Penny Dreadful “Above The Vaulted Sky”

What is Dorian Gray doing on this show?  Seriously?  Does he add anything to the narrative?  Is he here just as a way of saying something about transgender rights given his current subplot that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anyone else?  Why should I care?  Will he go to more elicit ping pong halls?

I mean, we have an episode here that ends with a lot of people getting busy who maybe shouldn’t.  Dorian and Angelique.  Victor and Lily (uh oh).  Sir Malcolm and Evelyn (Sir Malcolm, watch out for that needle point surely used to enchant…too late).  And there are some smoldering looks between Ethan and Vanessa, who probably should but don’t.  Because couples we would theoretically want to be together aren’t.

But we have other things going on.  Ferdinand Lyle’s translation work has come up with a single phrase repeated many times in many languages, loosely translated as “The Hound of God”.  Surely that would mean something to Ethan…

Say, that one survivor of his wolfing out found Sir Malcolm’s place.  And what happens to people who survive a werewolf attack?  Uh oh again.

Is anyone happy though?  Vanessa thinks Victor is with his “cousin” after she shares a lunch with the pair, and she tells her new friend John Claire all about it without mentioning names, and she takes time to teach a certain Original Recipe creature how to dance and woo a woman.  That’s good, because his efforts with Lily aren’t working out too well even before she jumps into bed with Victor during a bad thunderstorm.  Uh oh.

But if the episode ends with a lot of sex, it begins with a lot of creep.  Vanessa’s hair was needed for the fetish/voodoo doll the witches are making, and it seems Vanessa isn’t the only one with a doll of her likeness.  Evelyn has one of Sir Malcolm’s wife, and she’s working on that while her daughter Hecate is weaving the hair into the Vanessa doll.  And then Evelyn starts jamming needles into the doll’s exposed brain.  Yes, it had a brain.  And Mrs. Murray starts having shooting pains in her head, and during the same thunderstorm that brought together everyone but Vanessa and Ethan, she sees her two dead kids claw out of their graves that have somehow been moved to her bedroom.  Driven mad, she slits her own throat, but manages to see the hallucination of her kids are gone just before she dies.  That’s awful.

These witches are bad news.  Let’s hope somebody goes apespit on them and fast.

Wait, there are six more episodes for season two?  OK, this may take a while.  Maybe Dorian Gray will mean something by then.