Ripper Street Review - Episode 6 (Spoilers for US)

This week's Ripper Street finally reveals a few of Detective Reid's secrets. Here's Jamie-Lee's review...

This review contains spoilers

1.6 Tournament of Shadows

Now three-quarters of the way through this beautifully bloody journey through the streets of Whitechapel in the months after the serials killings of Jack the Ripper, we are finally offered a brief insight into the background and inner workings of Ripper Street's lead character. Master of the bowler hat and sardonic quip, Detective Inspector Edmund Reid is played by Matthew Macfadyen of Spooks, Mr Darcy and husband of voice of Lara Croft fame. He even does those Marks and Spencers adverts, which is why you may find yourself wanting hot chocolate pudding oozing with cream and lashings of, ohhh, anyway... He has used his brooding skills demonstrably when hiding his feelings of pain about his daughter and somewhat awkward marriage in this gritty series and his MI5 training from Spooks has proved useful for authority, particularly when dishing out the dirty work to his right-hand men Drake and Jackson. He’s also shown that he’s not afraid of a rough and tumble himself when putting Jackson in his place, or giving one or two ruffians or embassy staff a swift backhand.

Ripper Street offers a plethora of on-going interesting characters and sub-plots to keeps viewers entertained alongside each week’s main plot, and this week’s episode is once again completely different from anything we’ve seen in the previous five. The H Division are left dealing with the dock strike of ’89 and rather unpleasant anarchists are stirring up trouble. A bomber is killed in an ‘accidental explosion’ revealing a deadly Communist plot, although as this is Whitechapel and prime time BBC One viewing, all is not what is seems. When Reid thinks everything looks a bit circumspect, he faces a backlash from Special Branch. Not heeding his warnings from above, he comes across something more unpleasant and sinister than the criminals roaming the streets, and far closer to home. In addition, we get a taste of what’s to come in the future storyline, when we discover that Jackson may not be who he say he is at all. Not so happily coerced into going undercover for Reid during the strike, he performs brilliantly, saving Drake’s life in the process. However, how far does and can his acting and betrayal go?

READ MORE: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/ripper-street/24338/ripper-street-episode-6-review-tournament-of-shadows

'Ripper Street' review: Complex characters David Wiegand Updated 4:34 pm, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 (SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE)

As in the original BBC America production "Copper," which is set in New York in the 1860s, early forensic science plays a key role in helping Reid and his team solve crimes. In "Copper," Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) enlists the help of a free slave who is also a doctor, Matthew Freeman (Ato Asandoh), to solve crimes, just as Reid dragoons Jackson here to work on murder cases with him.

The similarities between the two shows don't end there. Corcoran is haunted by the murder of his young daughter, while Reid and his wife, Emily (Amanda Hale), have lost their young daughter as well. Each show also features a cooperative brothel owner, grittily detailed production values and florid, penny-dreadful dialogue.

By the second episode, show creator Richard Warlow ("Mistresses") is borrowing a bit of Charles Dickens in the story of a street urchin convicted of murdering an elderly toy maker and sentenced to die on the gallows in three days. The boy is one of a group of street kids in the employ of a Fagin-like character, who's really much more of a Bill Sikes and out to spring the boy so he can shut him up before he tells the authorities too much. Meanwhile, Reid and his team have to keep the rabid citizen Whitechapel Vigilance Committee from shortstopping the kid's trip to the gallows themselves.

Although each episode focuses on a particular crime, we're hooked as much by the characters and what we still don't know about them. Edmund and Emily have a strained marriage, although they both seem to love each other. He buries the grief over the loss of his daughter in his work, while she spends every waking hour in church. Homer and Long Susan have both turned up in London after escaping some yet-to-be-defined incident back in the United States, which may have involved a name and identity change for Jackson. He can be an invaluable asset to Reid on a murder case, but he's not to be trusted.

"Ripper Street" boasts superb performances, cast and production values, and, beyond the copycat elements, thoughtfully written scripts loaded with surprises and a compellingly complicated moral base: Virtually all the characters are a credible mix of strengths and flaws.

