Headscratchers / Penny Dreadful

• Picky little detail, but ... did anyone else notice that the lamplighter in the opening of "Seance" just walks right past an unlit street lamp, next to the bench the apple woman's sitting on? Last act of the guy's life was to slack off on the job, apparently.
  • The woman is a prostitute and the lamplighter gives her a stony look as he walks by. Prostitutes were considered trash by Victorian England, so he's apparently not deigning to shed light on her.
• If Bradshaw was such a good and beloved dog, why was he just left out on the lawn to rot until maggots started eating his eyes and squishy bits?
  • Possibly the dog had been let out a few days earlier and failed to return home. It's a large estate, so it could've taken a while for young Victor or one of the groundskeepers to find the body.
  • Or, coming from the other end of things, Caroline just decided to be a good parent and not mar her child's first experience of loss and death by going, "Oh well, Bradshaw shat on everything and ate my shoes, so no big loss."
• Just how long ago did Victor create Caliban, anyway? He's bald when he wakes up screaming, yet his hair's pretty long when he and Victor finally meet.
  • It could be a long time. In the novel, the first time Victor met the Creature was 2 years after creating him.
  • Since being created, Caliban has taught himself to read and speak English, gotten a job and tracked Frankenstein down, so it's been a while.
    • "A Blade of Grass" confirms that the orderly was literate, so it's more the case that he remembered how to read.
• How did Vanessa's hair grow back so quickly? When she was having sex with a demon and caused her mother to die of fright it was only just going back, but at her mother's funeral, when she sees Mina on the beach and when she goes to confront Sir Malcolm, it's suddenly long again!
  • That transition was presumably deliberate, to show that there's a considerable gap in time between her mother's death and her vision of Mina. At the funeral she was probably wearing a wig.
  • "The Nightcomers" explains this: Vanessa's recovery took longer than we thought, and there are quite a few months between her mother's death, the vision of Mina, and traveling to London to find Malcolm. In particular, after her vision of Mina, she spends at least half a year at Ballantree Moor, learning witchcraft and Tarot reading from the Cut-Wife.
• Sir Malcolm has a very large house in Victorian London . . . where are all the servants? Sure, the monster-hunting is secret and he can't be tripping over the footmen while he's interrogating the kid they've got chained up in the basement, but the house manages to be spotless at all times, food for at least three people is presumably cooked, they all have clean clothing to wear, and Vanessa has to have a lady's maid at the very least to get her into and out of her corsets, let alone her dresses. Day labour would be an option, but it would have been seen at the time as a last resort by someone too poor to have live-in help.
  • It could be that Sir Malcolm doesn't want to risk having any servants other than Sembene around. Vanessa could have another "episode" at any time, and Malcolm doesn't want that sort of thing going around. Sembene could be cooking for all three of them, and there probably isn't much to clean. How Vanessa gets into her corsets is admittedly a tricky one, but again it could simply be Sembene. Admittedly it would be considered rather scandalous in those days for a black man to even be in the room when a lady was getting dressed, but if there's no other servants around who's going to tell?
  • Sir Malcolm is accustomed to spending long periods out of the country. It's possible that he's never maintained a full-time staff at his London address, because the residence is shut down for many months at a time; rather, he hires part-time help to dust and air the rooms whenever he comes to town, sends clothes out for laundering, and has supplies delivered rather than sending servants to the market.
  • Except the weirdness of this lack of servants is lampshaded by Inspector Rusk in "Memento Mori", implying that the change was recent, and that everyone considers Sir Malcolm quite odd for not having them.
• In "The Grand Guignol" when they were in the theater, why was Ethan standing right on the clearly visible trapdoor? I know you can't always expect genre savviness from fictional characters but it seems like common sense to me that you shouldn't do something like that. Even if you're not expecting a random vampire attack, trapdoors can always give way at any moment.
  • The trapdoor is precisely in the middle of the stage, so that everyone in the audience can get the best possible view of the disappearing-acts it's used to simulate. Presumably that means it's also the best spot for someone on the stage to look back at every seat in the place, so Ethan stood there in order to watch out for lurking vampires in the stalls and balconies. Also, the risk of an accidental collapse can't be that great, as the theater's actors have to walk back and forth over it all the time: it'll have been built to be very sturdy.
