Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jonas Armstrong, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothenberg, MyAnna Buring, Anna Burnett, Charlene McKenna, Lucy Cohu, Matthew Lewis, Anna Koval, Finnion Duff Lennon, Matthew Lewis, Brandon Maher, Kahl Murphy, Benjamin O’ Mahony, Lynn Rafferty, Annabell Rickerby, Killian Scott, David Threlfall, David Wilmot.
There are some killers that just defy explanation, no matter if it is in the blood of real life or the fear of literature and media intrusion, there are killers, murderers, people to whom such depths are crawled that the greatest anomaly, the strangest and unfathomable desire, just makes them such interesting case studies.
Even if the explanation of the end is missing from the final chapter, the beginning of their lives, the moment in which such brutality is meted out and in which the brain is subjected to such torture that it is not surprising that such people turn the way they do; that is the moment in which the story begins.
For Detective Inspector’s Reid and Drake and their American comrade Captain Homer Jackson, having already dealt with the fear that stalks the streets and narrow filthy passageways that riddle themselves around Whitechapel and the east tide of Thames for many years, the beast that haunts the Jewish population of the area is one that not only confounds them, but is as terrifyingly human as the most infamous murderer in British history, Jack the Ripper.
The parallels that the writer’s of the series make with the period in which the Ripper plied his ill fortune trade upon the poor of Whitechapel is one that makes history’s claim to repeat itself, seem more than true, even more vile and treacherous.
The latest series of the acclaimed Ripper Street is one that runs very deep in the veins of the crime drama genre, when even the police and detectives can still be haunted by a killing by one of their own, then the finale, the absolute perfect open-ending that sits in Edmund Reid Did This and the writing especially has been exemplary.
With tremendous performances by the entire cast but especially by Jonas Armstrong and Jerome Flynn, the ghosts of many ill-intentioned deeds start to become clear and frighteningly obvious. A superb and decidedly confident series and one in which the tension is racked up to its uppermost desire.
Ian D. Hall