Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Ripper Street: Season Two Blu-ray Movie Review

Loyalty and Betrayal

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 12, 2014

Warning: The following review assumes that the reader is familiar with Season One of Ripper Street. If you have not seen the first season, please consult the Season One Blu-ray review for an introduction to the series. If you proceed past this point, you will encounter spoilers for Season One.

The sophomore season of creator Richard Warlow's series about the police officers of H Division in the aftermath of Jack the Ripper had to confront a specific challenge. Eventually, fear of the Ripper would loosen its grip on the populace of London's Whitechapel district, as it became clear that his reign of terror was over (though no suspect was ever caught). Since the initial premise of Ripper Street was the challenge of moving on when the Ripper suddenly vanished, what would be the show's organizing principle once the public had indeed moved on?

Warlow responded, first, by focusing on the main characters that had come so vividly to life in the first season, and, second, by deepening the series' explorations into the kind of crimes that foreshadow 20th Century concerns and reveal modernity knocking at the door of Victorian England (if not battering it down). Season One had already opened this frontier with its stories of labor troubles, forced clearings of tenements by developers and mass murder through poisoning of the food supply. In Season Two, the crimes that H Division investigates in Whitechapel's impoverished streets have a similarly contemporary feel. The Ripper is now a memory, seen only in entertainments such as puppet shows, where he is already treated as a figure of legend and even comedy. Thus does the popular imagination defang what frightens it.

Season Two of Ripper Street began airing in the U.K. on October 28, 2013, but broadcast on BBC America was delayed until February 22, 2014, probably because the BBC ratings were a disappointment, even though the show was voted best of 2013 in a poll by Radio Times TV guide and magazine. The BBC canceled Ripper Street after Season Two, but in a surprise move, Amazon Prime, which wants to compete with Netflix in the creation of original programming, has announced that it will continue the show.

It is 1890, and over a year has passed since the last confirmed Ripper attack. H Division remains short-staffed since the murder of Constable Hobbs, but Chief Inspector Abberline (Clive Russell) finally brings in a replacement, a young Irishman named Albert Stout (Damien Molony), who has to endure plenty of hazing for his short stature and lack of experience.

The head of H Division, Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen), now lives alone, after his wife turned her back on him at the end of Season One. During the course of the season, we learn the denouement of their unhappy marriage after Reid accepted responsibility for their daughter's death, but technically Reid remains a married man, weighed down by the guilt of having sacrificed home and family for the sake of police work. That work is now all he has. In Season Two, Reid's investigations will introduce him to City Councilwoman Jane Cobden (Leanne Best), a bold and energetic reformer whose efforts on behalf of her disenfranchised constituents stir Reid's sympathies. Cobden and Reid have so much in common that the possibility of romantic involvement hangs in the air almost from their first meeting, but Reid is painfully aware that his marital status is an obstacle. Another obstacle is muckracking journalist Fred Best (David Dawson), who remains on the prowl for any hint of scandal and seems to hear everything in Whitechapel, despite losing an ear in Season One.

Reid's surgeon and chemist, the American Capt. Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), appears to have settled in domestic bliss with the elegant brothel keeper known as "Long Susan" (MyAnna Buring). In Season One, they were revealed to be husband and wife, but Susan has been keeping secrets from Jackson. Her elegant house of prostitution was staked by a shady character named Silas Duggan (Frank Harper), who is now behaving more like a loan shark than a business partner. Jackson's discovery that their life is built on a shifting foundation poisons the marriage, which may in fact be Duggan's purpose. The situation is further complicated by the appearance, late in the season, of a mysterious man from Jackson's past, Daniel Judge (Breaking Bad's David Costabile).

Reid's indispensable sidekick, Sgt. Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn), has bounced back from the heartbreak he suffered because of his love for Rose (Charlene McKenna), one of Susan's girls. I will leave the exact details of Drake's recovery for the viewer to discover, but his arc in Season Two is its most complex. Never a stranger to violence, Drake will, for the first time in his life, find himself questioning his role as Reid's ready pair of fists when information must be beaten from a suspect. He will begin to suspect that the misfortunes of his life are the result of cosmic scales being balanced, and he will consider a different path. Witnessing Drake's struggle ultimately forces Reid to face questions about himself and his work that he has so far been able to avoid.