• Why does the group only carry sidearms? As a famed explorer and hunter, clearly Malcolm would have legit excuses to be in the possession of heavier weapons that'd be a lot more useful defending themselves against the vampires who nearly overpower them every time with only chance saving them.
  • If they were hunting monsters out in the country, they might be able to get away with that, but openly carrying rifles or shotguns around the streets of London would've attracted questions from the police, even back then.
    • And does, in "Memento Mori". Rusk is very curious why Malcolm has a tripod of rifles in his sitting room.
• If Ethan is the Wolf of God, why does God apparently have no problem with innocent people, even children, being mauled and even eaten by him when he undergoes his transformations?
  • People are only in danger if Ethan doesn't take the necessary precautions (such locking himself up or making sure he's away from people once or twice a month). Now its an unfair burden on Ethan, but generally being chosen by God isn't often portrayed as being a complete blessing, a lot of them had to be martyrs after all. Normally the blessing comes with a huge price or burden to bear. However Ethan apparently needs to be in this state to save Vanessa, and thus prevent the end of days. As such it's possible the good he can cause simply outweighs the bad.
  • Just because Ethan's presence serves God's purpose doesn't necessarily mean God made Ethan that way. Ethan may have become a werewolf for unrelated reasons, and the prophecy simply calls him "Wolf of God" because he's opposed to both Fallen angels' plans for Vanessa, which God is also opposed to. Think of it like Gollum serving a higher purpose when his involvement helped to get the One Ring destroyed, even though he was never one of the good guys himself.
  • Besides, we've no idea what God is supposed to be like in this iteration. He/she/it could be Good Is Not Soft or just too powerful to realise (or care) about any collateral damage Ethan causes as long as he gets the job done. Remember this is the same being that apparently banished Dracula to Earth where he could do untold damage.
• Was there any real point to Vanessa other than to be a great big dinnerbell to Lucifer and Dracula? seriously, look back through it, she almost next to never really participates in the action, talks a big game but never actually delivers, hell, in 03x07 she talks big about Killing Dracula without hesitation, has been told repeatedly he will try to seduce her, she gets to him and after like what? two minutes of sweet talk, literally hands herself over she is supposed to be some big power playing piece but never actually amounted to anything. was she just a Plot Coupon and Distressed Damsel?
  • Never delivers? Are you forgetting that she basically sent Lucifer running with his tail between his legs in 2x10 (and did the same thing to Lucifer and Dracula in 3x04)? Yes, season 3 essentially reduced her to nothing more than a plot device, but that probably had more to do with the show getting canceled abruptly, forcing the writers to rush a clumsy ending, than Vanessa bluffing about her power.
• Nitpicky detail, I know, but how plentiful was marijuana in 1890s England? ^note That is what Vanessa's smoking, isn't it?
  • In those days, pre-rolled tobacco cigarettes weren't exactly common. I always assumed she was just smoking ordinary nicotine cigarettes.
• Why do the scriptwriters use the word "demimonde" to describe a mystical otherworld? Doesn't it actually mean "female courtesan" or something like that? Also, in one episode the phrase "memento mori" is translated as "a memento of death", which is irritatingly incorrect (it actually means something closer to "remember death" or "remember you'll die"). Did the writers just not bother do the research? Or are they assuming the audiences are too dim to notice?
  • "Demimonde" is French for "half-world".
• In the finale, Lily/Brona leaves abruptly with no resolution on her character. I'd have assumed she would be pursued into death and might have asked Victor to find a way to actually kill her. Would this have been planned for Season Four or is it really just that?
• Vanessa is lobotomized in her first flashback episode. By the time of her mother's funeral she's functioning, thinking and speaking like a normal person. Is this just something supernatural?
  • Lobotomies weren't invented until decades after the period where the show is set. This troper always understood what was done to Vanessa as trepanation, an older procedure that, while still risky, isn't intended to damage the brain like a lobotomy. Instead it's supposed to open a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain, which was thought to be a cause for mental illness.