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Penny-Dreadful-Season-3-Episode-7

Dorian Gray best describes tonight’s episode when he tells Lily, “We are in the ebb tide now.” All season the waves have been building for Dorian, Victor, the Creature, Ethan, and Vanessa; but before they crash in next week’s two-hour finale, we reach a pause, the breathless moment in which the wave hangs at its height, suspended, and our characters commit themselves to the path ahead. It is an episode in which they assess their regrets, or wash their hands of them and look to the future.

Speaking first of Dorian, what does he regret? He is a man of high tastes and existential motivations, but we see tonight that he is simple at his core. His only regret is boredom. As he sits, night after night, with Lily’s growing legion of “depraved whores,” all he sees is yet another revolution that he’s already lived through in his long, long lifetime. He’s seen empires rise and fall, he tells Lily, one after another, and the potential is always so much better than the outcome. They are all, in his words, “disappointing.” To assuage his regrets, he calls in the debt Victor owes him for saving Victor’s life, and together they ambush Lily, bringing her to the Bedlam hospital and promising to make her “a proper woman.” The scene is a heartbreaking one for Lily, and proves a theory I had earlier in the season: This season, Victor exists to validate Lily’s conviction that men are oppressors, and that women who aren’t docile are considered unwell, wild, or insane.

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For the Creature, addressing regrets means amending them. He finds Vanessa, looking for advice, and she is his true friend. She advises him that he should go after the family from his old life that he lost, and that if they reject him, he will only be as lonely as he is now. “Then let us dare,” they tell each other, “and may the lost souls be found.”

And they are. Well, the Creature’s is anyway, as he has a tear-jerking reunion with his wife, and then his son. As he holds Jake in his arms, we can smile for the Creature because he has finally achieved the yearnings that drove him since the beginning of the series. In Season One, all he wanted was companionship. He antagonized Victor, made him resurrect Lily and further her suffering, felt her rejection, and then traveled the world alone. He kept moving forward, but all he’s had to do this whole time is retrace his steps. It’s a case in which the healthier decision is to not move on.

Another case like that would be Ethan, who we see on his way back to England with Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay after the nastiness at the Talbot Ranch. Sir Malcolm asks if Ethan would do it all over if he could—meet Sir Malcolm and Vanessa, take part in their night work—or not. Ethan tells Sir Malcolm he wouldn’t have it any other way.

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And Vanessa? She has been hounded by regret her entire adult life—regret for her betrayal of Mina, regret for the normal life she cannot live because she is hunted by Lucifer and Dracula. So she gives it up. That’s right, Dreadfuls: her new friend Hardtegan helps her discover Dracula’s true identity, and when she confronts Dr. Sweet, he gives her an out so easy she has to take it. He offers her everything she never had: acceptance. Dracula wants to accept her and love her for who she is, and in a way that lets her stop struggling against the darkness she fought from within and outside of herself for so long. He’s offering her a patch of shade in hellish heat. I personally can’t blame her for giving in, but it’s a shame that the love and happiness she has allowed herself this season is so double-edged. I worry that when she has to live with her actions later it will come at a great emotional cost. We’ll just have to see how everything shakes out when the finale comes sweeping in like a great and terrible cloud next week.

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Eric Mayrhofer

Eric is a Hogwarts student whose letter got lost in the mail. While he's waiting for his owl, he does social media during the day and fiction at night. He loves reading, and currently adores anything by Cathrynne Valente, Elizabeth Strout, Steven Millhauser, Patrick Ness, and of course, JK Rowling the Twitter Queen. When he grows up, he wants to be a water bender. In the meantime, he pursues his MFA.