READ MORE: http://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/Ripper-Street-review-Complex-characters-4199509.php#photo-4036998

Victorian sex & violence is gRIPPING - Says Matthew MacFadyen (THE SUN)

EXCLUSIVE By LAURA ARMSTRONG

MATTHEW MacFADYEN has defended Ripper Street against claims it is too graphic – insisting that most Brits RELISH Victorian sex and violence.

Nearly 90 viewers have complained since the BBC1 crime series, set in east London in the Jack The Ripper era, started two weeks ago.

But former Spooks actor Matthew, who plays detective inspector Edmund Reid, reckons the gritty reality shown on screen is an essential part of the show’s appeal.

He told TV Biz: “I think people are fascinated by Victorian attitudes towards sex and society. And back then in the East End there was enormous poverty.

“Actually, it was the Ripper murders that brought to light the dire poverty in the East End. They showed them up to a greater audience.”

He added: “Ripper Street is a very original thing really. The script grabs you because it is bombastic, big and colourful and grimy as well. There’s lots of stuff in there.

“And being able to go back to seedy Whitechapel is brilliant.

“The show designer is a supremely talented man and his team have been fantastic.

“All of the sets are as it was back then. There’s a toymaker’s shop, a pub, an orphanage and an asylum and all kinds of different things, so it’s great.”

He said: “My character, Reid, is a very dedicated and forward-thinking policeman. What I find interesting is that there’s nothing jaded about him.

“I wanted to get away from the classic ‘seen it all, done it all’ copper and he’s definitely not that.

“He’s progressive and interested in the innovations of the age.

“But he has also got quite a lot of anger and a fairly dark past.

READ MORE: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/4746229/exclusive-matthew-macfadyen-defends-bbc-drama-ripper-street.html

Ripper Street Review of Episode 2 (DEN OF GEEK)

Review Jamie-Lee Nardone

This week's Ripper Street plays out like a post-watershed Oliver Twist. Here's Jamie-Lee's review...


This review contains spoilers.

1.2 In My Protection

Imagine your worst nightmare: a plague of zombies, an infestation of giant spiders under the bed, or a massive scratch on your limited edition The Dark Knight Rises Blu-ray ... Now try and fathom something far more evil and you will have a vague idea of the level of depravity that the second episode of Ripper Street approaches. That’s right. Last week, it was Victorian snuff movies. This week, it’s Children Who Kill. And how. Think Oliver Twist, if Tarantino had been around offering advice to Dickens during a session in the local ale house, after devouring a year’s worth of penny dreadfuls.

The episode starts with the killing of a toymaker. A fourteen year old boy carrying the dead man’s possessions is brought to the police by a group of vigilantes who seek justice for the streets of London. This group is lead by George Lusk, played by Michael Smiley who, as usual, does not fail to impress. Assuming the role as a voice of the people with lynch mob mentality and the kind with lack of attention to details, he stirs up tension among the public and openly taunts Detective Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), claiming that he and his force are ineffectual and his mob need to do his job for him. Lusk rallies them to court and seeks the ultimate punishment for the boy, who refuses to neither speak nor deny the charge and is sentenced to death.


Enter Carmichael, played by the phenomenal Joe Gilgun of This is England and Misfits fame to stir things up as Whitechapel’s very own X-rated Fagin. Leading an army of orphan-criminals, he plays the perfect psychopath, demanding respect at all costs. And he’s not merely teaching them to pick a pocket or two. There’s something much darker going on with him.

But Reid is perturbed by the child’s silence, and aided by a concerned lawyer and orphanage governess, decides to get to the bottom of what actually happened and what is currently going on at the hands of Carmichael’s thirst for unyielding subservience, obedience and crime. Oh, and his army of teeny, tiny assassins.

READ MORE: http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/ripper-street/23985/ripper-street-episode-2-review-in-my-protection

REVIEW: Ripper Street (SQUABBLE BOX)

It was only a matter of time before we got another Jack the Ripper spin-off. The sport was to try to guess which genre or genres they were going to try to combine it with this time.

