Penny Dreadful

Timothy Dalton
Eva Green
Josh Hartnett
Reeve Carney
Harry Treadaway
Rory Kinnear
Billie Piper
Danny Sapani


When I was a child, about eleven or so, I was given a Dickens compendium, a collection of excerpts from his works great and small.  There were two that had a big impact on me: one from the Pickwick Papers -- which I had not read -- and one from Oliver Twist -- which at that point I had only read in abbreviated form. The Pickwick excerpt was light and joyous, a celebration of friends and life.  The Twist excerpt, though, was the bludgeoning death by poker of Nancy by Bill Sykes. That episode was, without doubt, the most gruesome thing I had ever read, and it was not an aberration.  Victorian popular culture was filled with the morbid, the grotesque and gruesome, the depraved. From high to low, Victorian society indulged its imagination for nightmare by publishing what came to be known as "penny dreadfuls,": potboiling fictions and true crime, Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd writ large in an arterial spray of ink.  As its title suggests, the Showtime series, Penny Dreadful, takes this sensibility and runs with it.

Timothy Dalton, in an intense yet understatedly carpet-chewing role, portrays Sir Malcolm Murray, father of Mina, she who married one Jonathan Harker.  And now that our literary antennae are up, we also meet Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Mr. Dorian Gray, and an American, Ethan Chandler, whose Gothic literary persona is hinted but never revealed until the last episode of Season One.  The three men are pulled, in ways both direct and subtle, into Sir Malcolm's search for his daughter and the creature who holds her in thrall.  Each has his own terrible secret, crimes of ego, depravity, and monstrousness, which they attempt to subsume into what they believe to be the rescue of an innocent soul from perdition. 

The series, though, is far from a simple rehash of familiar monsters.  There is nothing remotely attractive or Romantically Byronic here; these are not the monsters of the Saturday matinee.  Quite the contrary; Penny Dreadful has managed to return characters which over the last 100 years have become teenaged fantasies to their full psychological and moral horror.  And, in spite of the horror, this is a surprisingly moral show.  Sin and the wages thereof and the quest for salvation and redemption are the driving forces in this story.  Damnation and salvation are real, and it is a fight by imperfect and flawed protagonists against the former for the latter.

Set design and camera-work reinforce this bleak milieu, giving us a London by way of Dante.  Daylight is a blue-grey twilight, and the nights are defined by the theatre Grand Guignol; death and corruption are an intimate part of everyday life.  Our three young men, each in his own way, are attempting to outwit death: one by attempting to create life; one by sustaining life beyond its natural time; one by running away.  Consequences, however, cannot be avoided, and their decisions catch up with them in poetic and literal fashion.  

Set against the men are the three women: Vanessa Ives, as relentlessly driven to find Mina Harker as Sir Malcolm, with secrets of her own; Bronagh Croft, embodying the physical corruption Dorian Gray seeks to avoid, and whose name is the sorrow Ethan Chandler embraces; and Mina herself, damnation with an angelic face.  In true Victorian fashion, the women in some manner represent the perceived feminine virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. None of which, of course, are true.  One is, it seems, possessed by a demon; one is a prostitute; one is the minion of corruption.

There are times Penny Dreadful is difficult to watch, disturbing, jolting you out of your complacency.  It will make you think -- and rethink -- what you thought you knew. It will make you hope that these sinful, sorrowful people find their salvation.

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Yes.


One of the what ought to be the freedom of writing a story involving the character known as "the Doctor" is that he can be dropped into any time or place to have an adventure. This freedom, however, has it limits:  though time and place may be flexible, the Doctor, himself, is not.  And it is this that causes the stories in Time Trips, a collection of short stories by well-known contemporary authors, to stumble.

The stories in Time Trips are a mixed bag, covering multiple Doctoral incarnations, some with companions, some without.  The success of these stories is also a mixed bag, some of them capturing the character of the Doctor and the sensibility of a "Doctor Who" story very well, others failing dismally.  What was most surprising about the failures is that the authors of those stories are, in their normal genres, quite good writers able to capture character and scene in well-respected novels.

The most blatant of these failures is the story "the Bog Warrior."  In it, the Doctor is dropped, sans companion, into someone else's story and acts only as an observer not a participant.  The author tries to insert the Doctor into a ready-made world instead of building the world around the Doctor.  It is not a "Doctor Who" story; it is a story that has the Doctor in it.  On the other hand, one of the most successful stories in the collection is not even in the book, per se: it is incorporated into the dust jacket, its physical structure and placement mimicking the tumbling nature of its narrative.  In addition to this, though, it succeeds because "a Long Way Down," though the Doctor himself has only a small part, uses the sensibility of the Whoniverse as the basis of the story rather than shoe-horning the Doctor into a universe where he does not fit.

In short, Time Trips is only a moderately successful addition to stories about the Doctor and except for the loss of the unique format of "a Long Way Down" is best purchased in paperback.

BBC
Doctor Who: Time Trips
Stories by Cecelia Ahern, Jake Arnott, Trudi Canavan, Jenny T. Colgan, Stella Duffy, Nick Harkaway, Joanne Harris, A.L. Kennedy
(BBC Books; Penguin Random House UK, 2014)