Review: Ripper Street

East London is under threat again. Thomas Davies investigates whether Ripper Street can maintain its high octane policing thrills for another season.

Back for its second series, crime drama Ripper Street returns to our screens with a bang. Strong action and some intrigue sets up the story arc for this series, and it’s a promising start.

Matthew MacFadyen as the no nonsense Edmund Reid
Image Credit: BBC

Set in London, 1890, the show follows policemen Edmund Reid (Matthew MacFadyen), Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) and Homer Jackson (Adam Rotherberg) as they attempt to bring order to Whitechapel.

This time they investigate the assault of a policeman which soon evolves into a tale of sex, drugs and police corruption. The story itself wasn’t remarkable and I didn’t really care too much about the many subplots littering the episode (I’m sure they’ll develop later on) but the main characters are enjoyable to watch.

Their camaraderie drives the show forward and gives it an exciting pace, the ‘bromance’ between Jackson and Drake in particular is a real laugh.

But the great thing about Ripper Street remains its setting.

The gory style fits very well with Victorian London and they go to great lengths to drag you into the setting. From quirky dialogue, Jackson’s primitive experimentation and an appearance by the Elephant Man bring the past to life. It’s these little things that are the joy to watch and with a soundtrack that constantly reminds me of Sherlock Holmes it certainly gives a brash representation of the time and place.

It wasn’t quite as exciting as some of the episodes in the last series but it’s still good quality stuff. The last series of Ripper Street got better with time and with a solid start this series there’s no reason why that can’t happen again.

In a stacked field of crime dramas how do you think Ripper Street does? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or by commenting below.

From the Bill Douglas Centre: Toy Magic Lantern (c. 1850) and Alice in Wonderland slides

In this week’s snoop around the Bill Douglas, Screen Online Editor Jess O’Kane gets a closer look at a piece of projection heritage, far removed from the 3D glasses of today.

The Bill Douglas Centre houses a large collection of early motion picture apparatus, including this magic lantern, which gives us an insight into early forms of projection.

Image credit: The Bill Douglas Centre

Though their origin is hard to determine, magic lanterns were in recorded use from the mid-17^th century in Europe, particularly in The Netherlands and Germany.

A simple device, the lantern contains a concave mirror that passes light through a slide and projects the image outward, and thus can be seen as a predecessor to Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope.

Magic lanterns are not only useful for tracing the genealogy of modern technology, however. They can also tell us about the attitudes of pre-movie going audiences towards technological advances, images, and the potentially devious influence of visual culture.

Image credit: The Bill Douglas Centre

From the late 17^th century through to the boom of the Gothic 100 years later, magic lanterns were used to delight and horrify audiences unacquainted with such trickery.

As early as the 1650s, German priest Athanasius Kircher wrote of magicians and itinerant conjurers using lanterns to project images of the devil, silhouetted “spirits” and the supposed souls of the dead.

In the 18th century, special “Phantasmagoria” shows depicting ghouls and ghosts became wildly popular.

Just as a cinema full of people ran for cover when the Lumière Brother’s train pulled into le gare de La Ciotat, these early audiences were clearly fascinated – and frightened – by the permeability of reality.

By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, however, moving images were becoming commonplace, and magic lanterns were widely marketed as toys or educational tools.

Image credit: The Bill Douglas Centre

These Alice in Wonderland slides, for example, were produced in the between 1900 and 1925, and are based on Joseph Tenniel’s classic illustrations.

Travel photos, ethnographic studies and maps were other commonly used slides.

That those images that once seemed frightening and alien eventually became domesticated is perhaps unsurprising. Propelled by that wave of popular interest that would inspire the Golden Age, the magic lantern, like so much else that was once marginal, became commercial to the point of commonality.

Jess O’Kane, Screen Online Editor

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