Ripper Street - General Discussion

[Aethera]

This topic replaces the old Ripper Street forum which has been vaulted at the location below:

http://forums.previously.tv/forum/357-ripper-street-v/

[blackwing]

Not sure if anyone follows this topic anymore, but I just started watching this show on Netflix.  I'm midway through Season 1.  I recognize the lead actor from the early seasons of MI-5 / Spooks.  I'm liking it so far, it looks like each episode is self-contained rather than being part of a season-long story.

The one negative for me is Mrs. Reid.  I dislike the actress intensely, I hated her as Margaret Beaufort in "The White Princess".  Something is truly jacked up with her mouth and the way she speaks.  It looks crooked and always seems like she has marbles or something in there.  I really dislike the character too.  I'm not sure if we are supposed to view her as sympathetic or not.  I know they have lost a child but she seems so cold to her husband.  Is she supposed to be a saint because she wants to take in prostitutes?

[Haleth]

I've been doing a rewatch since I missed the last season or two when it moved to Netflix.  It's a good show, maybe a little salacious at times, but entertaining.  It's been fun picking out all the actors I've seen in other things since watching this, including Emily Reid = Margaret Beaufort and all the people who ended up with gigs on GoT.  I love both Matthew MacFadyen and Jerome Flynn.  

Yeah, Emily can be a pill but the poor woman isn't allowed to put closure to the death of her daughter.  The Reids really needed a good counselor.  

[blackwing]

On 6/9/2020 at 6:24 AM, Haleth said:

I've been doing a rewatch since I missed the last season or two when it moved to Netflix.  It's a good show, maybe a little salacious at times, but entertaining.  It's been fun picking out all the actors I've seen in other things since watching this, including Emily Reid = Margaret Beaufort and all the people who ended up with gigs on GoT.  I love both Matthew MacFadyen and Jerome Flynn.  

Yeah, Emily can be a pill but the poor woman isn't allowed to put closure to the death of her daughter.  The Reids really needed a good counselor.  

Just finished Season 2 and I was happy that we didn't have to see Mrs. Reid at all.  I'm hoping she is gone for good.  Reid seems to have moved on with Miss Cobden although I guess maybe she dumps him after she sees him screaming at Drake to kill Shine.

So many questions unresolved at the end of Season 2 - does Susan really leave Jackson?  What happens to Shine?  Hopefully he gets arrested?  What happens to the jeweler?  What happens to Flight?  Does Drake rejoin the force?  The only satisfying resolution was the death of the odious Duggan.

[Haleth]

I finished my rewatch of season 3. David Dawson is the best, no pun intended. Now on to the last two seasons that I was unable to watch earlier.

Ha!  I just read a bio of the real Edmund Reid on Wiki. He was the shortest man on the police force, not like the lanky Matthew Macfaddyn. Also he had 2 children, his daughter was named Elizabeth, not Matilda. 

Edited July 11, 2020 by Haleth

[Haleth]

I just finished season 5 last night.  What a departure from the show as it was.  So grim, so hopeless.  I read in the archives that fans were not pleased with the pacing of the season, but binging it might be more satisfying.  The good?  Outstanding performances by the actors playing Dove and Nathaniel, as well as superb work by Joseph Mawle.  (How does he manage to be over the top and subtle at the same time?)  I loved all the call backs to the beginning of the show and the return of characters we hadn't seen for a while.  Loved also one last case for Jackson and Reid to solve using science.  The bad?  The whole premise was kind of ridiculous with the threesome on the run.  I wasn't sure what the point of the many flashbacks and the very long denouement in the final episode but I guess it tied up all the loose ends and left viewers with poignant final image-- Reid's gift and his punishment.

I was really afraid for a minute that the flashbacks were going to imply that Reid was the Ripper.  Thank goodness they didn't go that way.

[blackwing]

On 7/25/2020 at 6:53 AM, Haleth said:

I just finished season 5 last night.  What a departure from the show as it was.  So grim, so hopeless.  I read in the archives that fans were not pleased with the pacing of the season, but binging it might be more satisfying.  The good?  Outstanding performances by the actors playing Dove and Nathaniel, as well as superb work by Joseph Mawle.  (How does he manage to be over the top and subtle at the same time?)  I loved all the call backs to the beginning of the show and the return of characters we hadn't seen for a while.  Loved also one last case for Jackson and Reid to solve using science.  The bad?  The whole premise was kind of ridiculous with the threesome on the run.  I wasn't sure what the point of the many flashbacks and the very long denouement in the final episode but I guess it tied up all the loose ends and left viewers with poignant final image-- Reid's gift and his punishment.

