Vanessa believed in the Christian God, and that has a bearing on this moment of finality as well. It’s a high Gothic/Victorian melodrama, and yet it’s a story in which choices have consequences, and that seriousness of intent has grounded the show’s wilder forays and flashier moments. If she’d done all that, only to be revived and have her life drawn out, that would be the kind of emotional dodge that “Penny Dreadful” has gently castigated for three seasons. She’d cause Ethan pain, but her suffering would end and the rivers of blood in the street would dry up. Ethan also accepted his new role as Malcolm’s adoptive son.Īnd after fighting the dark forces for her whole life, Vanessa chose to die in the arms of someone who cared about her. Ethan embraced his nature, even if it meant that his role as Vanessa’s champion forced him to kill her. He would endure more pain if it meant causing less for someone else, and for a man who has been pretty petulant since he came back from the dead, this was progress.Ĭharacters made momentous decisions that stuck as season three wound down. Clare chose not to put the kid through more suffering, even if that meant that he had to continue on alone. The whole message of the finale was that some kinds of suffering are better than others Frankenstein would have to work through his resentments, not take them out on yet more helpless bodies. Death and madness were, for him, just obstacles to bulldoze through, with heedless cruelty. Frankenstein for reviving her for his own selfish purposes, and brilliantly dissected the ways in which he uses science to control and shape others into the people he wants them to be. In all seriousness, “Penny Dreadful” takes death seriously. It was a a poignant scene that also made me realize that nobody drinks water on this show because there are dead bodies floating around in the Thames. The melancholy man said goodbye to his son, and broke free of a painful old pattern. Like Frankenstein, Clare/the Creature finally demonstrated that he was determined not to make an old mistake again. Clare rejected the idea of a revival for his son, at the cost of his relationship with his wife. In the last couple of episodes, various characters have demonstrated that they’ve learned something through all their travails. It wasn’t the only notable change, though it was certainly the biggest. Returns from death can be dramatically effective, but sometimes it’s best for a dead character to stay dead, and though “Penny Dreadful” has of course revived characters in the past, the drama seemed pretty intent on underlining Vanessa’s exit and making it seem very final. That is a necessary thing in this era of fake-out deaths and revivals that sometimes diminish the very idea of death. Either way, those two words and the elegiac nature of the poem served a very useful purpose: They communicated the idea that Vanessa is really most sincerely dead.
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