Comics Bulletin logo
Search
  • Columns
    Random
    • The Phantom Stranger Vol. 1

      Laura Akers
      July 16, 2012
      Classic Comics Cavalcade, Columns
    Recent
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

      Daniel Gehen
      October 30, 2020
    • Comictober 2020: DRACULA MOTHERF**KER

      Daniel Gehen
      October 27, 2020
    • What Looks Good
    • Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    • The Full Run
    • Leading Question
    • Top 10
    • The Long-Form
    • Jumping On
    • Comics in Color
    • Slouches Towards Comics
  • Big Two
    Random
    • Crisis #12 Tie-ins: Kinda Sorta the End

      Laura Akers
      September 15, 2015
      DC Comics
    Recent
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • Stan Lee

      nguyen ly
      November 7, 2020
    • Collecting Profile: Jack O’ Lantern

      nguyen ly
      October 31, 2020
    • DC Comics
    • Big Two Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
  • Indie
    Random
    • 2.0

      Review: Berserker Unbound #1 Is A Familiar Lost In Time Plot

      Laura Akers
      August 7, 2019
      Dark Horse, Indie, Reviews
    Recent
    • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

      Daniel Gehen
      December 14, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • 4.5

      TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 Lives Up to the Hype (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      October 29, 2020
    • Reviews
    • Archie Comics
    • Boom! Studios
    • Dark Horse
    • IDW
    • Image
    • Oni Press
    • Valiant
  • Reviews
    Random
    • 2.5

      Under the Dome 1.03 "Manhunt" Review

      Laura Akers
      July 9, 2013
      Reviews
    Recent
    • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

      Daniel Gehen
      December 14, 2020
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • 4.5

      TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 Lives Up to the Hype (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      October 29, 2020
    • Singles Going Steady
    • Slugfest
    • Manga
      • Reviews
    • Small Press
      • Reviews
      • ICYMI
      • Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
  • Interviews
    Random
    • Interview: John Workman: The Art of Letters Part One

      Laura Akers
      March 13, 2015
      Interviews
    Recent
    • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

      Daniel Gehen
      June 8, 2020
    • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

      Mike Nickells
      March 4, 2020
    • Simon Roy

      Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

      Mike Nickells
      January 29, 2020
    • Audio Interview
    • Video Interview
  • Classic Comics
    Random
    • Remembering Captain Planet and the Planeteers

      Laura Akers
      December 19, 2014
      Classic Comics Cavalcade, Columns
    Recent
    • Countdown to the King: Marvel’s Godzilla

      Daniel Gehen
      May 29, 2019
    • Honoring A Legend: Fantagraphics To Resurrect Tomi Ungerer Classics

      Daniel Gehen
      February 15, 2019
    • Reliving the Craziest Decade in Comics History: An interview with Jason Sacks

      Mark Stack
      January 2, 2019
    • Classic Comics Cavalcade
    • Classic Interviews
  • News
    Random
    • 3.5

      Advance Review: Death Sentence: London #1 is Like a Great Punk Rock Song

      Laura Akers
      April 1, 2015
      Previews, Reviews
    Recent
    • 2020 Ringo Awards Winners Announced

      Daniel Gehen
      October 26, 2020
    • BAD IDEA Announces 2021 Publishing Slate

      Daniel Gehen
      September 29, 2020
    • A Full Replay of NCSFest 2020 is now Available

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2020
    • Press Release
    • Kickstarter Spotlight
  • Books
    Random
    • Hope Larson On The Knife's Edge

      Laura Akers
      May 25, 2017
      Books, First Second, Interviews
    Recent
    • Collecting Profile: Disney Frozen

      CB Staff
      November 22, 2019
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      CB Staff
      August 31, 2019
    • “THE BEST OF WITZEND” is a Wonderful Celebration of Artistic Freedom

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2018
    • Review: ‘Machete Squad’ is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Jason Sacks
      July 31, 2018
    • Review: ‘Out of Nothing’ is the Antidote to Our Sick Times

      Jason Sacks
      July 23, 2018
    • Review: ‘Bizarre Romance’ Shows Rough Edges in the Early Days of a New Marriage

