History

If Ripper Street was considered violent before then the second season opener did very little to askew those claims. First a man was flung out of a window and impaled his leg on a railing spike and then Edmund Reid and Bennett Drake put down a prisoner revolt, with a little help from Homer Jackson. And that’s all before the opening titles. Of course, why would Ripper Street shun its violent reputation when it really makes the show stand out from all the more modern detective crime shows? While they might lose a few squeamish viewers but more will find the bloody depiction of the Victorian period intriguing.

Season Two was always going to be difficult for Richard Warlow, creator and writer of Ripper Street. The first season begun six months after the last Jack the Ripper murder and with the black cloud of the police’s failure still handing over Whitechapel. In this second season, the show moves further and further away from the Ripper killings and now requires an equally intense story to complete with the first eight episodes. Reid, Drake and Jackson require new direction in terms of story and motivation and thankfully ‘Pure as the Driven’ delivered.

When a police officer in another division, a friend of Drake’s has his leg impaled on an iron railing, H division become embroidered in a case involving Chinese gambling dens and opium trade. It’s really interesting to see a time when opium was legally traded and no one really cared, that is until it is revealed that someone has found a method of enhancing the drug, turning it into the now well known narcotic, Heroin. Captain Homer Jackson discovered as much after testing the substance on a rat and then, later, himself. Jackson has been shown to take drugs in the past but he has never really been depicted as addicted, so it will be interesting to see if his heroin use develops into something more.

 

Next time, make sure she wants to be rescued first.

However, beneath the illegal use of opium there was a much more private matter going on. The house that the police officer was thrown from was not his own and belonged to an Asian woman called Blush Pang. Despite the somewhat silly name, she has in fact been supplying people with heroin. No one thinks much of her being in White Chapel as apparently there are two streets of Chinese people with no way back home until her brother shows up. Having learned much from Jet Li and Jackie Chan, he busts out the martial arts, punching people into the air and beating up at least a dozen men all at once. Eventually, Jackson makes the logical move and pulls a gun on him. Turns out Blush Pang is his sister and she was taken from Hong Kong. Coincidently, Detective Inspector Jedediah Shine of K division previously spent 10 years with the Hong Kong police.

Unfortunately for Reid, nothing can be proved and to get to Shrine he can only imprison Blush Pang for the theft of a hard candy. Reid is rather glib in that moment but this actually represents a massive turning point for the character. Amongst the police corruption and lack of respect by the public in the previous season, Reid was shown to very meticulous. He insisted on paper work, forensic evidence and that thing the proper processes and protocols were followed. For him to throw Blush Pang in jail for any reason he wanted highlights a significant divergence of the character and possibly hints towards deeper corruption through the series as Reid attempts to reveal Shrine’s crimes.

At the same time, however, Reid will also have to prove his own innocence. In a wonderful use of dramatic irony, we the audience saw Shrine give the police officer an overdose with heroin, knowing that Reid had given the man a dose earlier in an attempt to gleam information. Of course, all fingers point to Reid as the murderer. Warlow also gave us a scene showing the elephant man witnessing the death. So we know Reid is innocent and that the elephant man is the only way to prove his innocence but leaves out the how, forcing the viewer to wait and find out how the two dots will be connected by Reid and Drake.

 

As if his life wasn’t difficult enough, now he’s witness to a murder.

This is what makes the writing of Ripper Street so watchable. The historical context isn’t just there so that the characters can use funny, archaic words and women can wear huge frocks. Instead it actually affects the characters and the story. Other programmes might have the Elephant man appear as a cameo but Ripper Street actually writes the character into the plot, giving him more importance than a passing nod to the time frame. Similarly, the opium trade and Shrine’s police work in China are rooted in the historical context of the Opium Wars and Britain’s colonial conquest of Hong Kong. The characters themselves grow out of the history surrounding the show’s time period, clearly reflecting that the Victorian setting isn’t just a gimmick.

Ripper Street is not perfect however. Admittedly I have never been much of a fan of Captain Jackson or MyAnna Buring’s Long Susan. Susan never seems to do much of significance, even when she has her own stories. In fact, much of her private issues could probably be resolved by just confiding in Jackson or Reid which she never seems to do. Jackson, on the other hand, is written as a one stop shop for medical knowledge which seems rather implausible at times. And after befriending Reid at the end of the first season, both are now contemplating running away again, so what was the point of that then?

The stand out as far as I am concerned is certainly Jerome Flynn. Compared with his role on HBO’s Game of Thrones, Flynn appears to seamlessly switch from selfish rogue to good natured copper. Though he has to play second fiddle to Matthew Mcfadyen’s Edmund Reid, Drake is always enthralling in his supporting role. Between him and the shows subtle but excellent writing, I will be glad to see this show continue.

