Like last season’s “Closer Than Sisters”, “Nightcomers” is an hour of Penny Dreadful dedicated to building out the conflicts of Vanessa Ives, capturing a moment of her tortured life in the form of an episode-long flashback. Unlike last season’s unexpected departure from the main timeline, the many suggestions of past conflict between Evelyn and Vanessa hinted towards a similar rendezvous – and without the element of surprise “Closer Than Sisters” had on its side, the less than subtle approach “Nightcomers” takes to fill in the back story of this season’s major conflict doesn’t quite have the emotional impact it is intended to have.
Not to say that it’s a bad episode – in fact, “Nightcomers” is quite a good episode of Penny: any hour that features Eva Green in nearly every scene is going to be an entertaining one, her devastatingly powerful performance only enhancing the show’s best trait, it’s ability to build atmosphere. Just looking at Joan Clayton’s house is unsettling, a home depicted in nothing but shades of gray, black, and brown, drenching each scene in the darkness it is continuously suggesting towards, be it with Joan’s flow of expository information about El Diablo, or Vanessa’s slow realization that she is indeed cursed. Well, it’s less of a realization than an affirmation, both of what she knows and what we’ve known since the pilot episode: Vanessa is a woman struggling with some serious demons, her search to save her best friend – and in the process, redeem herself – leading her into dangers she doesn’t understand, even if she’s powerful enough to destroy them.
Unfortunately, what “Nightcomers” adds to the blood-splattered collage of Penny Dreadful is perfunctory at best: we already know the Devil wants Vanessa to be his wife, and Kali and her witches have been hunting her for a long time. In the context of the season’s overarching story, “Nightcomers” doesn’t do much to bring new depth to Vanessa’s struggles and origins – and yet, as a standalone episode where Eva Green and Patti LuPone can play off each other’s talents, “Nightcomers” is as captivating as any episode of the series. Their back and forth illuminates the smaller details of the episode, giving the story of the witches’ cottage more gravitas than expected, as LuPone’s Joan struggles to determine whether teaching Vanessa the dark arts is a good idea or not, right down to the final moments of her life, tarred and chained to the tree outside of the spell stones in her front yard.
As much as I appreciate flipping the expository cliches of most dramas with each character explaining the other’s past to them (displaying a bit of their “powers” in the process), those moments still stick out like a sore thumb against the show’s more subtle exploration of characters: even Evelyn’s whipping of Geoffrey feels nuanced next to those conversations, which feel more like detailed bullet points than actual plot developments or integral back story. Fortunately, Penny spends plenty of time away from these explanations, an episode that gives great breadth to a character we’ve never seen before, Joan’s position as the town’s cut wife (aka abortionist) a fantastic framing device for depicting a witch fallen from grace, disavowed from her coven when they were seduced by Satanism. As a woman who has given up on her own humanity, Joan’s last days see her trying to save a life after spending so many years ending those that hadn’t even begun yet.
That unspoken contradiction is beautiful, and helps give some weight to an episode that otherwise lacks it – hopefully Penny will capitalize it and keep Joan around for the rest of the season, if only in flashbacks. Without that, “Nighcomers” will stand to be a much less effective flashback hour than intended – while it does the necessary work building out this particular conflict inside Vanessa’s head and soul, that work is mostly visual reinforcements of things we already know. “Nightcomers” is at its best when its depicting the end of days for an old woman who regrets and respects her position in the world; its ultimate impact on the season, however, remains to be seen, since it is appearing only in the third episode, suggesting there is still a lot to fill in between “Nightcomers” and both the present, and future, of what’s gearing up to be another dark and terrific season of Penny Dreadful.
[Photo via Showtime]
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