7/24/2023 0 Comments Penny dreadful reviewMost of the performances, particularly from veterans like Lane, are solid, but the heavy lift here is done by Dormer, who plays not one but four avatars of Magda: Alex, a homely assistant to Townsend Elsa, a mysterious if slightly cartoonish German emigre who lures Dr Kraft with her tale as a battered wife with a strange, asthmatic son and Rio, a maroon-haired, flamboyant leader of a Mexican American gang. City councilman Charlton Townsend (Michael Gladis), seeking to bulldoze Chicano neighborhoods for a highway to Pasadena, is approached to collaborate with Nazi insurgents to facilitate fascism in the US. Over there, Tiago’s sister Josefina (Jessica Garza) silently bears the brunt of neighborhood police terrorism. Over here, Dr Peter Craft (Rory Kinnear, the one holdover from the original), a German Nazi working as a pediatrician, spouts “America First” white nationalism in a city park. Over the first three episodes, Penny Dreadful plunges into its immersive world and hovers, scouring the city’s moral underground (which, it understands, can be as much the institutional as the criminal), slowly overturning pebbles with calls to the present. Meanwhile, riots between Chicano residents and hostile law enforcement over police brutality and stifled opportunity offer Tiago’s brothers Raúl (Adam Rodriguez) and Mateo (Jonathan Nieves) subplots in resistance groups (the union for Raúl, a pachuco gang for Manuel) and echo the city’s so-called Zoot Suit riots in 1943. Tiago and Lewis’s investigation leads to Tiago’s mother Maria (a standout Adriana Barraza), an ardent believer in Mexican folklore, and to the radio church of Sister Molly Finnister (Kerry Bishé), which switches Tiago into romantic lead mode, and her ruthlessly controlling mother Adelaide (Amy Madigan). (City of Angels is considerably less macabre than its forebear, but has its fair share of gore.)įrom here, weighty plots ooze in several disparate, loosely connected directions anchored by historical research (and, in disguise, Magda’s demonic nudging). The two are tasked with a grisly crime: a family murdered and left naked, hearts ripped out and faces painted Day of the Dead-style, in a dried-up riverbed. The adult Tiago (Daniel Zovatto), the first Mexican American detective in a racist cesspool Los Angeles police department, partners with Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane), a sardonic Jew sympathetic to Tiago’s outsider status. This is the ascendant LA of oil wells and parched mom-and-pop streets, working-class dance halls and a strong Chicano presence. But the show, created and written, like the original, by John Logan (Skyfall, The Aviator), cedes most of its action to the mortals in 1938 – LA’s so-called Golden Age, though there are no starlets to be found here. Magda, demon puppeteer of the series, gets a literal fiery entrance, starting a blaze that almost kills a young Tiago Vega, who survives with help from Santa Muerte.
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