entranceway app

[lifeskills]

Name: Shira
DW username: n/a
E-Mail: stitchmymouth@hotmail.com
IM: shirasyndrome
Plurk: whatinthefuck

Character Name: Victor Frankenstein
Series: Penny Dreadful
Timeline: Originally 1.08. Currently updated to the end of 3.09.
Canon Resource Link: This is a wiki for the series.
Character History:

The year is 1891 in London, England. A bunch of our favourite literary characters like the Wolfman, Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, and Dracula roam the streets, including Sir Malcolm Murray, the father of Dracula's Mina Murray, on a search for his daughter. Mina has been spirited away by vampires, prompting Malcolm and Mina's childhood friend Vanessa Ives to devise a plan to plunge into the supernatural underworld--what they call the "demimonde"--to save her.

Locating a nest belonging to an ancient vampire, Malcolm and Vanessa hire American-born sharpshooter Ethan Chandler to accompany them for protection. Though they succeed in wiping out the nest, Mina is not among them, leading them to believe there must be another vampire holding her captive in the city.

Enter Victor Frankenstein.

Growing up in an affluent family, Victor is shown as a black sheep even from a young age. Whereas his three brothers are healthy, hardy, and rambunctious, Victor is a sickly, gentle, and artistic child with a fondness for Romantic poetry instilled in him by his mother. Bedridden with childhood asthma, he's raised on a diet of intellectual pursuits, developing both a keen intelligence and a deep emotional sensitivity. Pretty poems fail to prepare the young boy for the ugly reality of death, however. Traumatized watching his beloved mother's slow, painful demise to a fatal illness, he sees death is not serene as poetry describes. Early loss sways him into a hard turn to science and a life-long interest in understanding the middle ground between life and death.

The tangible achievements of science and the idealism of poetry go on to shape a man fixated on his cause no matter how ridiculed he is or destitute he becomes. They remain his teachers long after his obsession alienates him from his privileged family and he's left to scrape together a living for himself. It's not enough to say his fascination is out of morbid enjoyment like a kid picking wings off of a dragonfly--rather, to him it's an area of study that will have positive repercussions for all of mankind. In Victor's eyes, conquering life, death, and rebirth may be enough to offer solace where the grief and mystery of death offer none. It's important to make the distinction as to separate him from some of the adaptations where he's solely the egomaniacal villain hellbent on atrocities. He's a troubled and tender-hearted young man who, in Vanessa's words, is one of the people who have been brutalized with loss and been made brutal in return. Not entirely kind but not malicious, either.

As a consequence of his youthful idealism, the first time Victor successfully manages to revive the dead prior to the start of the series, he expects the moment of rebirth to be a thing of beauty. He's disappointed.

The nameless creation wakes up distressed, terrified, and in tremendous pain, and Victor is so terrified in turn he flees from him. This is the birth of the Creature we all know--and as the Creature/Caliban recounts later, rejection and solitude were consequently the first lessons taught to him. Left to fend for himself and learn from Victor's old books, he grows to loathe his creator for his abandonment, setting the course of both of their lives in ways Victor can't imagine until the beginning of Penny Dreadful when he's nearing completion of his second creation.

Looking for insight on vampire kind, Malcolm, Vanessa, and Ethan come in search of a medical practitioner for a formal post mortem examination of the ancient vampire. They find Victor exhausting himself refining his methods with black market body parts after his first perceived failure with the Creature. At first, Victor haughtily rebuffs their request, claiming to be too busy with his work. You don't play God as Victor has been without developing a fair share of arrogance. As far as he's concerned, no distraction is worth taking time away from his efforts.

Or so he thinks. Vanessa pulls back the sheet to show the "human" body they've brought and Victor is immediately intrigued by the vampire's malformed physicality.

