcus, he can do one.

Mean, motherfumur servant of God.

Naturally, Tomas doesn't leave it alone. He offers Angela his help, explaining that he believes that this is the purpose God has for him. Investigating a noise in the attic, he sees a rat slain by some invisible force, and is attacked by Kat's sister Casey, black eyed and creepy AF, although she instantly reverts to normal when Angela puts the lights on.

'And Let My Cry Come Unto Thee' is a cracking opener, with tension and horror and just the right balance of the mundane and the uncanny, as when an explanation of how demons aren't real is interrupted by a crow driving headlong though Father Tomas' window and bleeding strategically on his Bible. It's a little bit grim and more than usually short on humour for modern TV, and in places downright nasty, but the series overall is strong enough to justify the nastiness. We need to see the horrid aftermath of a failed exorcism to understand Marcus' reluctance to get involved in another one. It's a far cry from something like Hunters, which just wants to shock.

Stranger Things - Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

My three year old daughter took one look at this promo image on Netflix (en route to PAW Patrol, naturally,) and said: "Someone lost a bike." Clearly the image communicates its message.

In small town America a boy goes missing after a D&D game. Reluctant at first, the Sheriff begins to share the concerns of the boy's mother, launching a major search, which the boy's friends join on the sly. A lost girl with uncanny abilities appears in town, pursued by sinister agents who will kill to retrieve her.

Welcome to Stranger Things, a Netflix original love story to 1980s science fiction.

I'd like to see the casting calls for this series: "Will Byers, a nine year old boy
who looks like he was raised on CRT television and pizza to a soundtrack of
unironic Michael Jackson."

The main thing you notice about the series is just how goddamned 80s everything is, from the clothes to the music (I'm pretty sure one of the producers rang John Carpenter's doorbell while another nipped in the back window and stole a load of demo tapes) to the faces. I mean, seriously; how do you cast 80s looking faces? And yet... I guess those kids have always been there, they just haven't been on TV for twenty-five years. It even somehow affects to treat D&D like some mysterious new thing that no-one knows  much about except that it was in E.T.

As in Spielberg's seminal tear-jerker, at the centre of the series - or at least at the cnetre of episode 1 - are the kids: Eternal outcast nerds Mike, Lucas, Dustin and the soon absent Will, and the enigmatic and powerful Eleven, who seems to be connected to the local super secret science lab where a dark, looming presence that kill scientists and makes lightbulbs flicker may have hatched from a thing. It's the 80s, so the boys act with a freedom undreamed of in this endarkened age, despite the acres of lonely forest surrounding the town of Hawkins and the darkness that descends from about 4.30 and enfolds the town in the kind of night that falls and really means it.

"Joyce Byers, a single mother with hella 80s hair."

There are grown ups and teenagers, but they're less important so far: Will's mother drives the search for her son, but has no existence beyond that yet; Mike's parents, his sister and her horny boyfriend are just around, the latter two most making out in her room and listening to 'Now That's What I Call a 1980s Soundtrack Album*'; Sheriff Hopper is a bit more rounded, a lost soul mired in drink, but under it all a good, solid copper; the government agents are ruthless and sinister; and the guy at the diner is a decent soul until he's shot in the head. So it goes.

Stranger Things is intensely familiar and retro, which somehow manages to be new and interesting. There are shades perhaps of Super 8, but it's a slightly later period and leans a little more towards horror than SF, despite many trappings of the latter genre. 'Chapter 1: The Vanishing of Will Byers' is very much a foundation, but hints at good things to come with its sparse, practical effects and deft recreation of the visual and auditory language of 1980s cinema.

* If I were an 80s nerd or hunting for the Easter Egg in Ready Player One I'd probably be using this scene to date the series exactly.

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.

Penny Dreadful - 'No Beast So Fierce'

"The invitation said 'don't dress for dinner.'"

Penny Dreadful continues to ramp up the tension as the third season moves towards its conclusion.

In New Mexico, Rusk and the Marshal show up to arrest everyone, and given the logistical problems they accept an invitation to dinner. Talbot harps on the importance of hospitality while Malcolm tries to urge him to reconcile with his son. Talbot insists that Ethan say grace, which he does with a Satanic perversion of the Lord's Prayer. The the Marshal promises a reckoning for his dead men, so Talbot shoots him, and the whole meal really goes downhills from there. Rusk dismisses Talbot's assumption of the upper hand and sure enough, Ethan lets Hecate off the chain and a massacre ensues. Talbot flees as his men are cut down. Rusk takes a bullet, as does Hecate, before Kaetenay shows to finish the last of the guards in the dining room. Hecate dies, the jury is out on Rusk, and the others storm the chapel where Talbot is making his last stand. In the final reckoning, Ethan is unable to pull the trigger on his own father, so Malcolm does it for him.

Back in London, Hyde and Frankenstein recap their plan, while John Clare tries to connect with his sick son and jst ends up terrifying him. Lily and Dorian begin running a series of seminars on the efficient murder of men, with Justine getting way too into it for Dorian's taste. The human hairless cat is also clearly not pleased that Justine, by reminding Lily of all that she was and has lost, is threatening his place in his partner's affections.

