After last weeks enticing episode, ‘The Weight of One Man’s Heart’, Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) had his story told. Revealing his past indiscretions during the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 let us understand Drake’s character leaving just Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) and Detective Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) to have their pasts revealed. This week offered varying parts to add to the ever growing picture of both of the characters jigsaw puzzle past but didn’t allow us what we grasp for, that will be left to the final two episodes. ‘Tournament of Shadows’ offer something different to what you might expect from Ripper Street, stepping from the toll of murder as the greed and despicable desire of a man controlled by lust, money and revenge, Ripper Street went political with the depiction of anarchists, unionists, spies and double agents; all surrounding the London Dock Strike of 1889. The ability of the writers to create eight episodes that differ so vastly, on scale of not only plot but emotion and draw, is staggeringly spectacular.
Beginning with a death of a seemingly unimportant person as we have come to know from Ripper Street, a Jewish man is killed in what is claimed to be an accidental explosion but it is not only the explosion that is not what it seems. The victim, Joshua Bloom (Ferdinand Kingsley), is actually an anarchist who was being watched by Special Branch. Linked with the striking workers, Bloom is classed as a disease by Commissioner James Monro (Michael McElhatton), who claims that, “None of us are safe from this leftist cancer.” Reid holds a degree of sympathy to the workers for he acknowledges their rights to strike for better pay and that it is simply a handful of trouble makers to spoil the unionists image. Things grow ever more suspicious as Bloom is shown to have been killed before the bomb exploded. Reid’s story spirals through unionists, radicals anarchists, Russian spies, corruption, racism and the fear of the left.
Jackson is forced to go undercover as a striker due to his history as a Pinkerton, causing a rift between he and Reid to widen as he opposes the idea and Reid threatens to arrest him if he does not comply. This has been common place over the last few weeks as their completely different personalities have clashed, a feature that in my mind looks to be leading to the climax as to Jackson’s story. Don’t get me wrong for I really enjoy the interactions and overall make-up of our H Division triple entente but what, in my eyes, constitutes the excitement of our leads is their differences; see Jackson’s purpose of being a ‘whore-mongering,’ boozing, layabout contrasting the straight-faced, law upholding personas of Reid and Drake which causes frays to form in their friendship, if you can call it so.
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