Penny Dreadful – season 1 – review

Director: Various

First aired: 2014

Contains spoilers

When I reviewed season 1 (and only) of Dracula I had seen episode 1 of this series but was moved to say, in comparison to the older series, “the dark, griminess of Penny Dreadful’s London was a million time more effective”. I stick by that, indeed the series had a huge amount going for it – though it might have been better in some ways.

Chandler, Murray and Ives

In many respect this Monster Mash series was reminiscent of the league of Extraordinary Gentlemen though the steampunkiness of the Alan Moore series was gone. We did, however, get representation from vampires and Dr Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway, The Disappeared). We got characters from the Dracula novel, though they were moved and changed around, and we got Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney). We also got an American gunslinger, Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett, 30 Days of Night), a consumptive whore, Brona Croft (Billie Piper, Secret Diary of a Call Girl), and a fortune teller who was sensitive to possession, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green, Dark Shadows).

Master Vampire

Now I mentioned Dracula characters and we start off with a new character tied into that mythos in the form of explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton). He is the father of Mina Harker nee Murray (Olivia Llewellyn) and she has been taken by vampires. We never actually meet her husband but the first episode sees Vanessa Ives hiring Ethan Chandler on Sir Malcolm’s behalf as they need a man good with guns. It sees them go beneath an opium den as they believe there to be a vampire nest there. We meet three types of vampire. There are the first they meet, servants of the master, who are male and look mostly human (and I never noticed them displaying fangs). There are what I might term as brides, females with their hair shockingly white and with fangs and then there is the main vampire, a bestial, clawed creature with red eyes and rows of sharpened teeth. They overcome these first vampires but Mina is not there and they realise that there is another master.

tattoo

They take the killed master vampire to the resurrectionists – looking for a surgeon who can autopsy it - and meet Victor Frankenstein. He tells them that the skin is more like an exoskeleton. When he peels it back there appears to be tattooing on the exposed body, which depicts scenes from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, this leads to an Egyptian Mythology sub-plot that is left dangling at the end of the series. Later they clean off the exoskeleton with flesh eating beetles, but as it is flesh below that is tattoo’d this didn’t make too much sense to me as one would have expected the beetles to eat down to the bone. Actually as things roll on we realise that the so called masters are themselves more an elite level of minion – there is a master vampire whom we do not see in the season (but whom I assume would be Dracula himself).

David Warner as Van Helsing

The other Dracula character we meet is Van Helsing (David Warner, The Hunger: Nunc Dimittis, From Beyond the Grave, Waxwork, Nightwing, Cast a Deadly Spell, Spider-Man & I Was a Teenage Vampire). In this Van Helsing is a haematologist consulting with Frankenstein and is well aware of vampires (his wife was taken by one). He introduces Frankenstein to the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, suggesting the Rymer accidentally got much of the detail right. I'm not too sure about that statement as Varney was the first complex vampire character but the little we see of these vampires indicates brutal and animalistic killers. Talking of Varney and placing the penny dreadful in a series of the same name, the series does throw in little conceits like that - for instance Frankenstein mentions the poetry of Shelley.

Harry Treadaway as Frankenstein

Frankenstein, of course, has issues with his own creation – Caliban (Rory Kinnear). Dorian Gray’s presence was slightly incongruous and I felt the character could have been used a little better (he is somewhat of an iconoclast but underused and we never get to see the damned portrait). Murray’s servant Sembene (Danny Sapani) was too mysterious and demanded further scrutiny and background. The series had moments of genius – an episode dedicated to the background of Vanessa Ives was disturbingly excellent in places – but other parts seemed a little too convenient, especially the coincidental interactions and acquaintances of these people from different social strata. In trying to build mysteries, perhaps some things were under-explored or (in one case) almost forgotten until the very end of the series and just touched upon. Perhaps they simply had thrown too much into the pot?

a vampire bride

A sense of time sometimes got lost. One episode concerning a possession failed to offer any idea of how much time had passed but then we discover that Gray had time to do a trip over to continental Europe while things were going on. The acting was generally very good – though Billie Piper’s Irish accent did slip occasionally – but the main star, to me, was the City of London (or Dublin, as that was where this was filmed!) because the palpable oppressive atmosphere was a constant through the show. I did enjoy Penny Dreadful, it just felt a little unpolished in places (around what they were doing with certain threads) and might have been even better than it was. However it deserves a strong 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.