Gore

So I’m not going to lie; the only reason I started watching BBC’s Ripper Street was because of Jerome Flynn who is probably best known for playing Bronn in HBO’s Game of Thrones series. I enjoyed his character in the American series so I was curious to see how he fared in a different role. His character, Detective Sergeant Bennett Drake, couldn’t really be any further from Bronn, which is nice. It shows Flynn off as a well rounded actor. Bronn is immoral and quick witted, whereas Drake is stiff and more easily repulsed. And there’s a lot to be repulsed about on this show. Within the first three episodes, prostitutes have been murdered, children have been used to kill and in the third, a cholera-like disease was used to poison numerous victims.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that some viewers have been complaining that the show is too violent and overtly sexual. True to that, another character, an American army surgeon by the name of Captain Homer Jackson, played by Adam Rothenberg, lives in a brothel and is a friend to the madam. In the aforementioned cholera episode, The King Came Calling, their investigation leads them to a club for transvestites and homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the show is called Ripper Street. The action is set in or around Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper famously went on his killing spree. Ripper Street is set six months later but very little has really changed. There are still slums and orphan children and there are still prostitutes, as there would have been in 1889. The show itself plays out like Sherlock Holmes with Matthew MacFadyen playing the lead; Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. Reid is nowhere near as brilliant as Holmes and the cases to be found here are certainly more gruesome than you might find in Steven Moffat’s Sherlock. However, the gruesomeness of Whitechapel is surely part of the appeal of the show. To set a detective series in that area and then play it safe and tame would feel rather empty.

Too much sex? 99% of women in this show are whores.

It’s not as though Ripper Street is aired on daytime television. This is a show that airs at 9 O’clock on a Sunday night. There shouldn’t be any young children awake that time to see the horrors of Whitechapel and if parents have older children that they don’t want to watch this kind of thing then the parents will need to take an active role in stopping them. Ripper Street is attempting to tell a story and it would be a rather sad event for it to get cancelled for being too violent or sexual when those elements are necessary for the depiction of Whitechapel. Thankfully, it has already been commissioned for a second season. Part of the problem really is that the BBC relies on the viewers who pay their television fee because they don’t show advertisements, so they tend to have a greater responsibility to what the viewers desires. That said, we live in the era of freeview where most people have tens of channels at their fingertips. If you don’t want to watch Ripper Street, use the remote.

Ripper Street isn’t the only show getting complaints for being too violent, although The Following got such criticisms before the first episode had even aired. But now that episodes have aired, we can clearly see that it’s not a simple case of being too violent. In part, the violence is justified. This is a television show about a serial killer. It needs bloodshed. A serial killer show without gore is like having Breaking Bad but never showing Walter White cooking meth. It’s a necessary component of the show in the same way that a victim is in Ripper Street.

What is more telling than the depiction of violence is the reaction of the characters within the show to the violence. In Ripper Street Drake and Reid are both repulsed by what they see whilst only the surgeon is desensitised to the brutal treatment of the victims. That makes sense considering that he’s both a doctor and in the army so he’s bound to have seen things that most normal detectives couldn’t even dream of. This is contrasted with Reid, who visibly recoils when he sees some of the victims, and Drake, who is shocked when he sees a man electrocuted on a railway line. But it’s The Following that seems to show this better than anything else.

Kevin Bacon plays Ryan Hardy, a retired FBI agent with a pacemaker, known for having caught Joe Carroll, played by James Purefoy, a serial killer who worships Edgar Allan Poe and kills his victims by stabbing them and cutting out their eyes. When he escapes from death row to finish his last work, Hardy is called back in to consult and help capture the man. But his escape and subsequent attack on his final victim, played by Maggie Grace, are anything but clean. Within minutes of the opening of the show, the good guys stumble into a room of slaughtered prison guards and during their search to find Carroll, they search a man’s house and find a German Shepherd, cut and bloody, with its eyes gouged out, just like Carroll’s victims.

Everyone has a dark side. Sometimes it has friends.

Those are pretty horrendous depictions, although in all fairness you’re likely to see this kind of gore on cable television any day of the week. Again, however, it goes back to how the characters react to the bloodshed and it’s anything but indifferent. Hardy, who has been studying and stalking Carroll, is still noticeably disgusted by the room of dead guards and another character mentions taking the death of an animal seriously because he himself owns a dog. While the show is violent and bloody, and necessarily so, it also goes out of its way to show the viewer the effects of that violence on others.

It’s rather closed minded to write shows such as Ripper Street and The Following off as ‘too violent’ or complain that the bloody effects offend the senses. It is death at its most visceral and it should offend you but it’s clear that the characters in the shows are also offended. By watching and paying attention, it’s obvious that these characters would rather not have to deal with the intense bloodshed, but it has to be dealt with to prevent further victims. And they can’t just relay the information back because the viewer then misses out on that intensity. If the character is repulsed by something the viewer can’t see then they can’t relate to the character and they might fail to understand the urgency of the mission. Case in point, at one point in the pilot, Hardy flips out and demands that the U.S. Marshall Chief does something. It’s a fairly straightforward scene but what really helps elevate it is the amount of bloodshed and violence we’ve already seen up until that point. We understand why Hardy is flipping out because of the violence.

It’s easy to see bloodshed on television and complain that it’s all for shock value. What’s harder is to take a moment and look at that bloodshed and actually find out where it’s illustrative or education. Looking deeper in to Ripper Street and The Following, that seems to be true of both these shows.