Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Charlene McKenna, Lydia Wilson, David Wilmot, Clive Russell, Josh O’Connor, Louise Brealey, Anna Burnett, David Dawson, Leanne Best, Anton Giltrap, Sam Gittins, Billy Cook, Dave Legano, Naomi Battrick, Phelim Drew, Stephen Wilson, Tim Faraday, Martin White.
Whitechapel was always a place in which a powder keg was more likely to be replaced with an atom bomb in terms of inciting fear and loathing, as well as a sense of prevailing anarchy amongst the populace. It never really took a lot for the area to become tinder dry and the faint whiff of gunpowder burning at the doors of social unrest for it to blow up around the officers of Leman Street Police Station and galvanise the team for the next wave of villainy to hit the newspaper headlines as Heavy Boots replace the stealth of murder in Ripper Street.
That sense of destruction though takes on a new direction as Detective Inspector Drake, Chief Inspector Abberline and Captain Homer Jackson face up to the fact that Detective Reid may be lost to them forever after the near fatal shooting at the hands of Long Susan. It is a destruction that is brought on by the worst of villains, those harbouring the negative status so prevalent still today in modern society of not wanting the thought of foreign imports or labour coming into the area.
Nothing changes and yet Whitechapel has always been a place in which movement and the refreshing of the local climate has been stamped into the local fabric ever since King William I decided to hitch up his new home alongside the banks of the Thames and change British history forever. Whether from the influx of the French Huguenots through to the modern Bangladesh workers, all have made their home and all have brought a sample of their world to bustling streets that surround Brick Lane and beyond.
To the late 19th Century populace, any sense of the local trade being taken elsewhere was enough to cause strife and the kicking in doors of Heavy Boots as a warning of what happens when local honour is misplaced. It is against this backdrop that the team must solve the latest murders to beset the troubled East End and it is a set of murders that really eats at the morale of the local area.
Whilst Matthew Macfadyen’s Inspector Reid is still out of the picture, this episode in particular belonged fully to both Adam Rothenberg’s Captain Homer Jackson and the underused historically Chief Inspector Abberline, portrayed with much than a sense of ghoulish glee and sense of nocturnal humour by the great Clive Russell. It is to Clive Russell’s portrayal of Inspector Abberline that much can be taken from, a sensible depiction of a man that for too long television and film have treated as though he was a youngish whelp, in some cases also inept at his job and nothing could be further from the truth; Clive Russell bring s a sense of the gravitas to the man that television in part has mocked as closely as the newspapers of the day but to whom much must be admired.
A mirror on the face of today’s society where we harbour suspicion to anything new or foreign making its way into the high street or into our lives, Ripper Street continues to show just how little we have moved on as a society. An excellent episode to get the teeth into!
Ian D. Hall