Showtime’s new series Penny Dreadful just aired its second episode, “Séance,” and that ending left us speechless.
Blood, sex and corpses
The episode starts with a woman eating an apple in the middle of a dark park, and then naturally getting attacked by a monster. Ethan then wakes up on the beach by the docks and goes into the local inn to get something to drink. Cue Billy Piper coming in to chat him up before leaving for work, and he decides to stay at the same inn. Brona visits the home of Dorian Gray, her new work place.
Brona starts coughing up blood while with him because she’s sick, and he was filming her strip. He doesn’t mind that Brona is sick and coughing, and so he starts to have sex with her anyway, all while they film it.
Victor is teaching his new buddy how to eat, and they decide to pick a name for him so he chooses a Shakespeare book and has his buddy close his eyes and land his finger randomly on the page. His new name? Proteus. Afterwards, Victor leaves for work but Proteus must stay behind.
He visits Malcolm and Vanessa to re-examine the corpse they found last week, and starts drawing blood per the request of Malcolm. He and Vanessa start bonding over poetry, and he confirms that the blood is human, but they need to talk to a hematologist. Malcolm asks him to do so, and pays him accordingly.
Malcolm visits the police to get information about the murder case, and they confirm that this isn’t Jack the Ripper, but there will definitely be another murder and he wants to be invited when it happens.
He could have had 10 friends.
Victor is back home and starts teaching Proteus how to read, but he recognizes a whale, so Victor thinks he might have been a whaler in his old life. Proteus starts enjoying the sunlight that is coming through the skylight, and eventually Victor decides to take him out exploring. He starts teaching Proteus about the outside world when Proteus starts remembering his old life. They run into Ethan and Brona, and Proteus starts flirting with Brona and offers her a chestnut, adorably so. They arrive back home to Victor’s, when Proteus gets split in two by a man (with his hands) who proclaims that Victor’s first born has returned, and called him father.
Malcolm and Vanessa show up at Sir Lyle’s party where Vanessa meets Dorian Grey, and he thinks that she’s skeptical of the room, but she assures him she is not. At the party they decide to hold a séance, and all four of them (Lyle, Vanessa, Dorian and Malcolm) take part. The woman holding the séance gets possessed by a spirit, but she senses another in the room. Vanessa then gets possessed by several spirits, one of them being Malcolm’s daughter and another being his son who died, or claiming to be. She puts on quite the show and manages to scare everyone in the room. Afterwards, Vanessa leaves the party (presumably still possessed by Amonet) and walks the streets in the rain, having sex with a stranger.
Brona shows up at the inn again, and Ethan offers her another breakfast of whiskey. They talk about her career as a model(ish) and bond again, then Ethan asks her to dinner. She agrees.
Malcolm arrives at Lyle’s home again, this time to have him translate the hieroglyphics on the corpse. Lyle says that Malcolm should stay away from whatever he found that included the hieroglyphics, because it is a dark spell. The inclusion of Amonet and Amun Ra tells the time of the world ending, and darkness taking over everything.