      Jason Sacks
      July 10, 2018
What's New
  • Collecting Profile: Batwoman
  • Collecting Profile: Daredevil
  • Collecting Profile: Floronic Man
  • Review of Cheetah in Wonder Woman 1984
  • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist
  • Collecting Profile: Transformers
  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Contact Us
  • Write for us!
  • Visit Video Game Break!
Home
Reviews

Ripper Street 1.03 "The King Came Calling" Review

Laura Akers
February 16, 2013
Reviews

 

1.03- "The King Came Calling"

There’s little worse for a reviewer than reviewing a bad show. What is worse is when you thought a TV series was going to be great, begged your editor to be able to review it, and then found out that the show was really bad. Now you’re stuck watching and writing about something you hate for an entire season, possibly longer. And so seemed to be my fate this season with Ripper Street. 

But with last week’s episode, “The King Came Calling,” a ray of hope has appeared.

As I talked about last week, one of the biggest problems with the series thus far is the clumsy way in which it included subplots designed to make the main characters more interesting. Rather than such morsels being woven into the main plot of the episode, they were largely just added with little or no connective tissue whatsoever. 

This week’s episode, though, does not make the same mistake. A man drops dead on the streets of Whitechapel from what initially appears to be “King Cholera.” The city is gripped with panic, and Reid and Division H work to determine the reason for the rash of deaths. But rather than throw in disconnected scenes about Reid’s wife Emily (Amanda Hale) or the mystery of Long Susan and Jackson, what we instead get is a fully integrated story:  while Long Susan and Jackson only play their proper roles here, she as a commentator on the illness and he as a pathologist driven to find out what’s killing the citizens of London, the narrative about the Reids begins to bear fruit. The “her” that the two have so obliquely referred to turns out to be their dead daughter (little surprise there), explaining not only the reason the mother has turned to religion for comfort but also making Emily’s delusion while suffering from the missing illness relevatory about the love this husband and wife share under their pain.

But the best part of the Emily storyline becomes what it reveals about the larger world in which Ripper Street operates. It’s important to remember that London is not like most big cities in the world today (and in the Victorian era). By the time period depicted in Ripper Street, most very large cities were planned: at some point, the organic sprawl was checked and streets were made regular and perpendicular, important public facilities were built in appropriate places, etc. But London to this day shows strong evidence of its medieval genesis. It is not a single city, but rather small villages that grew outward from their centers until they merged with those around them.  Each village had its own flavor, industry, and class system and these linger on even now.

And this class system is something we really begin to see in this episode. Emily’s religious bent has led her to want to help those her husband polices—specifically the women. After seeing the suffering of a streetwalker beaten by her pimp and her unwillingness to take advantage of the charitable groups that might help her (which she rejects because of the religious browbeating and scourge she’d have to endure in exchange for such help), Emily takes it upon herself to create her own charity—one which ministers to such “fallen” women without judgement or cajoling. In order to fund her venture (the Reids appear to have more money than a police inspector would likely earn, but not enough for this), Emily visits the City and the home of a very moral and apparently rich widow to petition her to fund the charity. 

This is the first real glance at the world outside Whitechapel and the difference is vast. Clean, airy, upright, but as rude in its own way as the slums, the City is juxtaposed not just in how people live but the value of human life itself. Dozens are dying in Whitechapel of the illness, but the true alarm comes from the fact that the first man who died was from the City and thus rich and of greater importance. While Reid and Division H trace the illness to its origin, Emily sits in the parlor of Flora Gable (Penny Downie) trying to convince her to set up an endowment. The conversation between the two reveals a great deal of the meaning of charity in Victorian England (and today, to a disturbing extent): Gable is horrified by the idea that the primary goal of Emily’s halfway house would not be to make these women assume responsibility for their supposed immorality. To her, saving their souls (through shaming and threats of damnation) is more important than putting a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. Emily, while still embracing her own religious beliefs, becomes as humanist as her husband in understanding that salvation is beside the point if you’re starving to death because you won’t sell the one commodity you have: your sex. She sees the necessity of helping the women deal with the core economic issue and leaving spirituality to work itself out.

