So, Renee and I were taking, as we do, about whether to watch a show, keep watching it or whether we can drop it. We base this on whether it’s in our genre (so, no matter what, we’re always stuck with Vampire Diaries and since it’s a dystopian Renee has 2 wonderful series of Last Ship to look forward to. LUCKY HER!) and whether we like it (so Killjoys stays, so there).
By the end of the last episode we’d agreed to drop this
series because the closest thing we have to the supernatural was Marlott’s
hallucinations and we weren’t especially enjoying it
And then this episode happened. This is because I taunted
Renee about Last Ship, isn’t it?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So John Marlotte has become more and more worrying in
this episode, which everyone puts down to syphilis dementia since pretty much
everyone knows. As John makes more accusations – against Sir William, against
Sir Peel, Nightengale becomes more concerned, insisting on taking his gun back
and making sure Flora doesn’t stay with him because she will be unsafe with a
man with Syphilis.
Marlotte lays down the law and invokes his authority, Flora
cannot leave! I’m not sure where this authority comes from beyond his white
maleness.
Flora also tries to talk Marlotte around but he rants and
raves and decides to lock her up. Marlotte is looking more and more out of
control and worrisome. When Flora mentions, to try and make the ranting
Marlotte back off, that Lord Hervey actually kicked her out and she never
actually wanted to return to Marlotte.
Marlotte, who I would say is not making good decisions
right now, but let’s be honest never really made good decisions, now decides
that Lord Hervey is actually the big bad. He rants at Lady Harvey who,
shockingly, doesn’t find slightly unhinged ranting and raving a very persuasive
reason to betray her brother – though she seems to know something is terribad
wrong with her brother. Also Marlotte totally wants her to marry him. His ranting
is really not making a really good case for matrimony.
He does decide to go check out Lord Hervey and runs into
his servant (who has been dubbed the Beast because someone randomly ranted
about the Beast earlier in the season and everyone kind of forgot that
reference to now) who I really do not understand why he deserves that but hey
let’s stretch that. Anyway, beasty servant is currently holding Alice prisoner.
Yes, Alice, the Butcher’s missing daughter who has
finally turned up after being forgotten for a little while. Marlotte tries to
intervene and is promptly captured by Lord Hervey who pretty much confesses to
everything. He is the evil Frankenstein creator who made the child body and he
has been murdering all the kids for his he’s been experimenting on
Marlotte is then drugged – and wakes up at home, covered
in blood, making random comments about the calendar pictures from Blake before
finding Flora’s body and a big knife. Yup, Flora, victimised and used for the
entire season is now thoroughly dead to advance the pain and storylines of the
menfolk. Which leaves Lady Hervey (since Mary Shelley hung around briefly
before running off) – the official Good Lady of Purity – as the only real
female representation on this show. Oh yay.
Nightengale finds Marlotte covered in blood and holding a
blade over the body of his fiancée and is rather upset by this. Marlotte is
arrested and tries to convince Sir Peele and Lady Hervey and everyone else of
his innocence by ranting in a slightly unhinged manner. Since Hervey is there
letting everyone know he has syphilis and isn’t rational, it doesn’t convince
many people. Even his appeal to Boz doesn’t actually achieve anything
After a very brief trial, Marlotte is sentenced to death
And Hanged. Yes the protagonist is hanged. He dies
And comes back!
Yes, Lord Hervey has succeeded and brought back Marlotte
to be his Frankenstein’s monster with the help of aborted foetuses (dear gods
don’t do this – don’t link Frankenstein monsters to abortion, please, we were
approaching an actual sensible narrative there). He’s all very proud of this
and doesn’t realise that undead Marlotte is really not a fan of being the
undead. He refuses food and water and is really really not wanting to continue
his unlife.
Lord Hervey also decides to tell Lady Hervey about this.
This deeply moral, religious woman who was against the surgeons dissecting
bodies is, not surprisingly, really really really really not happy about
Frankenmarlotte. She does convince Marlotte to eat though – so they can both
unite to find… redemption or possibly to stop her brother doing more evil
things to bodies.
So yes he eats. And stabs the beasty servant (who really
doesn’t deserve to be a beast) in the eye with a fork. Lady Hervey walks down
the aisle in her wedding. And Alice turns up at her parent’s home.
And so ends The
Frankenstein Chronicles with definite supernaturalness.
As I mentioned in the opening lines, I’m not a huge fan
of this series. It has been very distracted. We’ve had a whole lot of weird
tangents – the beast, Blake’s pictures, Mary Shelley (which went nowhere) and
endless guilt and hallucinations of Marlotte. For a show that is only 6
episodes that’s a lot of distraction and a lot of very under-developed
characters. Honestly the number of times I mixed up Sir Bentley and Sir William
was embarrassing, especially when I actually have seen both actors in several
other shows.
This lack of development also led to Nightengale being the
token sidekick. I love that he actually developed a relationship with Flora for
a little while because for one brief moment he was more than an actual tool.
But it was brief – and we saw so little of him. With Flora’s death and Shelley’s
only too brief appearance, we equally saw women not really get the attention
they deserve, leaving us with Lady Hervey who is a pretty shallow, love
interest character. And I’ve already spoken about the single depiction of LGBTQpeople which is such a hot mess.
So it looks like we’re in for a second season and… I can’t
say I’m super enthused but now we actually have Frankenstein’s monster at last
we can see the supernatural.