The BBC have obviously racked their brains over this one, and after diligently flicking around a few hundred digital channels, have come up with the franchise’s latest contrived mash-up: Jack the Ripper meets CSI in the Wild West.

With Whitechapel,  ITV have also recently had a stab (no pun intended) at Jack. But unlike ITV’s modern-day setting, the Beeb’s version is set in 1889 and miraculously resists the temptation of casting the usually ever-present Phil Davis. Ripper Street is set six months after Jack the Ripper began his gory exploits, and everyone is more than a little jumpy.

The Deadwood-esque Wild West filming style and heavy-handed, discordant music score make Ripper Street feel like a darker, nastier version of Guy Ritchie’s 2009 remake of Sherlock Holmes, and the programme’s brutal, blood-spitting, flesh-ripping visuals would be just as at home in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Jerome Flynn used to be in pop duo Robson and Jerome. I will never forgive him for that, but I have to admit he is rather good in Ripper Street. As is Matthew Macfadyen as Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, a smart, progressive copper intent on dragging the Met out of the Dark Ages and into the glossy, soft focus crime labs of CSI: Miami.

This unlikely League of Gentlemen is completed by an American surgeon played by Adam Rothenberg – an ex-employee of the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, drafted in, no doubt, to more graphically underline the Wild West parallel.

READ MORE: http://www.squabblebox.co.uk/2013/01/review-ripper-street/

Ripper Street: episode two plot and picture preview Find out what's in store for Reid and the team in the next instalment of BBC1's new crime drama (RADIO TIMES)

David Brown
9:37 PM, 30 December 2012

The new Victorian-set crime drama continues next Sunday with a case centring around Ernest Manby (David Coon), a 60-year-old toy maker beaten to death for the coins in his pocket and a mysterious brass box.

The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee offers up 14-year-old Thomas Gower (Giacomo Mancini) as a culprit, with the youth refusing to deny the charge. Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) – his conscience pricked by a radical lawyer called Eagles (Hugh O'Conor) and orphanage governess Deborah Goren (Lucy Cohu) – tests the validity of the investigation.

READ MORE:http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-12-30/ripper-street-episode-two-plot-and-picture-preview

It’s a Ripper! You can almost smell the fear on the set of frighteningly fantastic new crime drama Ripper Street (TV MAGAZINE)

By ANNE-MARIE HAMILTON Published: 27th December 2012

DENSE fog swirls above the cobbles as chickens in wooden cages let out high-pitched squawks and a pair of bloomers swings from a washing line high above the street.

Welcome to the mean streets of Whitechapel in 1889 where corpses, violence and general squalor abound.
It’s a lawless place ruled by fear and the setting for a new crime drama focusing on the terrifying aftermath of the Jack the Ripper murders.

TV Magazine is on location at a former army barracks in Dublin that’s doubling for London’s East End.
And as we peer past a crowd of extras, a familiar figure emerges in the gloom – former Spooks star Matthew Macfadyen, all broad-shouldered and reassuring in a well-cut check suit.

“Everyone has got this terrible hangover from not finding the Ripper – and they’ve got real hangovers as well,” says Matthew, 38, who stars as Detective Edmund Reid. “There has been a little bit of Guinness...”
Within minutes on set, it’s clear that pints of the black stuff have created a tight bond between the show’s three male stars, Matthew, Jerome Flynn and Adam Rothenberg.


“There is a lot of giggling,” admits Jerome, 49. “I have to admit, one of the reasons I wanted to be in the series was because Matt was doing it. I’m a big fan of his and thought: ‘Well, he’s not going to involve himself in anything that’s going to die.’ I think made the right decision.”

“It’s nice being away from London,” muses Matt (here’s hoping his actress wife Keeley Hawes, 36, isn’t offended). “Dublin feels very contained. And the set feels like a playground.”


Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/tvmagazine/tvmagazinefeatures/4714805/Its-a-Ripper-Matthew-Macfadyen-Jerome-Flynn-and-Adam-Rothenberg-star-in-Jack-the-Ripper-drama-Ripper-Street.html#ixzz2GOcA0RZU