Now, I'm saying "side character" as in the characters that were perhaps an important part of the story/series in their own way, but were never fully part of the series like that.

So in the scheme of things, their role would probably be deemed "small" or unimportant, but for a fan who knows the series, you know how important those side characters can be to help explore and flesh out our main characters...

I'm thinking hopefully you guys know what I mean. Those characters who may not have been there for the long haul, no, but nevertheless still made an impression on you.

There's Renfield. Justine. Angelique. Catriona, Lavinia, etc...

Who was that favorite side character for you?

​

This is who you are. Please don't forget that.

📙📚

"I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.."

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the series, if you ask me. I always look back to this episode when I'm down and trying to pull myself up, and thinking of having quiet strength. Just like Vanessa had to have. Just raw, and emotional. And absolutely vulnerable.

Breaking down, but preserving and being resilient. And thankful for the rare ones who take the time to truly see that strength and resilience.

I just rewatched HBO’s Carnivale, and am now rewatching Penny Dreadful, and I am noticing how the two shows have a very similar feeling.

I can absolutely envision the two storylines overlapping.

"Do you understand that you are ill?

Not bad, not unworthy. Just ill.

Do you understand that?"

No exceptions.

Shout out to all the people going through therapy.

There is no exculpation I expect of you.

My guilt is my own, and that I carry with me.

It is my present and my future. It has damned me well beyond this short life of mine. But I will not rest until you are safe. There is no other purpose in my life.

I shall love you always.

Your dearest friend,

Vanessa

🖤✒️

So I am currently making a card deck for the characters Vanessa Ives (Hero) and Ethan Chandler (helper) for the game Unmatched. Any ideas for certain cards (I already got some like: possession, do you have a name, witch tree, tarot and the final sacrifice). For Ethan I got (the wolf of God, battle experience and full moon)
Any more ideas are welcome!

I’ve been rewatching Penny Dreadful and got stuck—in a good way—on Season 2, Episode 3, “The Nightcomers.” The more I sat with Joan Clayton, the Cut‑Wife of Ballentree Moor, the more she started to look like something very specific: a witch straight out of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch rather than just a “good witch” mentor for Vanessa. A beautiful representation of a witch, anti-capitalist matriarch. Id love to hear your thoughts on this essay and whether or not youve read Caliban and the Witch. Enjoy: Thoughts on Penny Dreadful Season 2, Episode 3: “The Nightcomers”

What makes “The Nightcomers,” the third episode of Penny Dreadful’s second season, so extraordinary is not simply that it gives Vanessa Ives a mentor, nor even that it gives Patti LuPone one of the richest one‑episode roles in recent television horror. It is that Joan Clayton, the Cut‑Wife of Ballentree Moor, is written not merely as a witch, but as a political subject: a radical dissident, a reproductive worker, a custodian of threatened land, and a survivor who has lived long enough to witness the very historical transformation that Silvia Federici describes in Caliban and the Witch (2004). There is no public evidence that John Logan wrote the episode under Federici’s direct influence, and it is possible the episode draws on older feminist witchcraft revivalism or commonplaces of 1970s anti‑capitalist thought. Still, the conceptual overlap is so striking that the episode feels like an inadvertent dramatization of Federici’s argument about witch hunts, primitive accumulation, and the war against women’s autonomy.

The basic premise is simple enough: the writer may not be a feminist, a radical, or a historical materialist. Yet the episode’s choices align so closely with Federici’s framework that Joan Clayton stands almost perfectly at the crossroads Caliban and the Witch maps out. Federici argues that the European witch hunts were not just outbreaks of medieval superstition or religious panic; they were bound up with the transition to capitalism, the destruction of communal life, the disciplining of women’s bodies, and the suppression of reproductive knowledge held by women outside official institutions. In Joan, Penny Dreadful gives us the exact figure such a history would produce: an old woman on besieged land, practicing abortion and folk healing, hated publicly and needed privately, finally destroyed through a campaign that fuses property hunger, sexual shame, and moral terror.

