Despite some of the bumps on the road though, Billie Piper gave this role all she had. Dorian, likewise, also did a 180 by the time the finale rolled around given that he too spent a great deal of the season in a softer, more affectionate love story. Which was that Lily knew the whole time what she was and was harboring a hard, cold heart of hate and vengeance. I guess I just felt that a double-fold wasn't needed here. I thought it was a great fold on the gothic Bride tale. ![]() Which is somewhat of a shame since I enjoyed the weird, demented love story that had started between them. An arc that I guess, upon retrospect, was all a ruse as she claimed, in the finale, to have been working Victor the whole time. I may not have fully been on board with Lily's transformation in the final two episodes of the season, but her arc up until that point was really great. Billie Piper and Reeve Carney in Penny Dreadful. Sure, it was hard to swallow Vanessa and the rest not realizing that Sir Malcolm was being spelled for as long as he was, but no specific harm came from their lingering ignorance so it didn't handicap the story too much. The flashback episode featuring Vanessa and the Cut-Wife (guest star Patti Lupone - going from witch hater on American Horror Story to full witch on Dreadful) helped breathe a bit of backstory into the tale and illuminate the Nightcomers as seasonal villains, but it really wasn't until Sir Malcolm's full bewitching in "Above the Vaulted Skies" and Dorian's party in "Glorious Horrors" that the season began to burn with more ferocity. Aside from of course, the show's overall stunning look and fluidity of beautiful dialogue. And so aside from Evelyn's mysterious hobby for crafting ghastly dolls with beating baby hearts in them, there wasn't much popping. All of this would get cleared up toward the end of the season (both "masters" were halves of the same fallen angel and their pawns assumedly looked similar because of this), but this initial lack of pronouncement made the first handful of chapters feel murky. Likewise, Evelyn Poole's talk of the dark "Master" seemed to awkwardly grate against the shadowy unseen man referred to as the "master" last year. The true, pale form of the "Nightcomers" resembled vampires so much that I thought they were vampires until it was explained otherwise. Nothing notable so that things wouldn't feel like Season 1B. Yes, more dark forces were after Vanessa with the intent of making her the Devil's kept and bound love, but there wasn't quite enough there to distinguish things from Season 1. At first, Season 2 seemed to be repeating a lot of beats from the show's freshman year. And while Eva Green never had the opportunity, story-wise, to match her amazing and raw Season 1 performance, she still proved once again to be one of the most compelling forces on modern TV. Despite stumbling a bit out of the gate, Penny Dreadful's Season 2, perhaps due to the longer episode order, was able to pick things up dramatically in its second half and deliver unto us fresh and morbid look at a haunted surrogate family crumbling to bits under their own dark secrets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |