Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Speaking at Comic-con, Penny Dreadful creator and showrunner John Logan revealed some of the plans for the series’ second extended season.

“The biggest change for me in the second season, beyond the fact that it’s ten hours as opposed to eight hours, is we have a human antagonist,” Logan explained. “Last season, we sort of had the vampire, the generic monster, Now we have a human villain played by Helen McCrory, who is Madam Kali in the, I hope memorable, séance episode earlier in the season. . . . I’m teasing out from the characters I really love from last season, who had smaller parts, and adding a whole new set of new characters as well. The second season, for me, is, in a way, more joyous to write because I know the voices in my head, and I know where I want to challenge the actors, and I know where I want to play to their sweet spots.”

Logan knows how the first three seasons of the show will play out. “I charted it up to the third season in terms of where I wanted to take the story, where I wanted to align to some of the classic novels that inspired it and some of the ways I wanted to variant those things.”

Perhaps acknowledging some of the criticisms of the show’s pace, he noted, “A lot of Season 1, for me, was actually putting the playing pieces on the board. Now I feel we’ve had 8 hours to do that, to establish the landscape and so now I really get to play. I can create more and more complex patterns of the relationships of the characters and of the supernatural element as well. In terms of the second season, I’ve written all but two of the episodes. So, the last two are yet to be written. So I’m well ahead of the game there, and the actors will all be getting it the end of this month.”