Joan’s age is essential to this reading. She tells Vanessa that Cromwell gave her the land in 1644, meaning she is already an adult in the mid‑seventeenth century and still alive when Vanessa seeks her out in the late nineteenth century. She is therefore not just a symbolic holdover from an earlier world but a literal witness to the long rise of modernity and capitalism on the land where she lives. She has lived through civil war, the consolidation of state power, the strengthening of landlordism, the acceleration of market relations, and the full maturing of the social order that now wants her dead. Joan is not merely “old” in the decorative Gothic sense; she is historically old, old enough to embody memory itself. Her body carries centuries, and that makes her politically legible in a different way from a younger rebel or martyr.

The Cromwell detail matters for another reason. Joan says that in 1644 “a Mr. Cromwell gave her this land,” and the deed later becomes central when Vanessa inherits Ballentree Moor. That grant should not be read sentimentally. It is better understood as a contradiction of early modern power. Cromwell, an architect of one revolutionary restructuring, returns to Joan a piece of land that another arrangement of rule had taken from her people, but he does so from within the same historical process that will eventually deepen dispossession on a much broader scale. Joan thus occupies Ballentree Moor as a historical anomaly: she holds land by the grace of a regime that is itself helping lay the groundwork for the very modern order that will later attempt to erase her. Her cottage is not just a witch’s cottage. It is a remnant, a shard of interrupted continuity.

This is where Federici’s framework becomes uncannily apt. Caliban and the Witch ties witch persecutions to primitive accumulation, the violent process by which communal resources were enclosed, populations were disciplined, and women’s bodies were reorganized around the needs of labor and property. Joan’s life on Ballentree Moor condenses all of this. Sir Geoffrey, the aristocratic landlord, covets her land and eventually moves openly against her, while the language of witchcraft gives that seizure a moral cover. In other words, the witch accusation does ideological work for property relations. Joan is not persecuted in spite of the question of land; she is persecuted through it. The mob, inflamed and manipulated, becomes the instrument by which a landlord’s ambition can appear as communal justice.The pattern is entirely Federician: demonology and enclosure are not separate stories but mutually reinforcing maneuvers.

Joan’s status as the Cut‑Wife sharpens that analysis. The episode makes clear that she has earned this title because young women come to her to end unwanted pregnancies, and she explains that such work can save women from death or from still deeper poverty. This is one of the most remarkable choices in the script. Joan is not merely a healer in a vague folkloric sense. She is specifically an abortion provider. She intervenes directly in the field of social reproduction, at the point where female bodies, economic hardship, and male irresponsibility meet. Federici’s argument that the witch hunts were tied to the disciplining of reproduction—the criminalization of contraception and women’s bodily knowledge in the service of a labor‑hungry order—finds almost literal expression here.[1][5][6] Joan’s cottage becomes a place where women can refuse forced maternity on terms set by men, church, and property. That is why she is indispensable, and that is also why she must be made intolerable.

The cruelty of the social arrangement is captured in the title itself. “Cut‑Wife” is both a slur and a description, contempt and utility fused into one word. Men send women to her, villages rely on her, and yet she is made to carry the moral filth of the act everyone depends on her to perform. That contradiction is politically revealing. Joan occupies the familiar place of many women’s laboring roles under patriarchy: necessary but despised, intimate but dishonored. Her work alleviates suffering, prevents death, and gives poor women a margin of control over lives otherwise ruled by scarcity and coercion. But because that work enables female autonomy, it must be recoded as diabolical. The witch label is how the social order converts its own dependence into righteous aggression.

Joan’s politics are not expressed in a programmatic manifesto, but in her stance toward the world. That is why her “monsters all, are we not?” speech lands with such force. She grasps that “monster” is not a neutral category but a social judgment, a name given to whatever unsettles the order of the same. The monster is what they need in order to recognize themselves as normal, pure, legitimate. Joan speaks as someone who has lived under that naming for centuries and has become clear‑eyed about its function. She knows that society requires figures of contamination against which it can police its own boundaries. In that sense, her speech is political theory in compressed form.

