'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' Episode 5 mixes transgressive sex with murder and is deeply unsettling
Spoilers for 'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' Season 1, Episode 5 'Children of the Royal Sun'
Detective Tiago is in way over his head in this episode. He starts a secret affair with Sister Molly who has a way of shifting her words (and stories) around to suit the person she is talking to. She gives the same 'caught in a storm, rescued by a truckful of men' two very different treatments. In Tiago's arms, the story becomes a homage to her mother, "the dragon lady" who had raged against the storm, and the men become saviors who took them "to a dry place". But for Josephina, who has just told her the story of her assault, it becomes a story of a mother who abandons her in a room full of drunk, lustful men. Which one is true?
But while Tiago might not be aware of Sister Molly's duplicity, he becomes terribly aware of Mateo's transgression of killing a cop in cold blood. As he tells Mateo to run at the end of the episode, he knows that things will never be normal again.
Nothing is normal even otherwise in this episode with scenes that mix transgressive moments of sex with murder. After Tiago sleeps with Sister Molly, the scene shifts to her mother telling Randolph, the henchman, that he knows "what has to be done" -- all but spelling out that she needs him to kill Tiago just like he killed James Hazlett, Sister Molly's previous lover. But this is actually the tamest narrative pairing of sex and murder in Episode 5.
In the chilling cold open, we see Magda (as Elsa) asking a stranger to take her home and physically hurt her as a sexual kink. Once indoors, she murders the man and calls Peter Craft to help her. When he arrives, she is covered in blood and she tells him that the murdered man was her abusive husband. She tells him that she stabbed him to death because she could not stand to be raped by him one more time.
Later, Peter Craft makes love to her on the hurriedly dug grave of the dead man, her body still bloody from the kill. The scene shows that Peter Craft has lost all reason in his lust for Elsa. The shared danger of disposing of the body becomes a dark bond that he seals with Elsa on that grave. By doing so, he irrevocably leaves behind his "acceptable" persona as a family man and becomes the lover of a murderess who he aids and abets.
Just like Peter, Mateo is also a fallen man. In this episode, we see him also covered in blood, shaking with regret for killing the cop in cold blood. This is when Magda, this time as Rio, strips off his bloody clothes and measures his naked body for his "armor", the clothes of a Pachuco, who are "the children of the royal sun".
The encounter ends in sex as Rio's speech convinces Mateo that his taboo-breaking act of killing a man was something to be proud of as a sign of pachuco strength. His erroneous conviction is further reinforced when Fly Rico joins him and Rio in a threesome -- the transgressive act of murder celebrated by transgressive sex.
So when Tiago finally confronts Mateo, there is not a trace of remorse left in him as he proudly declares that if he had to kill the cop again, he would. Tiago, of course, is completely shattered as he tells his brother to run. It is the only thing he can do for him.
'Penny Dreadful: City of Angels' airs on Sundays at 10 pm ET, on Showtime.
