Penny Dreadful: No Beast So Fierce

Oh Penny Dreadful. You and your terrible anti-climaxes. After the abrupt deaths of Mina and Evelyn Poole in prior seasons I suppose I should be used to it now, but still, taking out two of your significant supporting characters with blink-and-you'll-miss-it gunfire has certainly raised the bar for your "it's not about the destination because the destination ain't that interesting" mode of storytelling.

Okay, so I'm slathering on the sarcasm here, and the truth is this show does compensate for its let-downs by providing great build-up, but this time around the discrepancy in trade-off was a little more pronounced.

Photography

I went on a day trip today to a place called Castle Hill, named for the limestone boulders that are reminiscent of an old abandoned ruin (at least that's what the brochure says, but to me it looks more like an alien landscape).

The last time I was there I was twelve years old and on my way to school camp, so it was a rather surreal to return twenty years later to find it relatively unchanged – though I wasn't able to find some of the landmarks that I recalled from last time.

It was about a two hour drive from my house, and as you can see under the cut – it's a pretty spectacular destination.

Orphan Black: The Redesign of Natural Objects

This was a surprisingly straightforward episode. Your average episode of Orphan Black is packed with so many twists and turns and surprises that it's forever teetering on the edge of incomprehensibility, but this one involved significant steps forward and a near-perfect example of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee (because did anyone truly believe that Alison would betray her seestras?)

It was still a rather low-key episode, and much of it was setup for the final two episodes, but I glimpsed Helena in the "next week" promo, so it's clear we're heading into endgame now...

The Tunnel: S02E08

We made it to the finish line! I have to admit, season two of The Tunnel wasn't quite as compelling as its first, though I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was the lack of any juicy Karl/Elise interaction. Their dynamic felt a bit muted, though this final episode did a lot to make up for it.

I also found it more difficult to follow the narrative thread this time around. A rewatch would probably clear up some of the intricacies, but The Musketeers has finally started so there's precious little time for that!

The Musketeers: Spoils of War

Just as one show ends (The Tunnel) another begins, though the third season of The Musketeers has been jerked around considerably in regards to its airdates. Apparently the entire season has already been broadcast in Turkey – and possibly a few other countries – leading to all sorts of spoilers crossing my dashboard in the preceding months.

Maybe it's just me, but that lack of care makes it difficult to really throw myself back into the story. I watched this episode not as the culmination of a suspenseful build-up, but after noticing a review for the first episode on someone else's Tumblr and realizing: "oh crap, I gotta get onto that."

And as it happens, this season is our last. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed: three strong seasons is nothing to be ashamed of, but I felt The Musketeers had a life-expectancy of at least five (putting it on par with Merlin). Apparently it hasn't been doing as well as I assumed, or perhaps it was just too expensive for its own good.

Still, it's better to end something while it's still engaging than drag it out forever, and we know in advance to savour every moment. 

Woman of the Month: Maya Cobbina

Maya Cobbina from Undercover

I've just finished watching Undercover, and though it tripped a little at the finish line, it still made for a riveting drama throughout.

Sophie Okonedo's Maya Cobbina was the centrepiece and the highlight, a criminal law barrister who is a popular contender for the next Director of Public Prosecutions – significant not only because of her gender, but her race as well. If she gets the job, she'll be the first black woman in Britain to hold the position. 

But because it's such a high-profile job, she has to be squeaky clean. At first glance, that's no problem. She's got integrity, passion and commitment. Her husband Nick says of her: "Maya is the most honest person I've ever met," and it's true.

But the underlying premise of the drama is that her husband of twenty years is not who he says he is: back in the nineties he was an undercover police officer sent to spy on Maya, only to fall in love with her. Now with her new career looming, his superiors want to reactivate him as a plant and pass on what she plans to do about several high profile cases.

In a way it's more Nick's story than Maya's (he's the one with the internal conflict) and yet there's no displacing Maya as the show's main character. I read a few reviews that complained she was too good to be true – unfailingly righteous, compassionate and dignified – yet I fail to see why that's a problem.

There is plenty of room for inspirational women as well as fallible ones in fiction, and in the context of this particular drama it's her inherent goodness that makes her husband's betrayal so tragic. Only someone as brilliant as Maya could cause a man to bury himself in a twenty-year deception just to be with her, and as she starts putting the pieces together it's impossible not to empathise with her dawning realization that her precious family life is a lie.

I'm a sucker for female characters that are strong and vulnerable, and that's precisely the characterization at the core of Maya. 

Penny Dreadful: This World is Our Hell

After last week's Bottle Episode, it was a no-brainer to ensure that this week the show's scope opened up to include previously untrod territory not only in the geographical sense, but in regards to Ethan's backstory. (And the drastic change in scenery was probably convenient for the showrunners considering they could film this and the last episode concurrently).

It's about as far as you can get from a single-room episode.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about this foray into Ethan's past is not what we learned, but what we DIDN'T learn: we still have no idea how or why Ethan is a werewolf. It was widely supposed it was a curse laid upon him by the Apaches after he slaughtered their people, a theory strengthened by the appearance of Kaetenay at the start of this season, but if Kaetenay is the reason for Ethan's monthly transformations, he didn't take responsibility for it in this episode. 

What we get instead are two sides of the same story told by Ethan and Kaetenay to Hecate and Malcolm: that Ethan joined the army on the behest of his father and participated in Native American genocide. It ended with him murdering his commanding officer and offering himself to the Apaches to scalp.

Instead Kaetenay turned him into a weapon to use against the white invaders, which eventually culminated in Ethan giving the tribe details of how to best steal weapons and food from the Talbot Ranch. Though he stipulated no one was to be harmed, almost his entire family was brutally slaughtered, which pretty much explains the entirety of Ethan's character and his prevailing hatred toward his fathers.