An invisible monster grips a community
Victorian England was a turbulent time and place, bubbling over with both progress and reactionary fear, advances in science and women’s rights. Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, inspiring both excitement and outrage. New possibilities in surgery and other medical procedures gave hope to the sick, even as wretched conditions in the London slums ensured there was more than enough illness to go around. Spiritual crisis and repression burgeoned alongside intellectual possibility.
This is the backdrop for “The Essex Serpent,” the latest limited series from Apple TV+ premiering Friday, May 13. Based on the novel by Sarah Perry, it’s a hothouse of romantic intrigue that spotlights the clash between modern ideas and time-worn superstition.
Overripe at times, it leaves room for enough mystery and respect for the unknown to keep mind and soul working in tandem toward a heady exploration of faith and doubt.
Claire Danes is radiant as Cora Seaborne, a recent widow and amateur paleontologist curious about the reports of a serpent that are sweeping the coastal county of Essex. Cora considers herself open-minded enough to consider the possibility that perhaps a mythical beast is in fact swimming in the waters off a small English village. Perhaps it’s a new species.
But what she finds when she arrives with her young son in tow is even more
troubling.
The people of Essex are spooked. A teenage girl has turned up dead. Something in the water has shredded the fishing nets. The local vicar (Tom Hiddleston, also excellent) urges calm and preaches as much rational thought as he can muster. But he can’t quell the hysteria, which grows even worse when Cora brings her collection of fossils to the rustic school and seems to elicit an eerie “Crucible”like mania among the students. Before long the townspeople come to blame Cora, with her big-city, open-inquiry ways, for unleashing the serpent’s wrath.
Splitting its time between the misty marshes of southeast England (with the haunting light of their night skies) and the bustle of London, “The Essex Serpent” is acutely aware of the division between its two worlds, a division that comes down to far more than geography. London is where a puckish, selfadoring young surgeon (Frank Dillane) courts Cora, and where Cora’s friend and servant, Martha (Hayley Squires), a committed socialist, tries to organize against the city’s housing inequality. Essex is determined to cling to its old ways, which means the neverseen serpent is a harbinger of evil, and an allpurpose symbol of guilt and sin.
“The Essex Serpent” rips a few bodices along the way; though it was published in 2016, it is in many ways a Victorian novel. Cora is in love with the vicar; the surgeon is in love with Cora. But the affairs of the heart rarely feel extraneous.
Rather, they’re part of what makes these characters human, in a story that is very much concerned with what that means. Some people are dragged kicking and
screaming into modernity; others can’t wait to get there. The show is smart enough to know that most fall somewhere on the continuum, certain there’s no serpent
but kind of hoping, for the sake of wonder, that there is.