Review: "Penny Dreadful - The Final Season"

LOGAN, John (creator), Penny Dreadful – Season Three, Showtime/Sky, 2016.

I bought this ages ago but ennui and a sense of ‘here we go again’ killed my will to stick with it and I gave up after the first episode. Recently though, being forced to trawl through my stacks and boxes of books, DVDs and CDs for diverting narratives, I stumbled across it once more and realized that I probably hadn’t given it the chance it deserves. I bunged it into the DVD player and sat back to let it unfold…

Episode One: “The Day Tennyson Died”

Episode Two: “Predators Far and Near”

Episode Three: “Good and Evil Braided Be”

Right now, I’m three episodes in, and things are looking somewhat grim. So far, it’s been all about logistics: Rusk has dragged his werewolf back to the New Mexico Territories in the unflinching name of Justice; Malcolm Murray has returned to Africa to bury his manservant Sembene; the Creature has tired of wandering the icy wastes of the Arctic and is heading back to London; Vanessa Ives has found an alienist upon whom to cast her woes; and Dr. Frankenstein has sought out a colleague to do likewise. Meanwhile, Lily and Dorian are tearing each other’s clothes off and going on murder sprees without any sense of shame or accountability (why, I ask myself, is Rusk so intent upon the wolf when most of the House of Lords is being gunned down in back alleys by Dorian Gray and his companion? Odd). Along the way we are introduced to some new (and not so new) players – Kaetenay, Ethan Chandler’s vengeful Apache adoptive father; the half-caste Dr. Jekyll; Hecate Poole the witch, newly liberated from her indenture last season and out to ensure wolf-based prophecies take place – and each is there to bring our heroes out of their personal despair and pull them back on track.

There is so much effort here dedicated to getting the band back together that it leads me to wonder why the writers let them fly the coop in the first place. There is a strong sense of tedium: drag the Alan Quatermain analog out of Africa; bring the werewolf back to the Wild West; call the Creature home from the Arctic wasteland – it’s exhausting just to watch it, when you think it needn’t have happened at all. Why didn’t Murray just send his servant’s body home? Why wasn’t Chandler just thrown in the clink with the threat of deportation? Why couldn’t the Creature just have returned from the Arctic at the very beginning instead of having to show us his discontent with the place? Much of the set-up for this season is an indulgent waste of cash and everybody’s time. Even injecting the new players could have been accomplished in this fashion, without having to throw everybody onto ships, and trains, and back-alley souks in Algeria. So far, so indulgent.

On top of this, we are introduced to a shadowy menace pursuing Vanessa through London, using its pallid minions to track her every movement. Early on it whispers its name from the shadows – “Dracula!” – while ghoulifying a new servant named Renfield, who just happens to work for Vanessa’s new shrink, Dr. Seward. Now, all of this is cute and hearkens back to the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” knock-off roots of this work, but it also ignores its own rules that it initially set up. In the first season of the show, the “boss vampires” were all rather alien and insectoid; here, they’re not. Dracula stalks the streets in his secret identity, whereas the earlier leeches would have had serious difficulties blending in. The other issue is that Vanessa Ives was the BFF of Mina Harker (nee Murray), daughter of Malcolm, and victim of Dracula, so she would logically seem to know him by sight, but she doesn’t. So, who has their story straight here? John Logan or Bram Stoker? Because it’s a little inconsistent no matter how you slice it.

Then there are the witches. In the special features option of the first disc, there’s a documentary about the concept of these creatures and how they were designed and facilitated. It seems that Logan wanted them to be like snakes – glamorous yet dangerous. If that’s what he was going for, then all I can say is that he missed his mark by a country mile. To me they just look like cancer-ward residents who’ve made very poor life choices in the body-modification department. I find them completely distracting and repugnant; very counter-productive to the whole narrative exercise. Like most things with this show, they are simply there as an excuse to display gratuitous nudity and violence and they pull the viewer out of the moment every time they show up. Fortunately, there’s only the one of them this time around.