His curiosity toward mysteries not yet conquered means that rather than being afraid, he easily overcomes the fact he's dealing with something beyond human. A puzzle is a puzzle, no more and no less. Malcolm not only clocks this insatiable curiosity of Victor's, but that he has the mettle to walk with him and Vanessa into the dark places, all of them a similar breed of people unfazed by the demimonde by each already having one foot in it. He hires Victor to consult on the search for Mina. Despite the money being a huge benefit to his living situation, Victor at first rebuffs this offer, too, feeling Malcolm's cause is a small-minded attempt at exploring for exploring's sake, what he judges as "solipsistic self-aggrandizement." He's convinced to accept the job after Malcolm tells him the truth about his missing daughter and Malcolm acknowledges he sees a specialness in Victor that makes him ideal as another determined truth-seeker.

On his way back from their meeting, a lightning storm passes over the city. To Victor's surprise, a power surge revives his second creation unanticipated. An even greater surprise--in complete contrast to the Monster, this creation is docile and sweet-tempered.

Overjoyed at his success, Victor starts to teach him how to reintegrate into the world, not unlike a father with his newborn. Victor has him pick out a name for himself from a book of Shakespeare: Proteus. Proteus is no violent monster with screws in his head--quite the opposite. He takes to life with a gentle curiosity, and the two form a bond in the process of introducing Proteus to new experiences. Proteus even begins to reclaim some of his memories of his prior life.

However, Victor's firstborn isn't about to be replaced by a new "brother." The Creature--now calling himself Caliban in similar homage to Shakespeare--tracks him to London and murders Proteus in front of him to teach his own lesson that the world has no room for his science experiments. He vows to torment his creator by killing those closest to him until Victor agrees to make him a mate--an immortal female companion.

The grieving Victor initially balks at this ultimatum and uses his new job as an excuse to put off contemplating a suitable "bride." After the group catches another vampire thrall by the name of Fenton, Victor is summoned to study the creature. If he can devise a treatment for vampirism, it may be a way to save Mina if she has, in fact, been similarly turned by the ancient vampire controlling her. Malcolm's assessment of Victor as someone willing to cross terrible lines to achieve results prove correct when Victor suggests making a test subject of the unwilling thrall to learn about his vampiric physiology, affronting Ethan, who rebukes their cold-bloodedness.

The tension within the group comes to a head when they're unable to agree on a unified course of action. The dissent prompts Malcolm to remind them that their endeavour is "not for the weak or the kind. No one in this room is kind, that's why you're here." He demands each of them swear their loyalty to each other if they are to proceed, which Victor does, solidifying them as the assembled spooky Victorian Avengers. Nonetheless, he's put in mind of Caliban's situation and points out attempting treatment on Fenton means they're transforming his very existence and they will be responsible for whatever happens to him. It's one of the ways Victor sees that he must take responsibility for what he's done unleashing Caliban on the world.

Malcolm arranges to have Victor collaborate with an expert on blood diseases to covertly try to piece together Fenton's condition without actually spreading the news of vampires prowling the city. The hematologist turns out to be none other than Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a wizened man who has a long history battling vampires and lost his family to them. Upon studying the "blood-eating" nature of Fenton's blood, the two quickly realize the other is aware of the existence of vampires. Though Van Helsing insists no cure for vampirism exists, Victor attempts a blood transfusion on Fenton to no avail.

Unbeknownst to them, Fenton has his reasons for suffering the experimentation. He had allowed himself to be captured in order to draw his sire to the house--in other words, the second ancient vampire they suspected was in the city. Escaping, he leads the elder vampire to Vanessa's bedroom. Victor and Malcolm are forced to fight them off, and in the wake of the attack, question why the vampires targeted her specifically. They begin to suspect that while they hunt for Mina, the vampires are hunting Vanessa for an as yet unknown reason.

Vanessa, as it turns out, has been highly sensitive to the supernatural since birth. Fighting off demonic possession for a good portion of her life, she is believed by many supernatural creatures to be the incarnation of an Egyptian deity named Amunet. Mythology tells if Amunet were ever to succumb to her dark nature and enter into a union with another of the world's dark entities, she would become the mother of evil, bringing an end to the age of man and a new age for night creatures. For this reason both Satan and Dracula (the master of all vampires) desire to claim her, a bone between two rivalling dogs. While Satan assails her through demonic possession, Dracula chose Mina as bait to lure Vanessa in.

