Ripper Street

Ripper Street (2012–2016) is a television mystery series created by Richard Warlow, starring Matthew Macfadyen as a fictitious version of Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Edmund Reid, the leader of the Metropolitan Police in London's East End in the immediate aftermath of the Jack the Ripper killings.

Season 1

I Need Light [1.1]

Edmund Reid: [speaking to Best and Chief Inspector Abberline] She was never Ripper, that girl. But you two... [to Best] You for profit... [to Abberline] You for guilt, I suspect, wanted it so. Now I ask us to undertake this. That we find a little joy in his continued absence, that we cease to look for him in every act of evil that crosses our path. There is an abundance of that hereabout and I would have obsession blinker us to the wider world no longer. Am I understood?

---

Fred Abberline: Edmund, this last year, that lunatic will ever bind me to you but you ask too much. He lives still, he breathes this air still. These streets demand your vigilance.

Edmund Reid: No. We did everything in our power, used every instrument allowed to us, some that were not. All that we can hope for now is that he is gone and stays gone. He will own my life no more.

In My Protection [1.2]

Deborah Goren: Children. Men say some are born evil, others blameless. The truth, in my experience, is simpler. They are mirrors, as evil or as innocent as the world that gives life to them. And this world, I need not to tell you this, this world is a wicked one.

---

Deborah Goren: I am a secular woman, Inspector. I have seen too much of the truth of things for it to be otherwise. Yet this of my faith I have kept: "Save one life, and you save the world entire."

---

[Susan enters Jackson's room and finds him shirtless]

Long Susan: Have you lost the last of your addled wits?

Homer Jackson: No. I, uh... forensicate myself.

Long Susan: Might a woman ask why?

Homer Jackson: If she swears to serenity.

The King Came Calling [1.3]

Edmund Reid: Morning to you.

Preacher: And to yourself.

Edmund Reid: [sees the almost empty street] You are alone here?

Preacher: The world hides in fright when there's rumor of cholera.

Edmund Reid: But not yourself?

Preacher: No, sir. I make my home where other men's fear lies. I fight it for them.

Edmund Reid: Then you are welcome here.

---

Detective Inspector Sidney Ressler: Reid, I cannot help but think the man's further excesses, his need to move beyond that initial batch... Dozens have perished, your wife almost among them... Had I not bowed to pressure to keep those bodies secret, the public knowledge of those deaths might have been enough to sate his madness.

Edmund Reid: Word of advice, Ressler. This work we perform, it does not serve to look backward. This city, wickedness will ever leave its spores here. You and I, we are not magicians. We cannot see through walls or into men's minds. Dozens perished, but hundreds who were ill are now well once more. We fight. We fight with all the skills we may muster. Beyond that, we may do no more.

The Good of this City [1.4]

Fred Best: Fred Best tells you, he needs something shown in return.

Edmund Reid: You do as I ask, and I shall give you a story that, though you connive and bribe your way to the Devil himself, it will not be bettered.

Fred Best: [smiles] Go on.

Edmund Reid: "How Stanley Bone, secret slumlord, is exposed by the actions of a whore-runner." Corruption and sex, Mr. Best. Surely it does not come more honeyed than that!

---

Lucy Eames: I know you, Stanley Bone. You proclaim to these good people about the future's gleaming hope, but the tongue you speak with is forked. And the future you speak of, it, it is built on evil and corruption. You had me as your slave, denied our children, had my mother murdered, and you would have sent me to a living hell had it not been for this inspector here. You are no man but you are a beast that has risen deep from the earth in which you dig into.

The Weight of One Man's Heart [1.5]

Homer Jackson: [talking about Rose's involvement with Drake] It's going to end badly.

Rose Erskine: Why do you say that?

Homer Jackson: Jesus Christ, what doesn't?

---

Edmund Reid: He needs a doctor. Get Jackson.

Col. Madoc Faulkner: Wait, Inspector. You must know that Sergeant Drake was forced, at gunpoint and against his will, to become an accessory to these crimes. He is for his own part as fine a policeman as he was a soldier, and innocent of all wrongdoing. And Inspector, when you return to your home this eve, give thanks to your god you will never set eyes upon the things I have witnessed. The bravest of men butchered like pigs. Sons and brothers in their hundreds left for carrion. Dirt beetles crawling at feast in their torn hollows... and all for queen and country. [tugs off his scarab necklace and looks at it] The Egyptians were fools. How can any god presume to know the weight of one man's heart?

[Faulkner draws his derringer from behind his back...]

Bennet Drake: NO-!

[...and shoots himself.]

Tournament of Shadows [1.6]

Isaac Bloom: Galileo said mathematics was the language which God has written the universe. I seek the hidden words. You might term it a kind of detective work.

Edmund Reid: In my detective work I find little evidence of God.

Isaac Bloom: But you seek order in all things, Inspector. The notion of meaningless chaos is abhorrent to you.

---

Isaac Bloom: Joshua was right. Justice has become a commodity. Is this the shadow of what is to be, Inspector? My brother used to say the future belongs to men of reason, not of faith.

Edmund Reid: On that I would agree with him.

Isaac Bloom: And mathematics tells us something different. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. You understand?

Edmund Reid: A little.

Isaac Bloom: Disorder, Inspector. Everything from the smallest system to our entire world moves always, irretrievably, from order into chaos. And there is nothing to be done about it. Do you share that belief?

Edmund Reid: No.

Isaac Bloom: Then perhaps you are a man of faith after all.

A Man of My Company [1.7]

Homer Jackson: I do work with one advantage, however.

Frank Goodnight: Wanna tell me?

Homer Jackson: It's my home field.

