If you've been following our reviews for Ripper Street, you know I've been very critical from the start whilst Jen has maintained a bit of optimism until last week's episode completely wore her down. This week is the final episode of the series and in honour of this, I decided to leave behind my previous criticisms and go into this episode with an open mind, ready to be wowed and amazed by the grand finale.
Yeah, that didn't happen.
The problem with this episode, and indeed the series as a whole, is that we all know that Jack the Ripper was never caught. Instead, the tension is wrung from Jackson's false arrest. Could he hang for being the Ripper?! Well no, because he's one of the main characters and Ripper Street has been commissioned for a second series... So then, we must rely on the ingenious ways in which Jackson (Adam Rothenburg), Reid (Matthew MacFadyen) and Drake (Jerome Flynn) prove the American's innocence. Which would be great, if they focused on this at all. But he then gets forgotten about for the REST of the episode (until the end when he solves it all very quickly by becoming Sherlock Holmes). Instead, we get a lonely hearts killer who kidnaps Rose for his own human trafficking gains.
Now forgive me once again for point this out, but the series is called Ripper Street no? So is too much to expect that the Ripper actually features in it all, bar a token association episode and as a convenient plot device? It also can't be a coincidence that Victor Silver shares his last name with one of the Ripper suspects, but this isn't even alluded to once by the episode. Whilst it was all good to have the mystery of Reid's daughter rumble along, the main cliffhanger last week was Jackson's arrest. To not focus on that for more than a quarter of the episode is, to this viewer, frankly rather baffling. But no, once again, the Ripper is used as a hook to get the audience back again and then dropped like a body in the Thames.
We also get the supposed tension between the three leads themselves. Suddenly, Drake does not want to have anything to do with Reid, despite no real build up to this whatsoever besides a couple of frowns and snarky remarks. Now, a good central team falling out can be done very well; Buffy did it in the Season 4 episode The Yoko Factor and produced enough tension to build up to the next episode in which the Scoobies quite literally come together to defeat The Initiative. I'm guessing that Ripper Street were going for a similar effect, but it didn't really work. You need to care about the characters to care about whether or not they become friends again at the end and unfortunately, I still don't.
Another thing I've noticed whilst watching this episode in particular, is the odd way that people talk. The dialogue is usually quite timeless, neither modern nor overly historical. Then occasionally, we get 'I know not' or 'you shall never see me more' and then Emily's overly dramatic 'you raise a hope that sinks its claws into me', feeling a little bit like someone swallowed Dickens and decided to regurgitate it sporadically throughout the script. Now I'm all for flourishes in language, but you should either go for full, lyrical dialogue (a la the excellent Deadwood) or just stick to regular speech. Combining the two just seems frankly quite odd.
This, rather conveniently, sums up the problem of Ripper Street for me. It's trying to be too many things at once without a healthy regard for any of them apart from being 'gritty'. The police procedural elements have never been particularly intriguing, nor unpredictable, with a lot of the culprits easily spotted and reveals foreshadowed. The historical context hasn't really added anything other than to give a grimier setting in which to operate and a chance to show how awful Whitechapel was back in the late nineteenth century. The two have never really worked well together, with the historical context abandoned once it ceases to be needed for the advancing police case. The mixture has never really worked.
Ripper Street will be back for another series, but I'm not sure Jen and I will be.
- Becky
You can read all of our previous Ripper Street reviews here.
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After the Jack the Ripper related exploits of last week's episode, In My Protection headed down the Dickensian route with more references to Oliver Twist than Bill Sykes could beat to death with a stick.
After a toymaker is brutally murdered, Reid (Matthew MacFadyen), Jackson (Adam Rothenburg) and Drake (Jerome Flynn) are led to believe that a teenage boy committed the unspeakable act, presented with evidence from George Lusk (Michael Smiley) of the Whitechapel Vigilance Men. When the boy is sentenced to death, Reid and the boy's solicitor, Eagles (Hugh O'Conor) think that there is sufficient doubt as to his guilt and proceed down a line of investigation that leads them to the vicious Carmichael (Joseph Gilgun).
Sadly, I'm not enjoying Ripper Street as much as Jen did in her review last week. I think my main issue with the series is that it seems to be ordinary drama masquerading as something more original; scratch the period drama surface and all you have is a police procedural and not a particularly captivating one at that. Just to compound the fact that we're in Victorian London, we have a scratchy violin score that seems to have been lifted straight from Hans Zimmer's music for Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (which is all I could think of during the boxing scene in the opening episode).
The Victorian setting offers up so much for exploration, especially in 1889, as everything was constantly shifting and changing. The rise of the press is hinted at, but never really explored. It could cast a reflection on our own culture of celebrity and media glorification of horrific acts (a particularly relevant subject considering sad recent events), but it's just left hanging there, functioning as a nuisance to our heroic detectives (I am of course, assuming that this does not change in the later episodes. Who knows, all my issues may be addressed). Being a Victorian literature/history nut, maybe I'm expecting too much from it but mostly the entire aim of the series so far seems to be "Look how horrible Victorian London was!". Anyone familiar with the works of Dickens, or even just the television adaptations, knows that already. It was grim yes, now do something interesting with it; don't just murder people horrifically and then play out a sombre version of CSI: Whitechapel.
This particular storyline was a rehashing of Oliver Twist, with a brutal murder taking place instead of a theft and Joseph Gilgun's pantomime mash-up of Fagin and Bill Sykes. While a couple of references were cute, especially the direct one to the 'Fagins of this world', it just served up another example of why this series perhaps isn't the best advert for BBC Original Drama. This also extends to the characters; two episodes in and feel like there's nothing left to discover. Matthew MacFadyen is a great actor and gives this series its good, central moral anchor but now we know what the conflict between Reid and his wife is, we know why he's so dark and moody. Bam, mystery gone.
Adam Rothenburg's Captain Jackson is very Doc Holliday* without the sense of humour or the charm, but with all the drunken debauchery and weird sense of honour (seriously, he's a few kilograms less and a more impressive moustache away from being Val Kilmer in Tombstone). Again, not the most original characterisation in the world. Jerome 'Career Resurgence' Flynn is also very good as the strong but silent Drake, slowly beating down the residual memory of the time when he was one half of unexpected crooners Robson and Jerome. But I don't feel attached to any one of them, and that to me is always the mark of a good drama. If I care about the characters, I can forgive most other things. So far, they haven't really given me a reason to.
On a positive note, I really enjoyed certain aspects of the episode and though, as I said, I'm struggling to care about the characters, I lay that problem at the feet of the writers rather than the actors. The performances, despite the one-note characters, were all excellent and the scenes between Reid and his wife offered some welcome, human respite from all the violence. Gilgun's villain did begin to grate a little towards the end of the episode, but as I was never supposed to like him to begin with, I would count that as a mark in the plus column. Likewise, the period detail is fantastic; from the costumes to the dirty streets, you are always certain where you are and when dealing with a place as grimy as Whitechapel was in the Victorian era, it's essential that your audience become completely immersed in this.
Sadly, the actual content of the episode just wasn't involving or original enough, nor was the case itself anything particularly gripping. So as you can see, my opinion of Ripper Street differs greatly from Jen's so far. We'll be alternating episodes throughout the series so I'm sure you'll definitely see some debating going on as vicious murders continue on Ripper Street.
- Becky
You can read Jen's review of the previous episode I Need Light here.
Follow Becky on Twitter @beckygracelea
Or follow her blog beckygracelea.wordpress.com
* EDIT: I did actually mean the famous OK Corrale gunslinger and not the rather charming Michael J. Fox film, Doc Hollywood as previously stated.