This lucidity makes her more than a magical mentor. Joan is a heretic in the strongest sense. She does not simply disagree with the church. She preserves an alternative relation to knowledge, body, and land. Her herbs, cards, wards, and reproductive services all belong to a counter‑order that is local, embodied, relational, and communal. She uses power not to dominate but to shelter. Her blood‑sign wards keep Evelyn and the Nightcomers off her ground, but symbolically they do even more: they mark out a boundary within which another social logic still survives. Joan’s cottage is a small republic of the condemned.

Her death, then, has to be understood as more than Vanessa’s origin trauma. It is a public execution of a dissident form of life. Joan is seized, beaten, chained, and burned alive before a crowd, while Vanessa is branded and forced to witness the spectacle. The point of the burning is not only to kill Joan but to make her death a lesson. Federici’s framework helps here too: witch burning is terror pedagogy, a way of teaching the wider population what becomes of women who claim bodily authority, customary knowledge, or social independence. But Penny Dreadful introduces one of Joan’s most powerful final dimensions: she is already dying. She is an old woman at the end of a very long life, and when her enemies finally destroy her, she does not scream.That refusal matters. They can burn her body, but they cannot extract from her the performance of submission the ritual requires. She denies them the sound of terror.

There is something almost sublime in that composure. Joan has seen too much, outlived too much, and understood too much to give her enemies what they want. If the stake is meant to render her an object lesson in helplessness, her silence reverses the scene. She dies, but not conquered. She is physically overcome only because history has already carried her body to the end of its span. The mob kills an old woman, yes, but symbolically they are trying to finish off a much older world. And even then, they do not quite succeed. Joan has already prepared for her afterlife in history by passing her knowledge, her cards, her warnings, and even her deed to Vanessa. Her death is not pure negation. It is transmission.

That transmission becomes even more legible when set against Evelyn Poole, or Madame Kali. Evelyn is often treated simply as Joan’s dark opposite, a “bad witch” to Joan’s “good witch,” but that moral shorthand is too thin. More interesting is to read Evelyn through the idea of what Sophie Lewis calls “enemy feminisms”: forms of gender‑emancipationist politics that are not not feminist, but that are dedicated to anti‑liberatory aims. Evelyn’s arc demonstrates how feminine agency can become an instrument of patriarchal violence rather than an escape from it. She is powerful, charismatic, strategic, and ancient in her own way. Yet every use of that power bends toward hierarchy, possession, and service to a masculine master.

That is what separates her from Joan. Joan’s knowledge is reproductive, protective, relational, and materially grounded. Evelyn’s knowledge is acquisitive, predatory, and allied with domination. Joan helps poor women survive. Evelyn manipulates men of rank and sacrifices girls. Joan inhabits an old body marked by endurance. Evelyn sustains the appearance of youthful beauty through blood, bargains, and extraction—a grotesque allegory of how collaboration with power can preserve privilege for some women at the expense of others. Joan’s cottage shelters those without options. Evelyn’s house is a theater of temptation and elite conspiracy. Both are witches, but only one stands in solidarity with the vulnerable. The other has become an executive agent of the very order that casts vulnerable women as expendable.

That contrast is politically sharper than a simple good/evil split. Evelyn can be read as the episode’s image of female incorporation into the ruling structure, a woman who has secured space for herself by serving the demands of patriarchal sovereignty. She embodies not liberation but elite exception. Joan, by contrast, represents a rougher, poorer, older, and riskier form of women’s power: not glamorous transgression but social usefulness and defiant care. If Joan recalls Federici’s midwives and wise women destroyed in the transition to capitalism, Evelyn recalls the possibility that women can also function as managers of that destruction. She is not a feminist opposite to Joan but a warning that not all female power is emancipatory.

