Review of Penitence episode 3

I watched the third and final episode of Penitence on Warhammer TV. It's a story about the Adepta Sororitas of the Order of the Sacred Rose, and this is my review of it. I'm avoiding spoilers, but it is Warhammer 40,000, after all, and in case you hadn't heard, it's the original grim dark setting. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that things don't go well for anyone (except when they do.)

In episode 2, Battle Sister Ludmilla and Novitiate Venthia reached the ash wastes of a world that's mostly ash wastes. Pursued by orks hankering for a fight, there's actually a little bit of combat in this episode. Still not much, as Warhammer goes, but I don't mind. The story here is still compelling. There may be struggle happening on the surface of Thesion IV, but the real conflict among the Battle Sisters. Novitiate Venthia has sinned, and to atone for her crime she is carrying a holy relic to a temple on the planet. This is her way of demonstrating her faith.

Ludmilla doesn't believe Venthia deserves forgiveness. We're not sure why, exactly, but Ludmilla believes Venthia is weak and has only joined the mission for selfish reasons. Whatever peace the two Sisters are able to make between them is borne of necessity alone.

Absolution in Warhammer 40,000

In the previous episodes, I observed that "salvation" in the religion of the Imperial Cult appears to not be guaranteed, the way it is said to be in the real world sects of Protestant Christianity. The death rites we witness in Penitence feel more like desperate pleas for mercy than closure.

By contrast, the death rites of Space Marines seem somber but noble. Space Marines don't plea with the God Emperor to accept the souls of their fallen brothers, and instead celebrate a duty fulfilled.

One of the most classic ways to manipulate the weak is to leave your expectation entirely undefined, and I gather that the Imperium knows this well. If you never tell people what is required for them to succeed, they'll spend their life trying to figure it out until there's no time left for them to attain their goal. The Adepta Sororitas has no definition of "done." You suffer until you die, and you never know whether you've been doing it right or wrong.

For Venthia, Palatine Saragoza graciously provided a condition for absolution: Get the relic to the temple. If Venthia can do that, her sin is forgiven, and she can spend the rest of her days fighting for the Imperium, in power armour. Of course, as in the real world, forgiveness is something you must have faith in, yourself. It doesn't work if you don't believe in its power. Your transgression can haunt you whether someone's told you that you're forgiven or not.

Warhammer 40,000 is a magical setting. People have psychic powers, dimensional rifts tear starfields apart, daemons walk the planets, and the dreams of a dead Emperor guides Navigators across the galaxy. There's no reason to believe that mortals are interpreting mundane events as miracles to justify their own faith. We witness magical things (call them miracles) happen in 40k.

The question this episode inspires isn't whether forgiveness exists, it's why the God Emperor doesn't manifest it for his mortal warriors.

It could be coincidence

The orks eventually leave Thesion IV, and it's not much of a spoiler to say that the local priests attribute it to the Adepta Sororitas. It makes sense. The Battle Sisters show up one day, and next you know the orks are gone. Cause and effect.

Probably.

Actually, the Adepta Sororitas had nothing to do with the orks disappearing. The priests ought to have thanked Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, who put out a call for orks to rally on "the war planet", Armageddon. I'm not sure when exactly that places Penitence in the 40k timeline, because at the time of writing I don't know whether there's more Armageddon to come (my actual future) or whether this is a reference to the Second or Third War of Armageddon.

This inconveniently flies in the face of my assertion that miracles happen all the time in 40k. Maybe they aren't miracles, after all. Maybe it's just a happy coincidence, at least some of the time. Maybe sometimes when a report comes in that daemons are stalking the corridors of a voidship, it's really just a voidsman seeing a Tyranid for the first time. Certainly more often than not, when an Adeptus Mechanicus magos performs a rite of initiation, the only part that actually matters is the part where the ON button is pressed. Not everything in 40k is magical, so why should we, or a disgraced Battle Sister, believe that there's power in forgiveness?

Good Warhammer

This series did not disappoint. I won't say Penitence has the emotional impact, for me, that Kill Protocol or New Life, but those are exemplary. Penitence definitely got me thinking philosophically about the state of mortal minds in 40k, which I think is an important consideration. It's easy to be "grim dark" by gluing skulls to everything and repeating litanies of hate that champion destruction, but the other side of that coin is the mental state of the people (of all species) in the setting. When you start to ponder the depression, hopelessness, deception, and willful ignorance that must drive the living beings in the 40k universe, you also start to ponder how those same traits might be also affecting the real world.

Whatever the story makes you think about, it's a good and proper quest. Some adventurers must get a thing to a place. It's an easy drop-in storyline for a roleplaying game or a wargame scenario. This is the kind of perfect formula I want, probably about 80% of the time. Put some people in the world, identify the MacGuffin, and then throw some monsters (xenos, in context) at them. That's what we do on the tabletop, and it works just as well in videos and books. Penitence is that, if you ignore the temptations to ponder philosophy and psychology, and it's good Warhammer, and good TV.