Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, David Wilmot, Clive Russell, David Dawson, Josh O’ Connor, Louise Brealey, Anna Burnett, John Heffernan, Leanne Best, Alicia Gerrard, Dean-Charles Chapman, Patrick Molloy, Daniel Fearn, Mairin O’Donovan.
Violence in Whitechapel is not a new phenomenon, nor is the grisly shadow one that has taken residence between the evil carried out by Jack the Ripper and the emergence of the Kray Twins, it is one that that has brewed for centuries and arguably makes the area outside of the walls of the City of London one of the most dynamic and interesting in the whole of the U.K.
The fourth episode of the third series of Ripper Street to make its way back to the B.B.C. takes that violence heaped upon the shoulders of Detective Inspector Reid and contains it to the point where having already murdered one man in the search for his missing daughter, it is quite possible that he will do so again. It is the wrath of a grieving father, twice over after being told she has is dead by Long Susan, that such actions are possible but as Your Father, My Friend is at pains to show, the respect he maintains through his actions in the past are enough to see that the violence, whilst not justified, is defensible in the pursuit of truth.
Whilst missing from the previous episode and having been found on Margate Beach, Inspector Reid’s contribution to the episode is paramount and singular, it is to Matthew Macfadyen’s credit that he is able to convey such emotion, one that many might find a degree in difficulty in portraying. The rage that is to be quelled as he takes on what he sees as the whole of the Whitechapel area in his relentless search for his daughter before she once again is spirited away from him is one that is worthy of any theatrical endeavour.
It is though in young actor Anna Burnett that great praise must go to as Mathilda Reid. To bring together the past and the present in her performance is more than note worthy, it is bordering on the very clinical and her showcasing of the last moments of two of the Ripper’s victims as she retraces the steps they took on each fateful night is both haunting and poignant to the terror that the neighbourhood lived in for many years after the Ripper’s last alleged victim was murdered.
An episode that didn’t glory in the solving of a perplexing case but one to which the very nature of being human was examined and dealt with superbly.
Ian D. Hall