"Do make me cut a bitch!"

Justine catches Frankenstein poking about, and drags him in for filleting, utterly ignoring Dorian's instructions unless approved by Lily. He offers Lily his 'cure', but she points out that 'their' happiness was truly only his and that she is quite at home with her pain and rage now, thanks ta. Justine is pretty narked that she decides to let Frankenstein go, feeling that man parts are reason enough for a filleting.

The series has done a bit of a reversal on Lily, hand in hand with revising poor, heartsick Victor into a toxic quagmire of misogyny. At the end of last series she was pretty much 'immortals rule, mortals drool,' but the recruitment of her army of the oppressed seems to have ignited a more idealistic fire in her, now in increasing contrast to Justine's 'kill 'em all and let God sort them out' approach to the Y-chromosome.

"I'm starting to get the feeling that my life might be better without men."

Men get pretty short shrift this week, and the show moves further from its weirdly conservative beginnings as Mr Lyle - on his way to Egypt to kick off Season 4's arc plot - recommends another expert to Vanessa; a trouser-wearing action thanatologist named Catriona Hartdegan, who clearly knows a thing or two about Dracula and is willing to take Vanessa on trust when she says that Dracula is trying to seduce her. She counsels Vanessa to seek company, which sends her to Dr Seward, who suggests that she reconnect with Dr Sweet and give him the chance to choose for himself if he will risk death for her sake. Naturally, Sweet/Dracula is thrilled to bits by this turn of events, and sexy times are had.

From the beginning, Penny Dreadful felt like a show that wanted to be transgressive, but was actually a bit of tame sensationalism. With Season 3 it is finally starting to flex some muscles on its female characters, bringing Lily back from would-be monstrous overlord to immortal militant suffragette, and surrounding Vanessa with strong, female advisers to replace the ersatz family of male protectors who have abandoned her. As a result, this is easily the strongest season to date.

Penny Dreadful - 'This World is Our Hell'

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name...

After last week's Vanesstravaganza, we return to our other protagonists and subplots, most notably those taking place in New Mexico.

With the posse on their heels, Hekaty-poo and Ethan discuss the shortcomings of their parents, and cutting between Kaetenay and Ethan we hear the story of his past sins. It turns out that he was part of a massacre of Apache during his time in the army, before killing his CO and handing himself over to the Apache. Kaetenay decided he should work out his guilt and used Ethan as a weapon in the Apache's war of survival. He took them to his father's ranch to steal guns and horses, where blood was spilled.

Tiring of the fugitive life, Ethan agrees to let Hecate use his blood to summon creatures of darkness against their enemies, and even as Kaetenay is setting out to murder the posse, snakes burst from the ground. I won't say all Hell breaks loose, because they're probably saving that for the finale, but there is certainly a quantity of Hell operating under less than absolute supervision. In the confusion, Sir Malcolm shoots Rusk's sergeant, and Rusk swears bloody vengeance on Ethan.

"And you're sure you know how electricity works?"

Back in London, Frankenstein 'electrifies' Jekyll's serum for injection into Balfour's prefrontal cortex, promising it will remove his madness, along with all memory of bad things, leaving him as innocent as a lamb. He chides Jekyll once more for his temper and they begin to prepare for the capture and 'treatment' of Lily.

Stopping off in a cave, Ethan tells Hecate the story of the first Apache, which I suspect may not be entirely genuine mythology. He explains that Coyote stole the son, allowing the creatures of darkness forth, until one man drove them back and restored light. Hecate suggests that this might be prophecy, not mythology.

Approaching the Talbot Ranch, Hecate and Ethan's horses die. They, Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay are all captured by Talbot's men, and Ethan instructs them to leave Kaetenay to die in the desert. The rest of them are brought to the ranch, where Sir Malcolm meets Talbot Snr, a worthy slaughterer of Indians and all around racist empire-builder played by Albert Finney. He also feels it necessary to dump on scotch for no immediately apparent reason.

"I may be an American, but I'm so evil I'm played by a Brit."

Talbot explains that he wants Ethan to repent. In conversation with his son, he describes the Apache attack, when Apache armed with his own guns broke into the chapel and murdered the rest of his family, including his other son and young daughter. He demands that Ethan repent or die, to which Ethan replies that he is done with guilt and repentance.

'This World is Our Hell' suffers from following the excellent 'Blade of Grass' and thus being the episode to lead us back into Season 3's increasingly diverging plotlines and the general problem of my not giving a flying fuck for the lives of any of these characters. Seriously, they can all die in a fire for all I care. Hecate is rapidly emerging as the moral centre of the New Mexico storyline, simply by virtue of not pretending to be anything else but the Devil's attack monkey.

I also have no idea why people keep casting Albert Finney - a fine actor, to be sure - as Americans.

Penny Dreadful - 'A Blade of Grass'

"Miss Ives; how do you feel about bottle episodes?"