As concerns about Vanessa's nature grow, some of the group begin to lose hope, unsure if Mina is beyond saving or not. Malcolm is adamant they continue, compelling Victor to keep consulting with Van Helsing that results in a friendship between the two men and an almost fatherly fondness for Victor. Van Helsing suspects a bright mind like Victor would keep chasing answers even if it put his life in peril--thus, he confides in Victor about his experiences with vampires and why he believes their condition incurable, emphasizing that Victor shouldn't cut his promising life short trying to shine a light down every dark alley, as his genius is something that could yet astonish the world.

It's praise Victor never received from his own father. The moment of validation is short-lived as Caliban appears without warning and kills Van Helsing, impatiently warning Victor his dithering comes with consequences. Anyone Victor grows affection for is fair game if he fails to meet his terms.

Another hard loss, but one he's left little time to mourn as Victor is once again called in by Malcolm, this time on behalf of Vanessa, whose condition has sharply declined. During a moment of weakness, she had inadvertently allowed a demon haunting her since childhood (implied to be Satan himself) to take her over. Victor is brought in to assess her health. Unnervingly, "Vanessa" taunts him with facets about himself she couldn't possibly know, up to and including repeating secrets about what inspired him to begin studying the divide between life and death. Victor initially tries to reason out a scientific explanation--that she's suffering a psychotic episode of some kind--but her possession becomes more and more extreme to the point they can no longer deny something evil has inhabited her body, terrifying even the staunchest empiricists among them.

Battling the possession exhausts the group; the demon grinds down their morale bit by bit as they keep constant vigil over her. Even so, none of them break their vow of loyalty. In their own ways, each of them is grappling with their own demons, and their strange company of misfits chooses to stay together to help Vanessa conquer hers.

During this time, Victor resolves to stop running in more ways than one. He decides killing Caliban is the only way to take responsibility for the damage his Creature--and by extension, his research--has caused, and prepares by having Ethan teach him to wield a gun. After an excruciating exorcism that finally loosens the entity's grip on Vanessa, Victor sets out to put his lessons to use, unprepared to find instead a bereft and remorseful Caliban, who's come to a realization about his own monstrousness.

Elsewhere in the city eking out a life for himself, Caliban had tried and failed to woo a young woman, scaring her with his aggression. Seeing her fear in turn makes Caliban see the truth about himself: he's not frightening because of what he is, but who he is letting spitefulness and malice rule him. He asks why Victor created him to feel when he has felt nothing but pain his entire existence. He's prepared to let Victor put him out of his misery, calling it a parting mercy.

Brought to tears, Victor is unable to bring himself to end his life and takes pity on him, committing to Caliban's request for the love and companionship he was denied.

It's then that Ethan knocks on his door. In a tragic twist of fate, Ethan's lover Brona is in the end stages of tuberculosis and needs a doctor in her final hours. She also happens to fit all the requirements for a resurrection candidate.

On her death bed, she confesses she's afraid of where she will end up when she passes; Victor comforts her that he believes in another option--a place that exists between Heaven and Hell, life and death. However, to reach such a place, there is a price for passage. While alone in the room, he smothers her with a pillow so he may best preserve her body, justifying his hopes of appeasing Caliban as the most grace he can give someone beyond saving.

The group must come together one last time to face the second vampire nest, their hopes resting on Mina being there. Those who wish to save her like Malcolm hope they can bring her home; those who believe Mina is too far gone hope this is where everything ends.

Given Van Helsing's last advice to Victor, it seems likely that he's one of the latter, but he resolutely agrees to see their task through and join the others in their fight. After a gruelling confrontation slaying the ancient vampire, Mina appears as a fully-transformed vampire. She takes Vanessa captive, revealing to them the aim of the "master" (Dracula, unbeknownst to them) to take Vanessa as his own, and Mina now wholly his servant.

