I thought that too, in a couple of places, but am giving it a pass because if it's a modern song trying to sound like a 19th century ballad then it succeeds pretty well, and because it suited the bleakly-shot cold open and credits very well indeed.

Thanks for your comments and insights! I've loved being with everyone here. I've loved this sort of writing and storytelling, and many of these characters, for close on 40 years. A lot of the people here are the sort of people I wish I'd known in high school.

In many ways, the versions of famous characters here were - even when they diverged from the source material - some of the best and most interesting versions of those characters I've seen.

I can't wait for the reboot of the Mummy franchise starring Simon Russell Beale as Ferdinand Lyle. I'd watch the hell out of that.

It worked for me too. They were all at Bedlam naturally; what would have been silly is if they had just missed each other.

Yes, a thousand times.

'It is too easy being monsters; let us try to be human.'

I knew I loved this show from day one, but Rory Kinnear closing it out by reciting Wordsworth? Perfection.

This series was heart-breakingly beautiful and truthful, elegant and brutal, and ended on the only note it could; thank God John Logan had the guts to do it.

If the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists.

Sounds like AMC (which must own the rights to only about 15 movies that are in almost constant rotation), or the four Movie Network channels here in Canada, one of which is, at any given moment of any given day, showing Maleficent. I have not sat down and watched the entire movie from start to finish, but am fairly…

Oh, I hear you; I'm a veteran of the pre-Great Nerd Victory days. I used to go down to Seattle from my home near Vancouver and scoop up Dover books by the box-full; all those great reprints of obscure Victorian supernatural/detective/yellow novels, many with Ev Bleiler introductions, which I'd bring home and then…

John Logan and Penny Dreadful. I was reading Poe, Stoker, Shelley, Stevenson, Gothic novels, ghost stories, penny dreadfuls, Victorian literature, Victorian detective stories, and more as fast as I could scoop them up while I was in my teens, which was back in the Carter and Reagan administrations. I did not know…

I didn't know that!

'Note, for instance, how Cat and Vanessa refer to Dracula as “the
Dragon,” while Ethan uses the same term to denote his dead father.'

If there's another adaptation of David Copperfield done anytime soon, Barnett would be a wonderful Uriah Heep. 'I'm very 'umble, sir.'

Yes; when, as an actor, you commit to Penny Dreadful, you go big or go home. No half-measures here.

It's been a long time since I read it, but the title of tonight's episode is also the title of an 1894 novella by Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne ('The Ebb-Tide') about three dissolute loungers in Tahiti who take over a ship loaded with a cargo of champagne after most of the crew fall victim to smallpox. The…

One of the (many) things I love about this show is how smart it is: not just in terms of being intelligent, and not spoon-feeding the audience, and tackling Really Big Subjects in language that is a bit more ornate and multi-syllabic than many people are used to, but also in terms of the fact that when characters on…

Also, kudos to Samuel Barnett, who plays Renfield: he's sublimely creepy. The shot of him tonight, slithering around and under and beside the exhibits, was beautiful, and beautifully done; when he went by the hyena the resemblance between them in posture and expression was incredible. And I really didn't know where…