Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Matthew Macfadyen, Jerome Flynn, Adam Rothernberg, MyAnna Buring, Charlene McKenna, Lydia Wilson, David Dawson, David Wilmot, Josh O’ Connor, Louise Brealey, John Heffernan, Anna Burnett, Charlie Creed-Miles, Richard Goulding, Phil McKee, Marie Critchley, Alicia Gerrard.
How far can a man be pushed before his breaking point is reached, before the Gods destroy and make mad? For Victorian Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, the Gods have been waiting a long time for the stretch of rope to uncoil to its full potential and take the man who has led H Division and the people of Whitechapel through so many crisis that the madness has almost taken on its own shadowy form; one in which now finally tears and severs.
The third season of Ripper Street has taken on a much more obvious serial like tone as Reid, Drake and Captain Homer Jackson find their feet covered in the murky waters of crime and punishment of the East-End of London. In the second episode an age old question and the commercialisation of debt rear their ugly heads together as if having joined forces in a cold wind blown in from all corners as The Beating of Her Wings threatens to take apart everything the police force in Whitechapel have come to represent since Jack the Ripper scowled in the dark alleyways a few years before.
The undercurrent of one spectrum of violence in the area being replaced by another is felt and the dangers of the new society feeding into the fabric of every person’s livelihood has an end of days association attached to it. As the Victorian era came stuttering to its close, the Fin De Siècle, the change in which lines were becoming even more blurred throughout Great Britain and abroad and the shape of the future being set, was more and more apparent and even in the ways in which would be celebrated and lauded, such as the first women doctors really making their mark on society since the late 1840s, the atmosphere, the corruption of the times, was all too clear.
For Matthew Macfadyen the episode is one in which his very essence as an actor is taken to new heights as he descends into the area in which his character has spent a life time rooting out and the very way he commits such an act of brutality foreshadows the rooting out of information he seeks about all that has happened since Jack the Ripper terrorised the East End. It is a powerful and exceptional performance to which nothing really can prepare you for.
Whilst at best it could be thought of as a case of misfortune that Ripper Street was taken off air from the B.B.C., the way that the action has intensified since its return to the screen is to be applauded, a tremendous and very concentrated episode; one that really sets the dark tone down several notches.
Ian D. Hall