Malcolm, accepting he can only save one young woman, kills Mina.

In the aftermath, Victor returns to prepare Brona's body, but the peace won defeating the vampires is temporary. At the start of the new year, Vanessa is once again attacked by supernatural forces--by witches (or "nightcomers"), the servants of Satan. Victor tends to Vanessa while waiting on an adequate lightning storm to revive his third creation.

That night, the weather takes a turn in his and Caliban's favour. Brona is brought back to life the most stable and well-made creature to date, though just like the others initially, she has no memory of her former life and must be given time to learn and adjust. Victor renames her Lily based on the flower's relationship to resurrection and rebirth, using a cover story that her amnesia is the result of an accident, she's a cousin to the Frankenstein family, and Caliban is her fiancé. Despite the latter's impatience, Victor refuses to hasten her education or force Lily into returning his affections--he maintains he's done the work of bringing her to life, but what she chooses to do with it is her own decision.

Reintroducing her into everyday life as he did with Proteus is a slow process, and over time she takes a greater liking to Victor as her primary caregiver, shying away from Caliban. The dynamic between he, Lily, and Caliban grows even more complicated when Victor's protective feelings for Lily turn to love, culminating in her seducing him one night. Vanessa, picking up on Victor's brightened demeanour, encourages him to follow his feelings without knowing their relationship's true origin or just how tumultuous Lily's psychological state is. In reality, she had already figured out who and what she was, choosing to keep acting the part of innocent Lily. Her disposition gradually turns colder and more cunning as she regains her memories as Brona while living a dual life as Lily, reveling in violence and sadism and the newfound power afforded her in her changed state.

Meanwhile, Vanessa and the rest of the group make strides toward deciphering the witches' language, a forgotten tongue referred to as the Verbis Diablo, a form of angelic speech corrupted by Satan. They find a set of artifacts written in a random assortment of different languages, ultimately revealed as a story told by Lucifer about his fall from grace--a bizarre autobiography of sorts. As they puzzle it out, the witches mount an assault on Malcolm's home, stealing a lock of Vanessa's hair. With it they build a life-like fetish, or voodoo doll. Malcolm is likewise targeted by the leader of the witches and enthralled by a spell.

Around this time Dorian Gray invites Vanessa, Malcolm, and Victor to a ball. Victor makes the mistake of bringing Brona/Lily as his date, unaware Brona and Dorian once had a sexual relationship. Dorian recognizes her immediately, and the reunion marks a turning point for Lily, who's drawn to Dorian's darkness. Their flirtation distracts Victor, resulting in him failing to notice witches among the party guests until Vanessa falls unconscious under the strain of a psychic assault.

Vanessa makes the decision to temporarily leave London to find a means to fight back. The only person she reveals her location to is Victor, stating she trusts him with the information. Before leaving, she advises him to be patient while Lily works out her feelings, though he forlornly fears she's outgrowing him, unaware of the extent of her activities. As Lily explores more of her past, including prostitution, she's invigorated seducing and strangling a man to death. Increasingly volatile, her interest in Victor wanes while her attraction to Dorian grows.

Enraged by her indifference and Victor's interference as a romantic rival, Caliban threatens to come back and kill him after taking Lily somewhere to start a life with her. For the first time, Victor is at a loss for how to stop everything falling apart.

The puzzle of Lucifer's language, on the other hand, is one they do manage to crack after intensive labour. The tale reveals a startling new development: Lucifer didn't fall from Heaven alone. His brother fell with him, one cast down to Hell, the other to Earth. The angelic brother on Earth is the being known as Dracula, with he and Satan in an eternal competition to claim the mother of evil and reconquer Heaven, triggering an apocalypse. One creature appears to threaten this plan, referred to in the writings as "lupus dei" or the "wolf of God." This figure is strongly implied to be Ethan, secretly a werewolf and the one in their company who was able to break Vanessa's possession, having fallen in love with her over the course of their acquaintance.

