Things aren’t quite as exciting back at the Grand Guignol, where Ethan and Brona encounter Vanessa and Dorian. Brona is noticeably disturbed, both by her past encounter with Dorian and Ethan’s casual discourse with Vanessa. She’s cut from a different cloth than the two well-to-do socialites, and she knows it. Angered, she takes off, saying through tears, “It’s a sad spectacle, why don’t we just admit it? You’re fucking a skeleton every night.” Coughing and miserable, she concludes with, “From now on, you can fuck me like anyone else: after you’ve paid,” and runs off, only to collapse in a doorway minutes later. It’s a tragic state to leave her character in, but Penny Dreadful has never professed to be about happy endings. The consumption-afflicted Brona doesn’t seem to be heading for a fairytale ending – at least not with Ethan.
Stunned into silence, Ethan is accosted by Dorian, who offers him company and a drink. The two head to one of Dorian’s hangouts – a seedy, underground establishment where people gather to watch a trained dog brutally dispatch hundreds of rats. Like many of Dorian’s pastimes, it’s all about death (memo to the writers: we get it already, this is one morbid dude), but Ethan isn’t as enthused about the proceedings as Dorian. The blood triggers something in him, and he needs to get out of there. Short of abandoning Dorian, however, there’s only one thing he can do, and so he heads for the bar to get very wasted. Unfortunately, being a gruff American in a town filled with smarmy Brits, he soon finds himself getting beaten on the ground for being perceived as rude. One gets the sense that Ethan could dispatch the entire room if he wanted to, but he’s holding back. Perhaps that’s because the kind of harm he’d do to those picking on him isn’t the kind that they’d recover from.
So Ethan winds up bruised and battered, and Dorian takes Ethan back to his home to patch him up. While there, they talk about perfume, the nature of artwork and the masks that they’re both wearing. Dorian tells Ethan that he plays the part of the disaffected gunslinger well, but that it’s still just a part. “We all play parts,” he admits. “What’s yours?” Ethan asks. With a smile, Dorian simply replies, “Human.”
As he fully absorbs that, Ethan raises a glass with Dorian for what Dorian thinks is “the most mysterious thing in London: Miss Vanessa Ives.” While they clink, we cut back to Sir Malcolm’s mansion, where Vanessa has come home to find a disturbed Sir Malcolm. “It came after you,” he admits. “I think it was all a ploy: allowing us to capture him, bringing him here. We practically invited it in, didn’t we?” Vanessa realizes that, because Mina led them to Fenton, that means she’s playing for the other team. “Can you blame her?” snarls Sir Malcolm. This is where it gets interesting.
“I’m not the only one in this house she has a reason to hate,” Vanessa warns him. “I betrayed Mina once, you ignored her your entire life, so have the courage to face your own sin before you cite mine so easily.” He tells her he wishes Mina had been born with her cruel streak and says, “You’re the daughter I deserve,” before storming off. There’s a lot still to be explained about why these two are working together, considering that animosity, but they certainly deserve one another.
The episode’s most surprising moment, though, is still to come. Back at Dorian’s, Ethan and Dorian trade stories about art. Ethan visited an Anasazi village at one point, and he was struck by the honesty of the cave paintings they made, which included only animals, the sun and the moon. No humans. “Can art be honest?” asks Dorian. “You’re the expert there,” replies Ethan.
Soon, however, as Dorian plays a Wagner piece, Ethan flashes back to various scenes from the series thus far. The rats’ carcasses, mangled corpses, Vanessa, him fucking Brona, all of the highlights – but he dwells on the images of the butchered victims of the creature that’s rampaging through London. Finally, he’s accepting, in full, the secret that we weren’t even fully sure about last week: he is the one responsible for killing those people. He’s a monster, a vicious one, hiding behind the mask of an American drifter. He rushes towards Dorian, snatches him by the throat, pulls him close… and passionately pulls him into a kiss. Never breaking his intense eye contact with Dorian, Ethan rips the man’s shirt off – and Dorian reciprocates. As the music soars, and they share another tender kiss, the episode cuts to black.