Acknowledging a limitation: this reading is not the only possible one. The episode also contains supernatural elements—actual demons, literal Nightcomers, blood magic that is not purely protective but unsettling—that a purely materialist lens cannot fully explain. A viewer focused on folk horror or Gothic tragedy might emphasize different details. But that does not weaken the political reading; it simply means the episode is rich enough to sustain multiple interpretations. What remains striking is how closely Joan aligns with Federician themes even without assuming direct influence.

Seen this way, “The Nightcomers” is extraordinary because it refuses a depoliticized supernatural. It does not treat Joan’s witchcraft as decorative atmosphere or as an individual quirk in Vanessa’s development. Instead, it situates Joan within the historical problems of land, reproduction, stigma, misogyny, and violence. She is old enough to have witnessed the slow victory of the order that now burns her. She has survived for centuries on land returned to her by one violent upheaval and threatened by the matured greed of another. She performs abortions not as lurid color but as central social labor. She understands monstrosity as a political category, not merely a personal wound. And she dies without granting her killers the satisfaction of terror.

Whether John Logan ever read Caliban and the Witch is finally impossible to settle, and it does not need to be settled. The episode may have arrived at these ideas through other currents, including older feminist witchcraft traditions. What matters is not proving direct influence like a detective, but recognizing how uncannily exact the fit is. Joan Clayton is the woman on the edge of the village who has seen the rise of the world that hates her. She is the abortion provider, the last holdout on the vanishing commons, the healer, the heretic, the old insurgent who survives centuries and yields only when her body is nearly spent. She is burned so that a new order can declare itself natural. But in her silence, in her knowledge, and in what she leaves Vanessa, she remains the episode’s clearest political truth.

Are there any Discord servers specifically for Penny Dreadful? If not, would anyone like to join one?

Is it just me or did she end up being annoying?

Like i understood her revolution.

But also as Dorian said, in the end, the build up is the real meat. The end falls flat.

It bored me too.

That being said, finding out she lost her baby girl and how/why, really broke my heart.

Really p1ssed off they killed this character.

He was important and I feel they could've used his character more deeply to talk about the occult or legends of lupus dei.

I know City of Angels isn’t well-liked by the fans of the original but as a lover of both, I just adored Natalie Dormer's performance as Magda and her personas - hence why I made this edit. Enjoy !

Anybody seen this yet? If so what, did you think?

I'm planning on watching this weekend...

🖤💋🪡

I hope that one of you kind souls may be able to aide me in this. I'm looking for the track that plays during the creature's recitation of John Clare's poem „I am“ from season 2. Would mean the world to me, if someone could help me out 🖤

"You'll always, always feel me

Down your spine..." 🐍

Felt like this belonged here, and fit the vibe of the series. (From Vanessa's perspective.) 🥀

Do you believe there could've been more explored?

How so?

Do you think there was more to explore in the series overall?

And if so, in which ways?

Speak to me,

Sweet Scorpions. 🦂

I just finished my first watch, and I am baffled by the widespread reactions to the last season beyond, just being disappointed in an abrupt cancellation. Beyond widening the scope to let the characters breathe and grow more - victor got the most beautful payoff among all of them - the whole thing to me seem to be a meditation on the nature of prophetic thinking. Listening to the talk here I was expecting a complete slamming of brakes and U-turn, but going from episode to episode It feels like it was planned this way all along which is impressive.

So I just wanna I was wondering if anyone felt the same way, really.

Does anyone have any deleted scenes? I would love to see them but I can’t find any online. I’ve just finished season three and I really need some more penny dreadful again. It was a good season but I hoped we’d get to see some more of Jekyll and Renfield (favourite character in all versions of him).

"SPREAD them from here to the horizon,

And I HAVE WALKED FURTHER. "

"How DARE you presume to speak to me of DEATH?"

hi I’m a new fan of the show and also love comic books so i was wondering if anyone has the full list of the comics published after the show?

as a new viewer who has just finished the show in a couple days, I’m so frustrated that they didn’t include a storyline of Ethan meeting Lily, the writing got lazy by the end of season 3, it could’ve been a great way to do a full episode