Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Iain Glen, Sam Hazeldine, Michael James Ford, Laura Hitchings, Charlene McKenna, David Wilmot, Jonathan Barnwell, Liam Carney.

When loyalties are tested between past glories and those that present and future hold where does a person go. This is the premise of the latest in the excellently made Ripper Street series, The Weight Of One Man’s Heart.

With the focus drawn away the depraved goings on in Whitechapel, the attention is fixed on the life of Jerome Flynn’s resolute and upstanding Sergeant Drake and how his two world collide as he starts to fall in love with one of the prostitutes under the care of MyAnna Burling’s Madam and the love and honour he feels for his old Colonel who has made it back to England to fight a new kind of war on behalf of those who made it back from the Sudan.

The dichotomy is an interesting factor in this particular episode and it brings modern day worries of what happens to soldiers who come home from war zones only to be forgotten by their people and by those that sent them to fight for Queen and country in the first place. It was as true after Sudan as it was after World War One and into modern day conflicts such as Afghanistan. In this tale of misplaced honour and the effects it has on the psyche of a man’s soul and what he feels he must do to ease his conscious.

This episode fitted Jerome Flynn down to the ground and showed his character as being, not just a tool of Victorian brute and brutish force, but as someone with a past, destructive, violent but also one that still gives him nightmares in what he witnessed in the Sudan. He is more of a rounded man than he has been given credit for during the first four programmes and the writers have given the audience someone now to hang upon. His dealings with Charlene McKenna as his love interest Rose and his Colonel, played by the ever reliable Iain Glen, are some of the most touching scenes yet in what is after all a programme about the events and lives of those that walked the streets, the public, the police, the criminal element and those whose jobs took them into the hearts and bedrooms of those in between.

This fine series still manages to capture the imagination and the depths of what Victorian Whitechapel was like, not for them the words that were so unfittingly and wantonly said to the soldiers of World War One, a land fit for heroes.

Ian D. Hall