WiC Watches—Penny Dreadful: City of Angels season 1
By Dan Selcke
(L-R): Daniel Zovatto as Tiago Vega and Nathan Lane as Lewis Michener in PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS, “Hide and Seek”. Photo Credit: Warrick Page/SHOWTIME.
Episode 8: “Hide and Seek”
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels rolls on to its endgame, what that is, with an episode that’s a little less light on its toes than what came before. To start, I didn’t think the dialogue — written in this episode by Tatiana Suarez-Pico — was quite as sharp as it has been. Lewis’ noir-isms are starting to get a little tired (“Save [Los Angeles]? We’re just trying to survive her”), Councilwoman Beck dressed down Councilman Townsend with a read that was straining too hard to closely parallel our current political hell (“You’re building prisons for all those you don’t like, until all that’s left are rich white men who look and think exactly like you”), and Dr. Craft’s wife Linda — who’s more lucid at the sanitarium than she ever was in her home — sends her guilt-ridden husband home with a .one-liner that probably sounded cooler in her head (“Next time you come bring a lawyer…and a cow for my roommate”).
So there were little cracks in the foundation of this episode, but mostly I’m just getting a little tired of the characters running in place so close to the end; I still don’t quite know what this season is driving towards. Tiago finds out yet another secret Molly was keeping from him — apparently she knew Josefina was his sister and didn’t tell him, whereas I honestly didn’t think she’d put two and two together — but their attraction is too powerful for them to stay away from each other.
Meanwhile, Elsa tries to get Dr. Craft to embrace his inner Nazi after he refuses to go gaga for Hitler at a meeting of the German-American Bund — the first time we’ve seen that group since the premiere, by the way — but he refuses. He even gives Maria a raise after Elsa’s creepy little devil boy Frank frames her for child abuse. So if Magda’s plan is to turn Dr. Craft into some kind of supervillain, it’s very much not working.
(L-R): Johnathan Nieves as Mateo Vega and Natalie Dormer as Rio in PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS, “Hide and Seek”. Photo Credit: Warrick Page/SHOWTIME.
God, I still don’t know what her plan is. As Rio, she’s also trying to get Mateo to be a leader, this time of the dispossessed Pachucos, but I didn’t buy her “you’re the only one who can lead us because you’re so special” speech to him at all. Dormer is great, but Rio…maybe they should have gotten someone else to play Rio. We know Magda can appear in other forms now, like when she appears as Maria’s husband in the Craft home.
That whole sequence is pretty good, as Magda flexes her spooky muscles to try and scare Maria into leaving her job and to stop being a good influence on Dr. Craft. It was very reminiscent of the original Penny Dreadful show, when Satan was trying to get inside the head of Vanessa Ives. But I still think these supernatural interludes feel odd on City of Angels, since most of it is a straightforward procedural.
Speaking of ties to the old show, Patti LuPone turns up to to serenade Councilman Townsend and Kurt as they dance at a secret gay club. This was my favorite scene of the episode. Councilman Townsend is a scumbag who thinks nothing of playing on prejudice against Mexicans to further his political career, but he also seems to genuinely care about Kurt. And Kurt, a Nazi plant ordered to keep Townsend out of trouble, cares for him right back. If anything, Townsend is manipulating Kurt — sure, Kurt refused Townsend’s request to kill Councilwoman Beck this time, but circumstances change.
Michael Gladis as Councilman Charlton Townsend in PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS, “Hide and Seek”. Photo Credit: Warrick Page/SHOWTIME.
I didn’t see either of those turns coming, and it’s nice to be surprised. And the show is better off for deepening these characters, because they both have tough choices ahead of them and now I care about which way they’ll go. I’m surprisingly invested in their relationship, probably because it’s so tenuous. This could fall apart at any second and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the crash.
So there was some fun to be had here, but overall I’m ready for the show to stop setting up the pieces and just let them fall where they may.
City of Bullet Points
- Back in the ‘what the hell is Magda’s plan’ part of the episode, Alex reveals to Lewis that she’s actually a Jew who’s parents are suffering in the old country under Hitler’s warmongering. Only she’s not, of course; she’s a demon, but she’s a demon who plans out really elaborate backstories for her characters. Or maybe she was lying to Lewis to make him think she was on his side. She’s a hard one to pin down, that Magda.
- Another line I was kind of side-eyeing, this one from Molly about her relationship with Tiago: “I need this to be real, Tiago, so I choose to believe it is.” There are some lines you just hear and go, ‘A writer wrote that,’ yknow?