In Season Two, the men of H Division face a new enemy: not an invisible fiend like the Ripper, but a readily identifiable man who is, in fact, one of them. In the first episode, they discover an opium smuggling operation that enjoys the protection of Inspector Jebediah Shine (Joseph Mawle), head of the neighboring K Division. A ruthless manipulator, Shine quickly proves to have no scruples when it comes to eliminating witnesses and potential enemies. Shine becomes Reid's bête noire, because he undermines every principle for which Reid stands. But how far will Reid stray from his own values in the pursuit of Shine?

The opium case is typical of Season Two's investigations, because it introduces H Division to a new form of highly concentrated drug synthesized from the raw extract that is more powerful than anything London has ever seen. Viewers will be whispering the word "heroin" long before Capt. Jackson identifies the substance. A case involving circus freaks leads to an advocate of the modern "science" of eugenics—and also to the London hospital where Joseph Merrick (Joseph Drake), the so-called "Elephant Man", is a permanent resident. The search for an escaped bomber takes Reid and his men into the murky world of Irish revolutionary politics, where young Constable Stout must risk his life by going undercover. The murder of a banker results in the discovery of a covert network of what, a century later, would be called "rent boys". Simultaneous fire-bombings of a church and a synagogue turn out to be the work of a cult whose leader prophesies the end of the world and is doing his part to bring it about.

All the while, Inspector Shine is hard at work on a scheme whose full extent will not be revealed until the very end of the season.

Ripper Street: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As far as I have been able to determine, Ripper Street continues to be shot digitally (by several cinematographers) with the Arri Alexa. The image for Season Two on BBC Home Video's two 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray discs is comparable to that of Season One, in that it is clean, detailed and noiseless. However, the color palette is somewhat warmer and more saturated than in Season One. Whether this was intended to suggest a greater distance from the Ripper's reign of terror or simply to provide visual interest is unclear, but it accords with various settings where the production design emphasizes brighter colors, including, for example, a music hall where one of Long Susan's girls attempts to start a singing career and the headquarters (in an abandoned building) of the doomsday cult that attempts to start a religious war. The streets of Whitechapel and the headquarters of H Division remains as grimy as ever, but they are perhaps somewhat more brightly lit. As with Season One, filtering, banding and compression artifacts were not an issue.

Ripper Street: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Where the first season of Ripper Street offered a stereo track, Season Two provides a full 5.1 mix, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA. The discrete surround encoding brings greater clarity and definition to a sound mix that, as was evident in Season One, was clearly designed for surround decoding. In street scenes, for example, the buzz of Whitechapel is everywhere, while the main conversations remain in the front soundstage. A no-holds-barred boxing match plays out on the screen surrounded by the roar of the bloodthirsty crowd on all sides. A story involving both dynamite and electrical experiments features both loud explosions and impressive flashes, sparks and "arcing". A brief scene set in South Africa (which I won't describe further to avoid spoilers) impressively recreates the sonics of a particular type of work site.

As in Season One, dialogue is clearly articulated, and there are subtitles for anyone whose ear is unaccustomed to the various accents. Period slang continues to be used, but once again no glossary has been provided. The distinctively Irish soundtrack continues to be composed by Dominik Scherrer, and it sounds even better in 5.1.

Ripper Street: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Beneath Ripper Street (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:45): This featurette is short, but it includes interviews with all the principal cast as well as the major department heads and series creator Warlow, all of whom offer relevant soundbites about Season Two. Spoilers abound; so this should not be watched until after viewing the episodes.



• Trailers: At startup, each of the two discs plays trailers that can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not available once the disc loads. Disc 1 plays trailers for Sherlock: Season 3, Earth Journeys and BBC America. Disc 2 plays trailers for Copper: Season Two and Atlantis: Season One .

Ripper Street: Season Two Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ripper Street continues to be well-written, compellingly performed and impeccably produced, but in its second season it has become a Victorian police procedural. There's nothing wrong with that, but the challenge for creator Warlow as the series progresses under its new umbrella will be to find a new focus, now that Jack the Ripper is only a memory. A possibility flickered near the end of Season Two, when Inspector Reid asked his boss what he would do if he could lay his hand on the shoulder of a man and know for certain that this was the Ripper. Reid's battle with the renegade Inspector Shine has brought him to that fine line between law enforcement and vigilantism, between law and justice, to which police drama returns again and again. Perhaps Warlow will bring us his own version. As for Season Two of Ripper Street, despite a disappointing shortage of extras, the Blu-ray set is recommended.