This lack of true concern for the actual lives of the less fortunate is reflected (and nicely intertwined) with the investigation of the sickness sweeping the city. Initially, Inspector Ressler (Patrick Baladi) of the City shows little concern for those suffering in Whitechapel. But when five upstanding members of the his own village fall to the disease, he is suddenly motivated to help his fellows from Division H to locate the source of the contagion.  And the answer, surprisingly for the series thus far, actually does have a connection (logical but indirect) to Jack the Ripper.  For the first time, we’re getting a well-plotted and executed narrative.

But the ray of sunshine, for me, is less about the construction of the plot and more about the possibility that the show will take on the larger social issues of those times and our own.  A great deal of the reason that Jack the Ripper was never caught likely had to do with the social class he prayed upon (and may actually have been part of his rationale for the victims he chose). Whitechapel represented, to the rest of the city, a den not just of poverty but vice and filth and sloth. Those people didn’t matter, and luckily, they were largely relegated to their own village, well out of the site of respectable Londoners.

How much difference is there between Victorian Whitechapel/The City and today’s inner cities/suburban gated communities? As this episode of Ripper Street points out, not much. In the previous episode, the series missed the opening to make a strong point about the Fagins and the street urchins who do their dirty work. “The King Came Calling” made me actually looking forward to this week’s episode, in the hope that such opportunities will be used more effectively. The series’ creator has chosen some very fertile ground here. Maybe he’ll allow something great to take root.


Laura Akers is a teacher by calling and a geek academic by nature. Her often too-lengthy writing for Comics Bulletin (and her own personal musings) tend to revolve around issues of gender, sexuality, identity, politics, religion (and all the other things you’re not supposed to bring up in polite conversation) in TV/film/webseries narratives. You can get topical whiplash and occasionally offended by following her at @laurajakers

 

Laura AkersRipper Street (BBC America)

Share On:
Tweet
Tiny Pages Made of Ashes: Small Press Comics Reviews 2/15/2013
A Good Day to Die Hard (2013) Review

About The Author

Laura Akers
Laura Akers

Laura Akers is a teacher by calling and a geek academic by nature. Her often too-lengthy writing and her own personal musings tend to revolve around issues of gender, sexuality, identity, politics, religion (and all the other things you’re not supposed to bring up in polite conversation) in TV/film/webseries and other narratives. You can keep up with her ramblings on these subjects by following @laurajakers

Related Posts

  • 3.0

    Ripper Street 1.04- "The Good of This City"

    Laura Akers
    February 16, 2013
  • 1.5

    Ripper Street 1.02 "In My Protection" Review

    Laura Akers
    February 4, 2013

Latest Reviews

  • Review: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist

    Daniel Gehen
    December 14, 2020
  • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

    Daniel Gehen
    December 3, 2020
  • 4.5

    TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 Lives Up to the Hype (Review)

    Daniel Gehen
    October 29, 2020
  • 4.5

    Micro Review: Commanders in Crisis #1

    Jason Jeffords Jr.
    October 12, 2020
  • 3.0

    Review: GHOST WRITER Fights the Spectre of Unevenness

    Daniel Gehen
    September 3, 2020
  • 3.5

    Review: Strange Skies Over East Berlin

    Yavi Mohan
    August 11, 2020
  • DRAWING BLOOD: A Hyper-Stylized, Fictional Autobiography

    Ben Bishop, Brittany Peer, David Avallone, Drawing Blood, Kevin Eastman, Tomi Varga
    August 9, 2020
  • 3.0

    Alien: The Original Script #1 – This One’s For The Fans

    Jason Jeffords Jr.
    August 7, 2020
  • Singles Going Steady: Why? Lettering!

    Daniel Gehen
    July 28, 2020
  • 4.5

    X-MEN/FANTASTIC FOUR #4 is a Finale of Moral Questions

    Daniel Gehen
    July 22, 2020
RSSTwitterFacebookgoogleplusinstagramtumblr

Comics Bulletin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, audible.com, and any other website that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, Comics Bulletin earns from qualifying purchases.

All content on this site (c) 2018 The Respective Copyright Holders