To prevent them making the most of this information in Vanessa's defense, the witches attempt to use the enchantment over Malcolm to take control of him, but he's ultimately able to regain his senses. In a rage, he goes to confront the witches alone, prompting Victor to seek out Vanessa and Ethan for help assisting him.

While Victor is occupied, Caliban follows after Lily. He correctly deduces she's fully regained her memories and has known who he and Victor are in relation to her for some time, playing them for fools. In a violent confrontation, Lily reveals her true ambitions--not to further kneel for men, but to have men kneel for her. To dominate. To create an immortal race to conquer humanity. Playing on Caliban's desperation for companionship, she promises to love him so long as he helps her murder Victor and rule with her. Horrified at her nature now exposed, Caliban chooses to leave to wander the Arctic.

On the eve before mounting a rescue, Vanessa consoles Victor in the midst of his morphine use to cope with his heartbreak, encouraging him those who could love him genuinely are out there and rest of his life is still waiting. While Victor is lulled into a stupor by the drugs, Vanessa sneaks out to go after Malcolm by herself, knowing she's the real target and thus presents a danger to the others.

Even though it happens to be the night of a full moon and Ethan fears his transformation, the rest are forced to give chase and are quickly separated from one another in the witches' lair. Ethan is trapped in a stairwell and transforms, accidentally killing Malcolm's friend and manservant, Sembene. In another part of the castle, Victor finds Malcolm suffering under a powerful enchantment that makes him hallucinate Mina and his family, who attempt to persuade him to suicide. Victor succumbs to the same, hallucinating his three creations scorning him for his failures and abuse of power. "Don't blame the children for the father's cruelty" is a sentiment manifesting Victor's sense of guilt his creations were born innocent; if they became monsters, there's only one person to blame for making them that way. It also highlights his difficulties divorcing their own independent actions from his feelings of responsibility--at what point does intervention become controlling their will and protection become stifling? He's narrowly saved from injecting himself with a fatal dose of morphine by Vanessa challenging and defeating Lucifer, appearing to her through her fetish doll. Ethan kills the leader of the witches in his werewolf form and runs away, overcome with guilt.

Weary beyond measure, Victor returns to his empty laboratory to discover Lily has left him to live with Dorian Gray, renouncing any connection to him now she's met a superior partner who can match her in his immortal uniqueness.

She and Dorian mock him for his smallness and underlying weakness for love, provoking him into shooting her. Naturally, she's unharmed, revealing she's known all along he's her maker--and made her too durable to be killed by a single bullet, at that. He similarly finds Dorian can't be killed because of his connection to his painting. They ponder killing him until Lily opts to let him go, feeling he deserves to watch his creation remake the world in their image and suffer for what he's wrought.

Despondent, Victor's self-isolation and drug use spiral out of control. The group having all gone their separate ways, embroiled in their own personal turmoil, he eventually reaches out to an old medical school friend--Dr. Henry Jekyll. As young and ambitious geniuses, they had bonded over their loneliness and controversial research at Cambridge. For Victor, this was his interest in death, and for Henry, his desire to subdue base impulses and "tame" the inner beast by means of a chemical cure. Feeling he has no one else to turn to who would understand, Victor confesses everything, requesting help in rectifying his misdeeds by destroying Lily once and for all.

But Henry knows Victor's heart too well--he guesses Victor still loves her and would win her back if he could. He proposes an alternative: using his area of study to "domesticate" her by suppressing her violent urges, returning her to the loving, sweet version of Lily she'd been when Victor had fallen in love with her. Convinced to do the very thing he'd warned Caliban not to in engineering her affections, Victor agrees on the terms that if rehabilitation should fail, they return to the original plan of destroying her. After putting Victor on a regimen to get him back on his feet and curb his drug use, they move their base of operations to Henry's laboratory in Bedlam Hospital where Henry works to treat mentally ill residents.

