'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' Episode 8 Review: Answers get clearer as Magda finally shows her hand
Spoilers for 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' Season 1 Episode 8 'Hide and Seek'
The slow pace of 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' as it navigates its many storylines can make it easy to forget that the series is known just as much for its thrills as it is for horror, but this episode is a sharp reminder of just that. Attacks are made, secrets are revealed and the importance of a few long-running threads finally come into the light.
With last episodes revealing that Adelaide Finnister (Amy Madigan) was working with the Nazis and Charlton Townsend (Michael Gladis), the bigger picture is starting to come together. Though the specifics of the villains' ultimate plans remain murky, one thing is clear — there's a war coming, one that's going to be fought on clear and discriminatory lines. Be it nationalism, cultural heritage or pride, Magda is neatly carving up the city's factions and gearing them up for battle; in some cases literally.
Magda is at her best this episode, as a few things are made clear. One, that her plans don't just use prejudice as a tool for violence and death — prejudice is the foundation of her every plan. Whether it's convincing the leader of the German-American Bund that the Jews are the enemy, or Mateo Vega (Johnathan Nieves) to lead the Pachukos to take back their streets, or even to fake a Jewish heritage to turn the thread of Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane) into a thread she can pull on when she needs to, Magda is benefitting from having people think in an 'us vs. them' mentality. Never has the common link between all of her various guises been more clear, and it's masterful to watch. We also appreciate, in hindsight, all the work she's been doing in the episodes leading up to this.
With the reveal that Peter Craft (Rory Kinnear) is Peter Krupp, heir to a 400-year old legacy of German steelworkers who would later be instrumental in arming the Nazis in World War II, we find out why Magda's spent so much time and effort in worming her way into Peter's life and her claws into his soul. Her ambitions go far beyond setting Los Angeles ablaze in a war — she wants the world to burn. With the shadow of World War II looming over 1930s Los Angeles, it's all too easy to believe that Magda's schemes all bore devastating fruit.
This episode also contains some of the series' biggest thrills, paying off the slow creep of Frank Branson's (Santino Barnard) eeriness with a heart-thumping chase scene to remind the audience that this is all still technically a supernatural show. The payoff falls a little flat, however, in the reveal that it's all a dream, but the shootout between an unseen assailant and Lewis and Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) is nothing to be sneezed at.
As more and more is revealed, as the stakes of the story are ramped up and as the bigger picture all starts to come together, it is with this episode that viewers who have lasted through this season get to truly decide whether or not the ride was worth it. The series' villains have all but shown their cards, and though there are still mysteries left to be solved, whatever you were still waiting to find out about 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' — this was it.
The next episode of 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' airs on June 21, on Showtime.