‘Penny Dreadful’ season 1, episode 7 recap: Heaven and Hell 

‘Penny Dreadful’ season 1, episode 7 recap: Heaven and Hell

By Tariq Kyle (@TRQhz) at 8:00 am, June 23, 2014 | Reviewed by Karen Rought

The episode begins with Vanessa sitting with Malcolm, and it’s clear that she’s still possessed. She’s talking about how corpses of women are prettified and photographed. It’s pretty gross. Then it appears that she’s being possessed by a spirit that knows Mina, or is Mina.

As she’s possessed, things start flying out of the bookshelves and walls and the entire house is filled with moving furniture, going about chaotically until Sembene knocks her out.

Victor gives her a visit to see what’s ailing her, and she seems relatively okay at the beginning. And then she starts getting creepy again, reciting the same thing that Victor had said to her in episode 1. She starts saying cyptic things about what Victor has been learning about, and he gets uncomfortable and leaves.

Malcolm explains this has happened before, and Vanessa fights it as much as she can. Victor says that someone must have triggered a feeling of guilt she has about some sort of erotic thing she did in the past. He picks up a card from her tarot table and suddenly a spider comes out of it, and then it’s a thousand spiders coming from the entire table. And then she screams.

Ethan arrives at the request of Malcolm, and he made sure Ethan brought his weapons. They enter Vanessa’s room and she is crouched at the foot of her bed, wet and making weird animal noises. He tries to talk to her, and she asks if he screwed Dorian or if Dorian screwed him. And she’s possessed again, saying she’s going to tell Brona. Vanessa goes crazy wild again, and they have to sedate her. At the end, she screams something in Arabic and Malcolm explains that it translated to, “Let me die.”

The next night, Vanessa seems lucid when Ethan is watching over her. She’s restrained to the bed, so she doesn’t hurt herself. She wants him to shoot her, and they talk about their belief of heaven and Hell. It’s now when they realize Ethan is possessed by the Devil. She asks if he’s too afraid to show himself instead of in the guise of others, and he says he’s more afraid of being thwarted. She asks what he wants, and he wants her to be the mother of Evil, and to rule with him. And then she makes out with the Devil…who is really inside Ethan. It appears that she has fallen under his spell, but then it’s revealed that the real Ethan is actually downstairs with Malcolm.

Malcolm asks if Ethan wants to go with him to Africa. During their conversation, they hear Vanessa scream again and this time she’s clawing at the wall and bleeding, and suddenly all of her veins go red and the hieroglyphics for Amotep and Amun Ra appear on her chest, and she claws at her wrists before they stop her from killing herself.

Victor is resting from their long night of watching over Vanessa when he looks outside and sees Caliban, waiting for him to work on his second creature. Ethan walks in, and Victor says he’s going to try transfusion and proteins to keep her alive, but perhaps they should let her die. Victor asks Ethan to teach him to shoot, and they practice in the basement. They practice, and Victor actually does pretty well.

Later that night again, they find Vanessa screaming and handcuff her yet again to the bed. It seems no one in the house is getting any sort of rest. Ethan brings dinner to Sembene, and asks why he’s so loyal to Malcolm and it’s revealed that Malcolm saved Sembene’s life, and now he owes him.

Malcolm goes to visit Vanessa as she’s resting and wakes her up, and says she can help them. He says there’s a place between life and death itself, and she’s close to it so she must be close to Mina. He wants her to find Mina, but she doesn’t want to because she thinks the only reason he let the demon possessions keep happening is for this reason, for her to get so close to death. Ethan comes in and tells Malcolm to get away from her. He thinks it’s time to do what Vanessa wants, and she wants to die. Ethan wants to bring a priest to help her at least, and in the end they agree.

The priest arrives, and he explains that exorcisms are forbidden because they must get permission from the Vatican, so they decide to give Vanessa her last rites at least. The priest goes to her room and tries to leave but Ethan stops him, so he begins. As predicted, she gets possessed again and actually bites off the priest’s cheek. Vanessa then mentally throws everyone but Ethan out of the room, and he says he’s not going to leave her. He slams her against the wall and says please, and it looks like she’s lucid again. She’s begging him to kill her, and he points the gun at her, says a prayer and presses his necklace that Brona gave him against her forehead as he starts reciting Latin. It was like he was possessed by God, or something. She falls to the ground, but she is alive – and presumably not possessed anymore.

That day Vanessa wakes up and remembers something from the play she saw a couple episodes ago and gets up to see Malcolm. She tells him she knows where Mina is.

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