So, after three episodes, we have Frankenstein and Jekyll combining their forces to tame Lily the monster; Lily and Dorian attempting to recruit all the downtrodden women of Victorian London into an army by engaging in incredibly unsafe sex with all of them (somehow they think this will work – I’ll reserve judgement for now); Chandler and Hecate fleeing Justice into the American desert with Malcolm Murray, Kaetenay, Inspector Rusk, his sidekick and a posse of Texas Rangers on their trail; Dracula closing in on Vanessa; and the Creature discovering memories lying dormant in its reanimated brain which are dragging it to an inevitably-doomed reuniting with the former family of its corpus. With so much ponderous establishment and reiteration, I’m tired already…

Episode Four: “A Blade of Grass”

*Phew!* Episode Four completed. This was no doubt intended to be the arty core of the series, seeding the revelations to come. It’s essentially just Vanessa Ives in her padded cell at the Banning Institute, returned there by the magic of Dr. Seward’s hypnotic powers. We discover that the Creature – before he got himself killed and then used for parts in Frankenstein’s mad schemes – was Vanessa’s attendant, one of the nursing staff who worked in the Institute. Or rather, we discover that he was actually Lucifer, stalking her in the hospital; and also… a large shadowy snake? Lucifer’s brother? And Dracula? What the…? What should have given this overwrought piece some room to breathe, just compounded the miasma, with a little bit of Renfield scarfing flies on top.

Eva Green and Rory Kinnear chew down the minimalist scenery here and they both do it well – for the most part, this series has got some excellent casting and two of the better performers really cut loose here. ‘Damage’ is something that Eva Green conveys well, both mentally and physically, and Kinnear is a great foil for her to bounce off. Still, the writers have constantly dropped the ball up until this point and the strident sense of flailing about trying to find a purpose for all of this – stuff – is the only takeaway.

Episode Five: “This World is Our Hell”

This is the fifth episode – the fifth of nine – and it’s only at this stage that we’re getting any kind of narrative traction. There’s a rule in writing that you should always start your piece as close to the climax as possible. This isn’t always an option with novel-length works but it’s a mainstay of writing both short fiction and – more appropriately - screenplays. The idea is that you give your audience the minimum amount of time to lose interest before the action starts. Here, they’ve thrown this notion out entirely. It’s taken the writer all this time – faffing about with excessive character establishment, flashbacks and various other indulgences – to actually get the story happening. That’s not ideal.

Now that everyone’s in America – ignoring the Ives/Frankenstein/Creature/Lily & Dorian threads for a minute – it’s time for the big reveal. All through the seasons of this show we’ve had sidelong references to Ethan Chandler’s dad – Jared Talbot - and how bad he is – finally we get to clap eyes on him. Funnily enough, as this point was drawing near, I thought to myself “who would be the best actor to cast for this role?” and I made a shortlist in my mind which narrowed inexorably down to Brian Cox. Surprise! I was right. He’s just right for this role – but then so much of the casting for this show is very good – but again the writing knocked everything sideways. The whole time we’re in Talbot’s presence, Sir Malcolm and Ethan fade into the background and their personalities drain away to nothing. Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay was bad enough, with Murray being reduced to a simple bystander in the partnership; with Talbot, he’s just a spectator once more and he gets a Yankee dressing-down to boot. Ethan as well, is reduced to a snarling brat when faced with his father – and he’s supposed to be some kind of God-appointed agency of world annihilation!

Everything which we’ve seen in prior episodes to do with the American arm of this narrative is completely unnecessary; this is the point where this thread actually starts and begins to unspool. Everything else we’ve seen – Africa; the train attack; the ocean crossing; the escape from the saloon during the full moon; the murders; Inspector Rusk; the horse thefts – is all completely pointless and indulgent. Should’ve been left on the cutting-room floor.

Meanwhile, Vanessa, Lily, Dorian and the Creature go on the backburner for a bit (given the amount of time spent on them in previous episodes) while the instalment dribbles out a little bit more of the Frankenstein story arc. Completely dominating Jekyll and his research, Frankenstein adds lightning to the mix of Jekyll’s potion and succeeds in rendering the effects of the juju permanent – although ramming an electrified needle into someone’s brain through their eyeball usually has this effect anyway. Not a lot happening here, although I sense that when Mr. Hyde shows up at the end, he’s going to vent a huge amount of slow-burning frustration on Frankenstein’s head, given the racist, elitist and self-entitled treatment that Victor’s dumping on him.

Episode Six: “No Beast So Fierce”

Episode Seven: “Ebb Tide”

I doubled down and pushed through to get somewhat forwarder with this thing. It cost me a piece of my soul, but I got there.

