As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Victor's sudden shift from impatient disinterest to instant inspection of the slain vampire's corpse makes more sense when you consider that its exoskeleton had a seam running down the midline of its chest. At least at first glance, it probably looked a bit like a badly-healed suture line, which would suggest to him that somebody else in London is stitching dead bodies together!
- Victor's treatment of his creature is awestruck and concerned, and he does his best to help the creature adjust to its new existence — all completely at odds with how he dealt with it in the original book. Because this is the second one. He's created life before, possibly by a different method, and knows how badly it can go.
- On Caliban's first night in London, he's barked at by a hostile dog. It appears to be the same dog that, in the previous episode, Proteus encountered under much friendlier terms.
- One of the classic elements of vampire mythology is that they can't enter a home unless they've been invited inside. In "Demimonde", after the leader vampire attacks the mansion, Sir Malcolm remarks "We practically invited it in, didn't we?" Perhaps by bringing Fenton into their home, they created a loophole in the rules that allowed the head vampire to enter without an explicit invitation.
- With a bit of Genius Bonus thrown in: Episode 5 reveals that the demon possessing Vanessa had sex with her. In medieval tradition, witches were said to be the wives/concubines of the devil. Vanessa's basically a witch, as hinted at in the episode.
- Neither Ethan nor Dorian are concerned with catching Brona's tuberculosis because Dorian is immortal and Ethan is a werewolf.
- Ethan is clearly uncomfortable with the group's torture of Fenton, not only because it's ethically unsound, but because he's probably afraid they might do the same to him if they find out he's a werewolf.
- When Ethan first tells Vanessa about Brona, she remarks, "Who doesn't love a lost cause?" Later, Ethan exorcises Vanessa with Brona's medallion of St. Jude... St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes!
- Dr. Sweet's childlike fascination with Captain Nemo seems incongruous, given The Reveal that he's Dracula. But if Dracula in this series has been Walking the Earth since antiquity, as the fallen angels' prophecy implies, then he's surely noticed that the rate of change in human civilization has drastically accelerated in the last few generations. It makes perfect sense that he'd be intrigued by an early sci-fi writer like Jules Verne: he wants to know what the world is going to be like in centuries to come, and what new technologies he might have to deal with.
- After seeing what the other familiars do to the one Dracula strikes down in "Good and Evil Braided Be," the charnel house condition of the vampire nest from "Night Work" makes a lot more (stomach-churning) sense.
- Mr. Balfour's name is this. It's a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Kidnapped, which tells the story of a man named David Balfour and his quest to pursue his inheritance, which is exactly what Doctor Jekyll is obsessed with. However, it goes further than this. "Balfour" was originally Stevenson's middle name, as in "Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson", but he dropped it in 1873. This provides a brilliant bit of Foreshadowing for the eventual reveal of how Jekyll becomes Hyde.
- During all of Season 3, the audience waits in anticipation for Jekyll to eventually take his famous potion and become Mr. Hyde. He never does. This is because the original twist of the novella, that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person, has become It Was His Sled, and the audience therefore expects the transformation. Instead, the finale reveals that "Hyde" is Jekyll's family title, which he gains upon his father's death, becoming "Lord Hyde." In effect, the writers have kept the original twist of the story and still made it (arguably) surprising to the audience. Jekyll and Hyde are the same person and have always been the same person.
- The ending of Dorian's arc, or rather the lack thereof that reveals him as just a rather inconsequential filler character, is, in fact, the entire point of his character. Like the paintings he compares himself to in the end, Dorian is unchanging and, as such, can have no character evolution and no arc. His character serves mainly to contrast the development experienced by everyone else of the main cast.
- The same can be said about most of the Creature's story arc. With the exception of the Creature being revealed to be Vanessa's orderly, the Creature has little influence on the main story, ending with him exactly as he started: wandering the world aimlessly. This is because he is exactly like Dorian: immortal and unchanging. Despite having drastically different lives, immortality has ruined both men.
Fridge Horror:
- If the confrontation Vanessa recalls in "A Blade of Grass" took place just prior to her surgery and eventual release, that suggests that Lucifer didn't waste any time about making good on his threats, because soon after she'd been sent home, he appeared in Sir Malcolm's guise to seduce her... a dalliance which killed Vanessa's mother. Somebody did not take rejection well.
- And soon after the surgery, Dracula seduced Mina. It seems that being bad at rejection is a fraternal trait.
- After Dracula throws a disobedient familiar across the room for telling Vanessa too much, many of the other vampires stop what they're doing and start to come out of the shadows with ravenous looks on their faces. This happens before Dracula even indicates that he wants them to eat the guy, which implies that he's fed disobedient familiars to his horde many times before.
- More Fridge Queasy than Fridge Horror, but Dracula's fascination with taxidermy: he likes to turn living things into ageless objects he can own. His hobby foreshadows his inner nature.
