3.4 Your Father. My Friend. The excellent character work from that episode carries over into Your Father, My Friend, as Rose’s sighting of Alice/Matilda running away from her captors prompts Drake to seek out his inspector and return him to Whitechapel. Matilda leads them on a merry chase through the streets of Whitechapel until Reid notices a pattern to her behaviour that echoes the Ripper killings. Meanwhile, Susan’s dealings with Capshaw grow darker as her complicity with the train disaster threatens to come to light. It’s an episode that barely stops for breath and packs in so many moments during its runtime, that it should feel a little overwhelming. Wisely dispensing with an external mystery to solve, it deftly combines various ongoing narratives into a satisfying whole as the lamentable fall of Edmund Reid continues. Though the show didn’t noticeably miss him last week, Macfadyen’s presence here drives the episode as a man driven to desperation and resorting to increasingly violent methods to get to Matilda. Secondly, it also worked to show how Reid’s work has irreparably damaged his family; the loss of his daughter and his subsequent focus on his policing led to him ignoring his wife’s slow decline into depression. His work on the Ripper case is too responsible for Matilda’s early trauma, the memories of certain details playing out in her fantasies and allowing her to be so easily manipulated by the Buckleys’ stories. It foreshadows the episode’s end when, instead of simply leaving with Matilda, Reid’s sense of duty ensures he goes to meet and arrest Capshaw. That final scene was incredibly tense and perhaps one of Ripper Street’s finest moments. Packed with foreboding, Reid’s conversation with Capshaw built slowly, but carefully, before that shocking moment from Susan. MyAnna Buring has excelled this series, given much more to work with in Susan’s character as her ambition slowly overtakes her morality. The beauty of her line, “you believe a woman must become a man to own such an act. How little you have learnt,” exemplified so much of her character’s struggles of succeeding in a patriarchal society that when she shot Capshaw, it felt almost triumphant. Your Father, My Friend was an episode that felt action-packed, but never felt overcrowded resulting in a remarkable piece of drama with a near heart-stopping climactic scene. As Reid finds redemption of sorts, Susan falls ever deeper. Read Becky’s review of episode two, The Beating Of Her Wings, here. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
