While I haven’t finished my reviews yet, I have now watched every Jekyll and Hyde film that I’m a)aware of and b)can access (there’s one or two that simply aren’t available on a US-compatible DVD). Now I’m moving into TV. Unfortunately the initial results have been dismal.
Long before Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? series gave us “Nowhere to Hyde” as the first episode of the second season. The Ghost of Mr. Hyde is robbing and looting at will with his uncanny powers; is it possible that Dr. Jekyll’s descendant is up to his ancestor’s own tricks? There’s nothing much to say about this other than there’s no reason anyone should have identified the ghost as Mr. Hyde — he doesn’t name himself (or talk at all), doesn’t look like Hyde (none of the usual Victorian clothes) so why assume it?
“Sandy Duncan’s Jekyll and Hyde” was an equally forgettable episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies, the second series featuring the characters, this time pairing them off with guest stars ranging from Sonny and Cher to Batman and Robin. In this case the guest star is Sandy Duncan, appearing in a Jekyll and Hyde film when a real Mr. Hyde shows up and kidnaps her — except he got Daphne, appearing as her stunt double. From my perspective there’s even less to say, other than noting it exists.
The 2014-16 BBC series PENNY DREADFUL is another example of the monster mash-up, centering around Mina Harker’s father recruiting a werewolf, a psychic and Victor Frankenstein in his efforts to get revenge on vampire kind. As I said when I tried the first season it’s The League of Slightly Above Average Gentlemen and comparably uninteresting. Rewatching didn’t change that but as it did have Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) in the third season …
The plotlines this season are splintered, which doesn’t make them any more interesting (I skipped a lot of scenes). The Jekyll part has Frankenstein recruit Jekyll, a psychologist and neurologist, to find a way to control the Bride of Frankenstein (Billie Piper), who rebelled against her mate and her creator to make her own way; Frankenstein’s in love with her and wants Jekyll to find a drug that will repress her mind to the point she’ll submit docilely.
In return, Jekyll wants Frankenstein to help him master the duality of man. Running an asylum, Jekyll has become convinced the human mind is balanced on a fulcrum between good and evil, and that to function we repress the evil. His patients have lost that ability; can Frankenstein help Jekyll find a treatment? The subtext is that Jekyll himself is intensely angry at his colleagues rejecting his ideas and that makes it even harder to win them over.
Frankenstein and Jekyll develop a successful treatment that cures at least one lunatic, and that’s the last we hear of it. They capture the Bride but Jekyll in the end sets her free. And at the end, Jekyll learns that his despised father has finally died, meaning Jekyll now inherits the family title — Lord Hyde. It doesn’t work for me but nothing in this series did.
2015’s JEKYLL AND HYDE stars Tom Bateman as Robert Jekyll, raised by foster parents in Ceylon. They’ve assured him they don’t know anything about his father, nor about why Jekyll becomes freakishly strong and violent without the drugs he takes. Then a letter from Maxwell Utterson (son of Jekyll’s solicitor) reaches him and Robert discovers his foster parents lied — they did know his dad (Louis, son of Henry). Hot with anger, he refuses to listen to their warnings and heads off to London to learn more.
What follows fits Jekyll and Hyde into an urban fantasy set-up, a war between MI-O (Military Intelligence Other) and the Tenebrae, demon-gods and their followers. On MI-O’s side we have Bulstrode (Richard Grant); the leader of the Tenebrae is Captain Dance (Enzo Cilenti). Hyde is in some fashion tied to the Tenebrae; he can free their dark god, Lord Trash (and who the hell came up with that name?) or he can perhaps destroy him. Both sides can make use of him.
This doesn’t make much sense: shapeshifting is a Jekyll family supernatural trait so why did he need drugs to make the change to Hyde? We might have learned in S2 but that never happened (the show-runner says we might as well assume the big explosion at the climax of the final episode killed everyone). On the plus side the cast are good and Bateman manages the change with very little physical difference; people can’t always tell by looking which persona they’re facing but it becomes clear fast (though this raises the question of why almost all the other Jekylls have a bigger physical change).
I also like that the two personas’ women are different from the usual. Lily (Stephanie Hyam) turns out to be manipulating Jekyll for MI-O while Bella (Natalie Gumede) is a music-hall owner rather than a streetwalker, both tougher and more independent than most of Hyde’s lovers in earlier incarnations. The show doesn’t grab me — the Tenebrae are standard foes for a series of this type — but it’s more fun to watch than Penny Dreadful.
I’ll add that while the 1930s look is great (the clothes, cars, fashions) there’s no sense of the politics or customs of the times and nobody smokes tobacco (though I’m sure it’s hard finding actors who are willing to light up and I don’t blame them for that).
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Just wondering, Fraser… are you planning to cover the “Cyrus Longworth/John Yaeger” plotline from “Dark Shadows”? The writers didn’t use the Jekyll & Hyde names, obviously, but they were definitely riffing on the trope.
Yes, my brother who’s a big Dark Shadows fan reminded me of that plotline. I watched the whole series on SyFy but I don’t know I’d have remembered without being nudged.