SPOILER ALERT! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FROM LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE OF PENNY DREADFUL. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
I’ve given a lot of praise to this show thus far (you can check out our other reviews here), but last night’s episode “Possession” has brought the show to an entirely new level.
I’ve never seen an episode of television like this in my entire life, and that is not an exaggeration. If you took the episode “Seance” and merged it with this episode, with some slight editing you would have a phenomenal indie horror flick. It confounds me how far this show has come in just 7 episodes.
It all seemed so simple from the beginning. Vanessa was suffering from her strongest episode of possession yet and it was the job of our monster hunters to try to save her. Of course, halfway through the episode one of the biggest curveballs of the episode was thrown. Just as Vanessa is urging to Ethan to kill her if anything goes wrong, it is revealed that she was not talking to Ethan but the devil himself disguised as Ethan. It was a wonderful callback to “Closer than Sisters” when the devil appeared as Sir Malcolm. However, this time Vanessa was able to resist her erotic temptation, however he still asks her to become the “mother of Evil.”
However, the most brilliant part of the episode was this beautiful montage of the team simply waiting and taking care of Vanessa. For the first time in the series the feel as if they were in over their heads.
Throughout the entire episode was this underlying theme of the afterlife and the belief of God. Being faced by the imminent death of Vanessa seemed to have thrust this thinking into our character’s heads. The doctor wish he could believe in it and Ethan does (we’ll get to that later). However, these were not the only developments on out characters. Demon-Vanessa pretty much let the beans spill on every single character’s past and some reveals were brought out by the characters themselves. We learned of the doctor’s virginity and morphine addiction, that Malcolm forced Peter to have sex with natives on their trip to Africa and that he buried a frail Peter and left him, and Brona’s sexual encounter with Dorian.
Vanessa’s possession allowed all this information to be divulged without the same clunky expositional dialogue that a less show would have to utilize, but it was also necessary to set Sir Malcolm up as the “villain” of the show. We knew from the beginning that Sir Malcolm was a man on a shaky moral ground, but this episode confirmed that he is willing to let any one of them die if it means finding Mina. Even worse, Ethan was able to deduce that Malcolm simply wanted to keep Vanessa alive to help him in his quest.
The final ten minutes of the episode played out like any possession film, but the twist came in when Ethan pushed Vanessa up against the wall and started babbling off in Latin in a last ditch exorcism. He then simply walked out.
Other show would have been afraid to do an episode like “Possession” or even “Closer than Sisters,” especially in their first season. The series’ momentum was propelled by this mission to find Mina, so most shows would shy away from breaking that momentum. What makes Penny Dreadful so compelling is that it instead uses the characters as its momentum. Their mysteries, secrets, and fatal flaws are what keep us watching.
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.