Early mid season episodes can be tough, both on the characters and on the set-up of the plot arc, so I figured it’d be best to let two or three weeks go by — watching week to week is great for suspense, but sometimes giving it two or more episodes at a time can be helpful to feel out where things are going. Since I’ll be in London over the weekend and then going back to work, I didn’t relish the prospect of coming home to sets of three new episodes per show, so two will have to suffice. Here we go. Continue reading →
Ichabod isn’t confounded by Americans’ awakening consciousness (and conscience) in the struggle for marriage equality, thanks very much. Wearing hats indoors, however… Continue reading →
Things take a turn for the even more complicated with the arrival of the new Sheriff, Leena Reyes. She knew Jenny and Abbie as children, and their mother, of course. In short, she knows too much and yet not enough. With Jenny back in jail for illegal possession of firearms and with Captain Irving now transferred to the psych ward, Ichabod and Abbie are a few allies short — except, of course, for the Kindred. But something tells me he isn’t going to stick around for tea. Continue reading →
War, is what. And apparently, the evil forces converging on Sleepy Hollow aren’t just turning up now, nor was it a coincidence that they made their first attempt during the Revolutionary War. As Ichabod states, “they have been planning this since before the birth of our nation.”
So, as we can see, Abbie, Katrina, and Ichabod all get released from the shackles they were put in during the Season 1 finale cliffhanger — Abbie gets out of purgatory, Ichabod digs himself up from his second early grave, and Katrina gets out of that tree. Question is, where does she go after? She’s definitely going to be interacting with 21st-century mortals, but what will happen after that? Surely, she and Abbie will have to trade places again, after what looks like a nasty run-in with a chair, rope, and a Hessian’s knife.
After last season’s end’s nasty surprise that their son, Jeremy, is aiding the Four Horsemen conquer Earth, Ichabod and Katrina are in for a world of pain during the brief time they will probably have together.
So far, this promo tells us nothing of our beloved supporting characters: of Jenny, of Captain Irving and his family. A first look official photo, however, suggests that Captain Irving will be institutionalised. When I first saw the image, I thought he was going to be thrown in jail, but just today I rewatched parts of the first season and realised that what I mistook for State Penitentiary garb was actually a top with the logo of the mental hospital Jenny was held in during the first half of Season 1. Jenny’s fate was unclear at the end of the last season’s final episode, though I believe she will pull through. Abbie needs her sister, and I don’t think they would sacrifice such a great supporting character for additional loss and drama.
What Penny Dreadful wants to do is recombine the well-known and beloved narratives of 19th-century Gothic fiction with the realities of Victorian London in 1891 — the time of the Great Exhibition, during the rise of spiritualism and Evolutionist Theory, the time when society was scared to death by ideas of social mobility, religious upheaval, and the astonishing advancement of science. Inspired by Mary Shelley and her tale of Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, authors of the Victorian Age created stories centred around the supernatural, the smudged boundaries between life, death, and what divides the two. Things are out of place in Gothic fiction — things where they shouldn’t be, people where they shouldn’t be, horrors where they shouldn’t be. The word of the night is: transgression. Continue reading →
This is a collective review of the last two episodes of Dracula, Four Roses and Let There Be Light.
This is a mess. One huge, out-of-control mess. It’s motivations, plot-lines, and characterisations all over the place, and the writers don’t even seem to be trying to clean up after themselves. It’s incoherent, it zigzags back and forth, things that are a huge deal, like Van Helsing breaking up with Dracula, sort of just happen on the side, while other stuff that, yes, we get already, are drawn out over and over, totally ad nauseam. It’s one thing for characters not to be able to make up their minds. It’s quite another for the narrative to screw the characters over ten times per episode. Continue reading →
This is a collective review of the last three episodes of Season 1, of which the last two aired in a double-feature finale this past Monday. Continue reading →
I hate to say it, but I’m honestly glad that there’s only two more episodes to this season, which is getting more and more ridiculous. Continue reading →
Crime and Relative Dimension in Space 