12/15/2023 0 Comments Penny dreadful nudityIt's also a lot of fun, in contrast to many of the recent big-budget genre shows that opt instead for po-faced allegory or relentlessly bleak nihilism. It's frightening and, occasionally, brutally shocking. It has performances that lie just on the right side of camp. It uses the audience's prior knowledge of horror cliche and its famous characters in a pleasingly nudge-wink way. It looks utterly superb, drenched in pea-souper fog, opium fug and gallons of claret. Tonally, it's all over the place, flitting between being daft as a bag of flumps and revelling in nudity, sex, gore and category-F swearbombs, but Penny Dreadful is still one of the year's more pleasant surprises. Also, what will kill Billie Piper's Brona first – consumption or Chandler-wolfman? Will Frankenstein's monster get the bride he craves? Will Amunet and Amun-Ra catch up with Vanessa? Though we know what lies beneath the curtain in Gray's secret room, we're still unaware of his actual motivations, particularly given the love triangle between him, Vanessa and Chandler. Delving into the monster's backstory for almost an entire episode was an odd move, sucking momentum from the series somewhat, but Rory Kinnear's performance is a delight of barely bottled rage, and the early groundwork will presumably pay off later. Perhaps more intriguing at this point is Frankenstein's predicament. We need some backstory for both of these characters in order to understand their bond and uneasy relationship, and we may well be getting it with this coming episode. While Murray's search for his daughter is possibly the weakest plot thread so far, in that we're no closer to her than we were in episode one, this will likely step up a gear with the revelation that Vanessa may be somehow responsible for her disappearance. Admittedly, Timothy Dalton hasn't had much to do as yet, but you can bet your last silver bullet he'll have gnawed on the doorframes by series' end. Eva Green divides her time between genuflecting before crucifixes, swooning before Dorian Gray or wailing in vast-eyed demonic-possession mode. Not that the show is too simplistic or arch – it's utterly straight-faced, like a Ripper Street for the Sleepy Hollow enthusiast. Originality isn't exactly on the agenda – the show just has an affable desire to entertain, like an idiotic dog. But like the short, trashy shots of gothic Victorian fiction from which the show takes its name, that is sort of the point. In fact, there isn't a character in the show – from Harry Treadaway's brilliantly driven, if morally suspect, Dr Frankenstein, to Billie Piper's prostitute with a heart of gold and a terminal illness to match – who isn't a stock type as well-thumbed as a barber's FHM. Similar familiarity is found in the lavender waft of Eva Green's mysterious Vanessa Ives and Timothy Dalton's even more mysterious Sir Malcolm Murray, both of whom communicate solely in portentous exposition and grim forebodings of nastiness most horrid to come. Hartnett's Ethan Chandler – a dashing, swashbucklingly randy sharpshooter in a travelling American Civil War re-enactment troupe – is as novel a creation as your standard red housebrick. Penny Dreadful's reliance on the tried-and-tested doesn't end there.
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