Penny Dreadful: City Of Angels “Maria And The Beast”

Wait…is this story actually going somewhere?  Finally?

Too late!  I don’t much care.

To be fair, and I always try to be fair, the biggest problem is the demons and the Nazi plots don’t exactly connect.  Yes, Magda is involved with everything somehow, but it isn’t exactly clear why.  Maria Vega, she can apparently see Magda just hanging out in cemeteries, and even gets to confront the demoness first hand when she summons Santa Muerte and both sisters show up.  Apparently, the Vega family is important to…whatever is happening.

The problem there is the family is splintering.  Tiago is busy on the job all the time.  Mateo is getting into gang life.  Josefina is really into a church that isn’t Maria’s preferred Catholic one.  Maria even takes time to berate Raul for just sitting around during all this.

C’mon!  The guy got shot in the head!  He should be allowed to be a bit…slow to do anything!

And while Michener recruits Tiago to follow the Nazis, even planning on gunning a few of the top ones down after they exit a fine restaurant, it doesn’t really work out that way because more people walk in.  Michener got Tiago involved as it is payback for not sending Mateo to prison.  That works.  And Tiago has no objections to shooting Nazis, especially after Michener relates what happened to his cousins in Eastern Europe when the Nazis rolled through.

But then Councilman Townsend, Magda in her secretary form, and Sister Molly’s mother Adelaide all join the Nazis at the table.  This comes after it comes out that Magda is working to make Townsend, an overweight authoritarian with no political will or ideas of his own, into the President of the United States, a comment that I had to wonder whether or not the series intended as commentary on certain other POTUSes.  So, there’s a Nazi plot, and the Vega family is important for some reason.  That’s progress.

Too bad most of the episode deals with Dr. Craft and how Magda (in her mother-and-son form) moves into his house and starts trouble there, trouble that includes dismissing a housekeeper that wasn’t really objecting to anything that was going on and ending with a dead hamster.  Why this guy of all guys?  He’s a pediatrician.  He doesn’t seem to be some big deal in any way, and yet Magda is going out of her way to recruit him for…something.

This would be, once again, why I find this version of Penny Dreadful so frustrating.  There’s too much going on that doesn’t seem to actually be going anywhere.