I was really afraid for a minute that the flashbacks were going to imply that Reid was the Ripper.  Thank goodness they didn't go that way.

So I finished the whole series.  It seemed to me almost like there was a different showrunner between Season 2 and Season 3.  They didn't really address any of the cliffhanger items in the Season 2 finale, they just took a time jump and just let things work out.  I had been wondering what had happened to Shine, until he showed up again in Season 5.  Season 3, they decided to turn Susan into an evil criminal mastermind.  A big boo to that.  She was the lead female character on the show and it's too bad that they had to make her the baddie.

Season 4, I grew increasingly irritated with Bennett Drake and how he kept telling Reid that Reid worked for him.  But I was shocked when they killed him off in the end.  I wonder if at this point, they already knew that Season 5 would be the last and had already decided to make the main characters into fugitives, and didn't want Drake to be the one chasing them down?

As you mentioned, Season 5 was kind of depressing.  But I did enjoy that there was a long arc about the Whitechapel Golem and the fact that Dove was trying to hide his brother.  The episode that focused on Nathaniel in the country and his interactions with the Sumner siblings was one of my favourites, I thought it was great to learn more about him and see him as a troubled soul instead of simply a monster.  But then again, I like Jonas Armstrong.  I really liked him as Robin Hood and I thought it was a poor decision of his to quit the show.  

I don't understand why if the police suspected that the trio was holed up in Mimi's theatre (Nathaniel even had a flyer from it) that they didn't do a better job of searching and/or watching it.

The endings were depressing.  Obviously Nathaniel had murdered, but it seemed clear that there were impulses that he was trying to keep in check.  I wonder if in today's world if he would have been sent to a mental institution instead.  I was hoping somehow there would be clemency for him since he revealed the police corruption of Augustus and the killing of Robin.  (But again, I think that's my like for Jonas Armstrong talking.)  I knew that Susan had done some very bad things but I was hoping she would have been spared the noose.  I have no idea why they decided to have Matthew/Homer leave for America with Connor only to have him killed in a tragic accident.  Why?  Why not let him be happy?

And the final scenes with Reid were particularly depressing.  Mathilda and Drummond go to live in the Congo and she said she knows that he will never visit them there.  Did she ever come back to visit?  I didn't get the sense that she did.  He tries to date Mimi and she rejects him.  So he's left all alone with his work.

I really enjoyed the period atmosphere of this show... for my next streaming series I'll probably watch Whitechapel with Rupert Penry Jones (if it's still on the HBO app) because I like the time period.  Either that or Peaky Blinders.

[supposebly]

2 hours ago, blackwing said:

I really enjoyed the period atmosphere of this show... for my next streaming series I'll probably watch Whitechapel with Rupert Penry Jones

That show plays in the present, well, 2005 in case you were going for a Victorian time period. I'm currently re-watching on Amazon.

[blackwing]

32 minutes ago, supposebly said:

That show plays in the present, well, 2005 in case you were going for a Victorian time period. I'm currently re-watching on Amazon.

Ah, thanks for letting me know, may still check it out.  

[bourbon]

This looks pretty dormant, but I just finished bingeing on Netflix, so...

There are a few shows with finales so bad, so confounding, so WTF, that they ruin the entire series for me. How I Met Your Mother is one. Ashes to Ashes another. I'm not sure this finale falls *quite* into that category, but it is pretty darn close.

I appreciated that Augustus Dove and Nathaniel were complex characters. I actually liked Dove and was rooting for him until he killed Robin. I kept hoping he hadn't actually done it, but alas. I think he really cared about Rose and Connor and wanted to do right by him, terrifying governess aside. 

And daaammmmn was that last season grim and utterly hopeless. I was so hoping Rose and Drake would reconcile before his murder, but no. The love between them was utterly broken, and she goes off, leaving Connor basically motherless and alone. Again.

They had painted Susan into such an unsympathetic character since S3, I wasn't sorry to see her go, but I wish they'd have done it a season earlier. Watching her skulk around London killing people and spying on her kid did not make for good storytelling or character development. 