So here we are at the end of episode seven and – who would credit it? – the series introduces another player. Just when we thought that there couldn’t be any more time wasted on character establishment and development, we get yet another character – Cat (“o-nine-tails”) Hartdegen, the thanatologist and expert fencer. Vanessa gets hooked up with this femme fatale by the seriously underutilised character Ferdinand Lyle before he slides (sadly) out of the story for good. And then, after being introduced during a suitably snappy fencing bout, she vanishes after giving Vanessa some sound advice, which Miss Ives then absolutely ignores. It’s typical of this show that they spend this amount of time and effort to do absolutely bupkis.

On the plus side, almost everyone who disappeared into the New Mexico Territories has been horribly murdered by now and those left standing are on their way home. This last group includes Ethan Chandler, Sir Malcolm Murray and Kaetenay. So, no more Inspector Rusk, Jared Talbot, Hecate Poole, or the myriad Texas Rangers that shadowed their activities – hooray! All loose ends tied up, all characters returned to where they started, and everybody ready to go. To be clear: Sir Malcolm and Ethan started in London, went to Africa, then on to the American West - burying Sembene and collecting Kaetenay on the way - only to go back – several thousands of kilometres later - to where they started in London – across six episodes. That’s a large chunk of my life I’m not getting back and, frankly, I’m a bit resentful about it.

I mean, what was the point? Nothing has happened; nothing was progressed at all and yet there was all of this work invested (and not just by the show’s creative staff). It feels absolutely like there was a contractual obligation to film part of this show Stateside and, in order to meet this, they just ruptured the narrative to fit. ‘Ruptured’? More like, ‘busted to Hell and back’.

Then there are the other characters. In Dorian and Lily land, the whore army is sent out into the streets to assault loathsome examples of the male population and divest them of their right hands. En route, Dorian gets jealous of Lily and her new friends and lets Frankenstein and Jekyll abduct her in order that she can be pacified via a lobotomy. And the Creature makes contact with his family upon Vanessa’s advice, finding that they accept him without question – such is the quality of Rory Kinnear’s acting chops, this was the only compelling part of the narrative on offer.

I’m increasingly left wondering what this show is trying to do. It shifts and lurches all over the shop, not quite knowing what it’s doing or where it’s headed. It’s completely hamstrung by the fact that it’s so clearly ripping off Alan Moore and his “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” but, apart from gratuitously clinging to this notion of pastiche, it doesn’t even start to know what to do with it. And yet there is so much money and expertise on show here, all of it utterly let down by the crap quality of writing on offer.

(Let me just qualify that. In terms of dialogue; in terms of characterization; the writing on this show is top notch – there are moments when I’ve rewound the thing just to listen to an exquisite turn of phrase casually tossed into a passing conversation. It’s in the plotting, and the construction of narrative arcs, where this thing falls flat on its backside. Witness Season One where all of the main characters had equal weight and it felt like reading seven books at once; this was addressed in Season Two, where some of the characters took a step backwards to the second-string, in order to serve a single narrative. It seems this crucial lesson has been forgotten. John Logan has no idea what to do with the material on hand, and further, fails to use any of it efficiently. Instead, the show gropes its way forward, clinging desperately onto the random ‘cool moment’ here and there and steadfastly being unable to do anything of clarity with them. It seems as though it’s deliberately seeking to become “style without substance” at random points, while leaving all of the actually interesting stuff unconsidered in its wake.)

Episode Eight: “Perpetual Night”

Episode Nine: “The Blessed Dark”

That’s it: I’m done. It turns out that this series is actually only two episodes long – the last two. Everything else is just fluff. If you want to save your existence, just watch episodes eight and nine – that’s all that the season has been about, and the rest is just obfuscation. There’s a mammoth gunfight at the end of this story which everything has led to: if, like me, gun battles are way up there on your tedium list, then you have every reason to avoid this show.

Everything resolves here. This means that all of the male characters survive and feel good about themselves while all of the female characters die and discover that pushing against the patriarchy is fruitless. On top of all this, the dialogue gets extremely syrupy and maudlin and all of the good writing (such as it has been) vanishes under a treacly, sentimental veneer. I was literally yelling at the TV screen by the time this was all over. If you value your time here on Earth, avoid this garbage and all that it stands for. My only sympathy is that great – truly great – thespians have been dragged into the miasma of this abomination – Simon Russel Beale, Eva Greene, Josh Hartnett, Rory Kinnear, Billie Piper. Even Timothy Dalton was poorly-served here – this role was perfect for him and yet they took away anything that was even vaguely defining for his character, leaving him with an inexplicable murder and a mild chat with Dracula as his ‘gun’ moments. I’d be asking for my money back.