A pitying Lily warns Victor to set aside lovesick notions. A first love is survivable, but she's not the person he hopes her to be; he most certainly won't like the person she's becoming. Regardless, having a scientific solution gives Victor a misplaced direction to lean into. In treating one of Bedlam's deranged patients, Victor finds Henry's serum a temporary fix that gradually wears off, reverting the patient to their previous state. Combining his knowledge of galvanism with Henry's knowledge of chemistry, they can produce a better method of stimulating the brain--the end result being a permanent effect by erasing the subject's memories, giving them a clean slate and taking away the pain in their life that made them what they are.

He's unaware of the dire circumstances his friends have also fallen into: Malcolm has left for Africa to return Sembene's body to his native home; Ethan has allowed himself to be extradited to his own home in the United States as penance for his victims; and believing herself cut off from her Catholic faith after engaging with the Devil in his own corrupted tongue, Vanessa has retreated into her own isolation and despair, turning to therapy for her depression. Worse yet, Dracula is an active presence in the city on the heels of Satan's defeat, bringing with him a greater legion of vampires. However, the game has changed--Dracula has devised a new strategy to trick Vanessa into lowering her guard by appearing to her in the guise of a human suitor. Befriending her, winning her trust and affections, she is none the wiser she's being seduced by one of her supernatural enemies.

At the same time she struggles to hold her ground against the vampires, Victor and Henry make strides in completing their objective. Developing a sedative strong enough to subdue immortals, Victor attempts to retrieve Lily, but this plan goes awry when he's found sneaking around Dorian's manor. Dorian unexpectedly spares him, tired of Lily's extremes. Learning the two men have devised a means to temper her, he conspires with Victor and Henry to capture her. One of them has to stop their shenanigans--and it won't be him.

Bound and chained in the laboratory, Lily begs Victor not to change her. Now that he's made life, he must let it live regardless of whether or not he approves of how they live. In an effort to appeal to him, she confesses her secret shame as Brona, when she was a mother of a baby girl who died from exposure. If he reverts her to a blank slate, he'll be taking her memories of her child. Memories make them the people they are, painful and ugly or not.

Victor recognizes the monumental cruelty of deciding her identity. Her story is a mirror held up to his face showing him how monstrous he's also let himself become; to Henry's disdain, he changes his mind and allows Lily to leave to parts unknown, stating they must try to be more human. Disgusted with himself and with what his achievements have brought about, he tells Henry there will be no road ahead for him in the realm of scientific pursuit, warning his friend continuing his research won't lead to good horizons. They part ways.

And while Victor faced his moment of weakness, so has Vanessa with unfortunate consequences. With the help of an occult researcher, Vanessa realizes she's known Dracula's identity all along and is devastated by the revelation, compelling her to try to kill him in his mortal form. This attempt fails when Dracula preys on her vulnerability, convincing her to finally accept the darkness inside herself. He bites her, in so doing sparking the forewarned end of days, causing unnatural darkness to fall over the city that results in thousands of deaths as night time creatures invade and the air becomes poisonous to breathe.

Alerted by the events in London, Malcolm and Ethan return to save Vanessa, but are immediately set on by vampires. Malcolm is wounded and Ethan goes in search of Victor for help. Reuniting all of Vanessa's old and new allies, Victor joins the attempt to rescue her despite walking into Dracula's lair being a virtual suicide mission. They delay Dracula and the rest of his vampire minions so Ethan can reach Vanessa. He's the one to save her as the "lupus dei" even if, in truth, saving her means saving her from herself.

Accepting she must die if the world is to ever be safe, Vanessa has Ethan help end her life, feeling God welcoming her into the light in her final moments.

Darkness dispersed and prize now out of reach, Dracula retreats, marking bittersweet victory. Victor attends Vanessa's funeral to pay his final respects to her--agreeing she's now freed from her suffering in death--and say goodbye to his surviving friends before departing alone, path unclear.

Abilities/Special Powers:

None! Besides a very high intelligence and wide-ranging experience in the medical field, Victor has no extraordinary abilities aside from being well-read.