There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama. Now, as it embarks on its fifth and final season, there’s every reason to suppose that the going will get seriously apocalyptic, not least because the unspeakably evil DI Jedediah Shine has been brought in to helm the Leman Street police station in Whitechapel.Studious viewers will recall that Shine, the godfather of all bent coppers, was not only the murderer of the Elephant Man but also the arch enemy of Matthew Macfadyen’s Edmund Reid Read more ...

H Division has a new home in Whitechapel that basks in the white heat of the technological revolution. The police station not only has a telephone but a “microreader” that allows the user to check thousands of miniaturised card indexes. Alas, a wry smile is all the viewer is likely to get from this opening episode of the fourth season. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes.When it was originally broadcast on Amazon Prime, Ripper Street 4 began with a two-hour episode. Terrestrial viewers on BBC Two have to make do with 60 minutes of scene-setting, throat-clearing and explanation. Three Read more ...

Axed by the BBC at the end of 2013 after its second series, ostensibly because of poor viewing figures, Ripper Street found a new home on Amazon Prime, where the third series began streaming in November last year. With a fourth and fifth series already commissioned by Amazon, the BBC is making up for lost time by airing Series Three. Perhaps the Top Gear bunch will be back on the Beeb yet.Happily, the change of address has done Ripper Street no harm at all, and this powerful opener centred on a train robbery gone wrong in London's East End. Masked hijackers set out to steal a Read more ...

Though greeted ambivalently when it made its debut at the end of 2012, Ripper Street has looked increasingly like TV's undervalued secret weapon as it has surged purposefully through this second series. Maybe the title was misjudged, suggesting it was just another gruesome and mist-shrouded Victorian murder mystery. Turns out it was much more than that.Indeed, echoes of Jack the Ripper have been almost entirely absent as the series has taken the plunge into such factually-based issues as rent-boy networks and the Barings Bank crisis of 1890 (different only in scale from recent financial Read more ...

Proof that the BBC’s love of gritty realism is not solely the province of Luther and similar modern-day urban crime dramas comes just minutes into the second series of Ripper Street, before the credits even roll. In the East End of London a police officer is thrown from a window, only missing a little boy playing recorder for the amusement of the street below when his leg is gruesomely impaled on a railing.The writers allowed their leading man a bit of social commentarySo far so Ripper Street of course, given the criticism that the first series of the Victorian crime thriller collected for Read more ...

Last week we left Homer Jackson, the raffish ex-Pinkerton detective with the exceedingly chequered past, languishing in jail, after being fitted up for a Ripper-style killing by the murderous Frank Goodnight (played by cultish US actor Edoardo Ballerini). For this week's finale, Matthew Macfadyen's DI Reid urgently needed to get Jackson out again in order to apply his advanced forensic skills to unravelling a white slaving racket.Jackson was slickly able to prove his own innocence, then quickly extracted crucial clues about the gang who were drugging and kidnapping young women. His medical Read more ...

Perpetually reborn in movies and TV series, Jack the Ripper rides again in Ripper Street, which is set in Whitechapel in 1889, in the aftermath of the much-mythologised murders. Except this time, the subject isn't the Ripper himself so much as the dread and hysteria he left in his wake, which shrouds the murky streets like poison gas.We got the message in the opening sequence, when sightseers on a tour of notorious Jack the Ripper landmarks stumbled across a murdered woman, her body grotesquely slashed and mutilated in the old familiar ways (pictured below). Instantly, the neighbourhood Read more ...