What else? There was no Mr. Hyde moment. Dracula gets away. Catriona Hartdegen does nothing – absolutely nothing – of importance by the last act. And the Hallmark greeting card people obviously have some kind of authoritative power over the script in the last episode – let’s hope no-one with diabetes lasts this long in watching this vehicle! Of all the ways that this thing could have ended – even if it had to have ended this way – this was the clunkiest, worst way that they could have done it. John Logan – j’accuse!

*****

One thing that this show has been tentatively striving to do – an underlining theme if you will – is to give some kind of agency to its female characters. This is fine and to be lauded, as far as it goes. However, as it gets applied here, it’s rather sneakily ingenuous and ends up being rather backhanded. Oddly enough, the entire narrative arc of Dorian Gray and Lily is emblematic of this thought process: women are to be supported in their efforts to become empowered and to act as free agents, only within the scope of those men with whom they associate. Lily can dream of liberation as long as Dorian supports her; Vanessa can live free of guilt and domination by dark forces as long as she accepts the protection of Sir Malcolm and Ethan Chandler; even her status as Dracula’s “equal partner” is equivocal since she has to submit to him and his established system of ghouls and subordinates in order to become his “bride”. On the one hand, Logan seems to be highlighting the Fallen Woman trope of Stoker’s original novel, but it’s a fine line between homage to the source material and kowtowing to the patriarchy. Every woman in this show gets broken down and re-combined in some more useful capacity to the status quo – that is, if they don’t simply get discarded out of hand for being non-conformist.

The most telling thing about this show is that Dorian Gray – icon of the patriarchy as he turns out to be – ends his performance by telling the estranged Lily that “he will always be here” whenever she decides to return to him. If that’s not a chilling manifesto about where this show’s politics lie, then I’m no commentator!

It’s obvious too, in the way that the female cast of this show are treated. The female characters get covered in latex or drowned in blood; they are made to wallow in filth, or spew long and caustic streams of invective; and then there’s the gratuitous nudity. Even the costuming (which is gorgeous, by the way and, like everything to do with this show, is wasted upon an unworthy vehicle) is designed to treat the women like porcelain dolls, objectifying and belittling them. None of the men are treated like this; even the werewolf transformations – which you’d expect (given everything else going on) would be as over-the-top as the witch costumes – are as lacklustre, and pedestrian as possible. It’s more than obvious that there are double standards here which an abundance of pretty frocks just can’t ameliorate.

You might say that Penny Dreadful, in the sense of its murky sexual politics, is just being true to its source material*, but even then, it shies clear of actually paying dues to those sources. It wants to bend the rules, but it also tries to avoid making clear those rules for itself (and, thereby, us, the audience) to follow. This is what makes “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” so good – it has rules; those rules are shared with the audience; and they are stringently followed. Too many of the narrative elements here are undefined and unclear: what is going on with Vanessa - exactly? Who is Dracula - exactly? Where is Lucifer in all of this? How is Ethan important in the greater worldview of this reality? What exactly does Sir Malcolm Murray bring to the table, apart from the single pro-active moment of the cold-blooded murder of Jared Talbot? John Logan obviously loves his Victorian narratives and – to be fair – some of those narratives pose more questions than they answer (The Beetle; The Jewel of Seven Stars); but they were narratives of their time aimed at an audience of their time. This is a story written and filmed for a Twenty-first Century crowd and we don’t like things to be vague and nebulous. Being slipshod about this stuff is easy and sloppy; just saying “that’s how Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker did it, so I’m doing it that way too” is a cop-out. And this is where all of the truly gifted and dedicated actors, photographers, editors, costumers, casters, set designers, dressers and builders - in short, everyone involved in something like this - get let down.

Still the best opening credit sequence on television though…

*****

*In fact, the show never mentions anything that can remotely be called a ‘penny dreadful’; it springboards squarely off classic Victorian literature, following Alan Moore’s example. It never references Varney the Vampire, or The Monk (which is Gothic literature, strictly speaking), or even Spring-heeled Jack, which were actual penny dreadful mainstays. Annoyingly, the show has spawned a US-based version – “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” (so much for “final season”); however, the term ‘penny dreadful’ was never used in American publishing, where the preferred term was ‘pulp fiction’. Too many potential entanglements with Tarantino's lawyers there, I guess!