If Dexter taught us anything - aside from how not to end a TV show and endear yourself to your entire fanbase - it's that Showtime can do complex villainous characters like few others, and the same can undoubtedly be said of the excellent, chilling Penny Dreadful. In a fictional world populated with supernatural fears and foes, where poisoned morality seems as virulent as the consumption that wiping out Billie Piper's melancholic whore, it's impressive that any villain stands head and shoulders above the rest, and it is undoubtedly Caliban's complexity that affords him the biggest impact. Like the great Frankenstein's monsters, Caliban is arguably more sinned against than sinning, but he is an embodiment of evil nonetheless - a mirror held up to the darkness of his master and his master's fellow creatures, and though Victor himself is the most inhuman of all the characters, his scientific zeal makes him partially forgivable, whereas the "monster" is designed to be pure villainy in the oldest sense - haunted, grotesque and monstrous. And thanks to a stunning performance by Rory Kinnear, Caliban was brilliantly, monstrously watchable.
Gem is a freelance writer, musician and librarian.
Her hobbies include: recreating movie death scenes from LEGO, concocting new types of bird suet cakes, walking on fresh snow and playing the glockenspiel - all at the same time.
