Crime with a bit of bite
Any fans of The Walking Dead who’d been missing their Monday night fix of flesheating monsters would have welcomed the return of Ripper Street to BBC2 last night.
Because grisly maneater Nathaniel Dove – who bit Bennet Drake’s throat out at the end of the last series – was still at large.
He didn’t add any victims as the drama returned for its fifth and final run but it is surely only a matter of time before he strikes again. However, Drake’s former boss Edmund Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) and US sidekick Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg) are on his tail.
Only problem is, following the murder of Long Susan’s father, Theodore Swift, they are fugitives themselves – and half the police in London are out looking for them.
That includes Reid’s nemesis Jedediah Shine (Joseph Mawle), back for the final series and sitting in Reid’s old chair in H Division.
If Shine has his way there will be a classic fight to the death between the two old adversaries – and that prospect alone has got me hooked on Ripper Street all over again.
I lost track of it between the BBC axing it and Amazon resurrecting it. Then Tom Hardy’s exploits in Taboo reawakened my thirst for dark dramas set in Victorian London and I catch-upped the hell out of it.
I’m glad I did. If last night was anything to go by, this series could go down as its best.