And WTF was the point of killing Jackson? I get that they wanted to leave Reid utterly alone without his friends or family, but *he already was*! Drake and Susan, dead. Jackson, Rose, Mimi, Mathilda, moved away. Why kill him? To what end? 

Even Drum and Tilda's ending wasn't terribly happy. They were cute, and I think he really did love her, at least, but they seemed so mismatched. Not to mention the fact that he really did betray her by lighting that candle, and she pulled a gun on him. It felt to me that when she found out she was pregnant, she agreed to marry him b/c she didn't have any other options, and she moved away to start again and make the best of it. 

Reid's ending was so grim. I figured there was no other way it would end. He wouldn't retire and would continue to police Whitechapel. But it was just sooo dark. He wasn't a dogged cop protecting his people, he was an obsessed and mentally ill cop who had murdered multiple people and had lost everyone he'd ever cared about. 

Feh. I liked it, but that ending. 

Won't re-watch. 

[blackwing]

On 3/7/2021 at 4:23 PM, bourbon said:

This looks pretty dormant, but I just finished bingeing on Netflix, so...

There are a few shows with finales so bad, so confounding, so WTF, that they ruin the entire series for me. How I Met Your Mother is one. Ashes to Ashes another. I'm not sure this finale falls *quite* into that category, but it is pretty darn close.

I appreciated that Augustus Dove and Nathaniel were complex characters. I actually liked Dove and was rooting for him until he killed Robin. I kept hoping he hadn't actually done it, but alas. I think he really cared about Rose and Connor and wanted to do right by him, terrifying governess aside. 

And daaammmmn was that last season grim and utterly hopeless. I was so hoping Rose and Drake would reconcile before his murder, but no. The love between them was utterly broken, and she goes off, leaving Connor basically motherless and alone. Again.

They had painted Susan into such an unsympathetic character since S3, I wasn't sorry to see her go, but I wish they'd have done it a season earlier. Watching her skulk around London killing people and spying on her kid did not make for good storytelling or character development. 

And WTF was the point of killing Jackson? I get that they wanted to leave Reid utterly alone without his friends or family, but *he already was*! Drake and Susan, dead. Jackson, Rose, Mimi, Mathilda, moved away. Why kill him? To what end? 

Even Drum and Tilda's ending wasn't terribly happy. They were cute, and I think he really did love her, at least, but they seemed so mismatched. Not to mention the fact that he really did betray her by lighting that candle, and she pulled a gun on him. It felt to me that when she found out she was pregnant, she agreed to marry him b/c she didn't have any other options, and she moved away to start again and make the best of it. 

Reid's ending was so grim. I figured there was no other way it would end. He wouldn't retire and would continue to police Whitechapel. But it was just sooo dark. He wasn't a dogged cop protecting his people, he was an obsessed and mentally ill cop who had murdered multiple people and had lost everyone he'd ever cared about. 

Feh. I liked it, but that ending. 

Won't re-watch. 

I agree that the season was depressing.  I liked the period atmosphere of the show, but to me it's like they had zero overall direction.  There was such a drastic shift from season to season.  The one constant was always that Reid, Drake and Jackson were like the Three Musketeers, they weren't necessarily friends but they were always working together, and that was even broken up by Seasons 4 and 5.

I hated Amanda Hale as Reid's wife in Season 1 (I have not liked this actress in anything) but wow, poor woman.  Her daughter "dies", her marriage falls apart, she gets sent to an institution, and then she kills herself.  The daughter is revealed to be alive, asks once about her mother, but then Reid never talks about her again.  As far as we can tell, he never even visited her grave or looked at old photos of her when the family was happy.  This is why I think the producers just made things up on the fly from season to season.  I still don't fully understand the point of reuniting Reid with his long lost daughter, only to pretty much separate them permanently in the end.

The offscreen killing of Jackson is puzzling.  What was the point?  He had moved back to America with his son and was never going to go back to England.  He was as good as gone to Reid, so it's not like he had to be killed to show that Reid had no one left.

Why would anyone ever want to become a police constable?  The ones we had on this show didn't seem to fare too well.  Young Hobbes was brutally killed.  Flight was caught up in corruption.  And then there was the one from the last season (I forget his name but he is the one who didn't marry Matilda) gets demoted because he opposed the corrupt chief and gets humilatingly stripped naked and tied to a horse.