We're almost to the middle of the season, which means it's time for Vanessa Ives backstory theatre (traditionally a strong point of the show,) and this time we're also doing a bottle episode.

Vanessa plumbs her memories of the asylum where she was committed following her breakdown, to experience the gamut of Victorian mental health treatments - force feeding, hydrotherapy and so on - in the care of the rigorously scientific Dr Banning and a kindly orderly who will one day be transformed into the murderous juggernaut we currently know as John Clare.

The episode begins with John - for want of a better name; he isn't allowed to give one for reasons of protocol - trying to persuade Vanessa to eat, and we see the relationship between them begin to evolve as his kindness wears down her walls and he begins to fall in love with her. He tells her of his family and his son's sickness, which requires him to work in such a cruel place, and it is clear that he believes in the methods of the doctors even if he doesn't understand them. Still, he warns Vanessa that if she doesn't act as if she were 'normal', she will be subjected to trephination, a procedure even he recognises as crude.

"So, you feel you are under attack?"

Then, as she begins to tell John her story, things get weirder. Dr Seward tells her that she is not able to pull her out of the trance, and John is possessed by Vanessa's tormenting angel. Dubbing himself Lucifer he strikes at her with barbs and accusations and professions of love. Then another arrives, a presence which also manifests as John and clearly overwhelms and terrifies Lucifer; the presence of Dracula. This is a terrific moment, with Rory Kinnear compelling as the two vast presences, the lords of spirit and flesh, and Eva Green once more turning in a powerhouse performance, by turns repulsed, enthralled, cowed and finally, triumphantly defiant. Moreover, the fact that Lucifer cowers in the presence of his flesh-bound brother - Dracula claims that Lucifer has become nebulous, deprived of belief - sets aside any nagging worries that going from fighting the Devil to fighting Dracula would be a step down for our protagonists.

While Patti LuPone provides admirable support, this is Green and Kinnear's show, and provides considerable substance for Vanessa's next meeting with John Clare. As for the other characters... Well, who knows; there are no subplots at work here, just a tour de force two-and-a-bit character bottle drama which maintains the standard of past backstory episodes.

Damnit. I think I might actually like this season of Penny Dreadful.

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.

Penny Dreadful - 'Predators Far and Near'

"I was going to avenge my people, but I got high."

Lily and Dorian return this week to open the show with a burst of egregious violence. Attending a live torture porn show, they bust out, murder the 'butcher' and his wealthy patrons and rescue the 'star turn'. The scene is interesting in large part for the characters' very different styles of murder, Dorian of course being an immaculate headshot ninja, while Lily is all about the knife. I suspect that the fact that only one of them is touched by what they do in any way will start to strain the relationship eventually.

Kaetenay contacts Ethan through dream magic, and Ethan dream-tries to dream-strangle his ersatz father. He threatens to scalp him, which the older man dismisses as a cheap Comanche scare tactic not worthy of an apache. We learn that Ethan came to Kaetenay covered in the blood of his family, and that he also killed a senator's son. Kaetenay explains to Sir Malcolm that he hated Ethan too much to let him die, and Malcolm compares this to his relationship with Vanessa.

Time of the month again.

Ethan is being taken to his father and waiting until the moon waxes. One of Kaetenay's people recognises him and he warns her to leave the room, then kills everyone else. One of his captors almost gets a shot of, but Heckaty-poo witches out of the wall and kills him. This makes two curb-stomp massacres in the space of a single episode.

Ethan is also being pursued by Inspector Rusk, who refuses to hand responsibility over to the US Marshals, apparently because he's a dick. Seriously, he's all 'Imperial matter' and putting the boot in on national sovereignty.

Jekyll introduces Frankenstein to his work in calming violent insanity at Bedlam, demonstrating on a man named Balfour. It's clear that he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about being dissed for his race after his dad abandoned his mother, and I suspect some fools are going to die over that one. Frankenstein sneaks off to see Lily and is all pathetic at her, which oddly doesn't win her back. Meanwhile Lily and Dorian are recruiting their foundling into their crusade of revenge and dancing in circles around the ballroom. Again.

Honestly, it's a bit early for this reveal to have much punch.

Vanessa unburdens herself to Dr Seward, who amazingly doesn't freak the fuck out and call on Dr Jekyll at once. She instead advises Vanessa to for the love of God do something fun. Vanessa calls on Dr Sweet once more and invites him to a show after learning of his love for Jules Verne (I'm slightly disappointed that Nemo appears to be fictional.) He refuses coffee and goes off to listen to the wax cylinders of her talking to Seward, for he is Dracula!

Now, we don't know yet if he's, like, proper Dracula, or if Dracula is using him as some sort of puppet or meatsuit and when he meets Vanessa he really is, well, Sweet. I suspect the latter, especially since otherwise putting the reveal this early lets the tension down too soon.

But Lily and Dorian are back, still dancing in circles, but I don't want to set their house on fire just to watch them burn, and that's not nothing.