[He tilts his his cigarette case, shining the sunlight into Frank's eyes and spoiling his one and only shot. Jackson raises his own pistol and advances on him.]

Frank Goodnight: Always were a faker.

Homer Jackson: You shouldn't have killed the boy, Frank. [shoots him]

---

Long Susan: [to Jackson] I never knew a man who made cheating seem so heroic.

What Use Our Work? [1.8]

[in a room in Long Susan's brothel]

Bella: Is it true, Sergeant, you were sweet on Rose, but that she let you down? That makes her a fool, and more besides. There's not a girl here who doesn't think you are the finest of men.

Bennet Drake: Miss Bella?

Bella: Sergeant?

Bennet Drake: Would you keep a secret for me?

Bella: Til my death.

Bennet Drake: If we just... sat here for a while, in this chair, you and I, and perhaps I might sleep for a moment or so... if we did that, would you tell no one what had passed? I, uh... I do not ask you to lie, simply to say nothing if questioned.

[They curl up in a chair together.]

---

Edmund Reid: What use our work, Bennet, if we cannot care for those we love?

Season 2

Pure as the Driven [2.1]

Homer Jackson: [experimenting with heroin] It is life stripped of all judgement. No pain, no hunger, no sorrow... no tomorrow.

Edmund Reid: Qualities much in demand hereabout.

---

Edmund Reid: I know it painful, Sergeant, but it cannot be helped. Good men may go bad.

Bennet Drake: Although I have yet to see a bad man go good.

Edmund Reid: The world is unjust in that way.

Bennet Drake: Indeed.

Am I Not Monstrous? [2.2]

Joseph Merrick: John, look at me. Do it. Do it! Am I not monstrous? It is the truth of my every waking moment, and yet, despite all, I feel joy. No, I do. I do!

Dynamite and a Woman [2.4]

Homer Jackson: No sorcery known will allow a man ingress until she first lowers that drawbridge down. You need to make her start wondering after you. Feel the twinge of intrigue, fellow feelings of vulnerability. Here, here, you see? Mother, cruelly killed when she was but a child. Father in lockdown and a stranger to her. You need to make yourself the same, Flight. You need to build yourself a story, tragic loss, destitution. It's got to be perfect, it's got to be detailed and, most important, it has got to be felt. Right here, in your heart, with your own secrets. When you lie, you lie with your own hidden truth.

Threads of Silk and Gold [2.5]

Homer Jackson: You're beautiful!

Long Susan: You're drunk.

Homer Jackson: I thought of it before I was drunk, and I'll think of it after I'm dead.

---

Bennet Drake: The law's the law, right?

Bella Drake: And policemen serve it.

Bennet Drake: We don't ask all the whys and wherefores, do we? Otherwise...

Bella Drake: Well, what then?

Bennet Drake: But the Inspector, when it comes to banging up poofs and Mary Anns... To see him, he's a man all scooped of belief.

Bella Drake Do you believe in it?

Bennet Drake: Hell's bells. Not you, too?

Bella Drake Maybe he just understands what it is to be lonely. Say a law was made tomorrow... for you to love me was a crime. They say it's filthy and unnatural. Would you stop, Bennet? Turn off your love like a gas tap, just to obey?

Bennet Drake: I'd be the filthiest scofflaw this land had ever seen. [kisses her]

A Stronger Loving World [2.6]

Isaac Bloom: Oh, I am rational, inspector. And I hear every day men such as yourself, who would have us believe our journey to truth will set us free. But man has no more desire for truth than a dung beetle. Like any animal, he desires meat and sex. And like any animal who feels himself caged by what he is, he will yearn for anything that lies beyond the bars. Dee called it magic. You call it progress.

Edmund Reid: You are a cynic.

Isaac Bloom: I am a scientist. The only thing as irrational as faith in God is faith in Man.

---

Edmund Reid: The naked truth being... ?

Homer Jackson: That we're born alone, we die alone, and not one thing in between makes a jot of goddamn sense. [hands Reid a bottle] Pray with me.

Our Betrayal: Part 1 [2.7]

Rose Erskine: You have no wish to speak with me, Bennet. I see that. But I will not be diverted now that I have found you, because I am your true friend. I know that I have been cruel to you in the past. And you must look at me now and see nothing but a reminder of your pain. But I am your friend and I will not desert you. So you go back to your graves and your dosshouses, and you be sure of this: as the day begins and the night ends, you will find me waiting for you. You think you can hide from life, and perhaps another man might, but not such a man as you, Bennet Drake. You believe yourself accursed. You are not. You believe you carry only pain into other people's lives. You do not. Bennet, you brought love into mine, a love that is keener now than ever it was. You are a good man. You are a good man. I will say those words until the day I die. Bennet Drake is the best of men and this life, this world, will not let him sink from its surface.

Our Betrayal: Part 2 [2.8]

Edmund Reid: Say, imagine, we might, you and I, walk into a chophouse on the Commercial Road, and, in that chophouse, we lay our hands upon the shoulder of the man the world made, the Ripper, know him unequivocally for that killer. What would we do?

Fred Abberline: There is what I would like to do, and there is what I am permitted to do.

Edmund Reid: And so instead of pinioning his head to the wall through his eyeball, we, we would show him our irons, then go about the process of proof.

Fred Abberline: We would. I would!

Edmund Reid: Evil men do as they please. Men who would be good, they must do as they are allowed.

---

Bennet Drake: Inspector, look at the ruins of our lives. Anyone we might care for or bring close to us... anyone... they suffer and we lose them.

Season 3

Ashes and Diamonds [3.3]

Rose Erskine: Bennett is... he's not the Captain.

Susan Hart: No. No, he is not.

Rose Erskine: Do you--well before now, that is--did you regret it?

Susan Hart: My dear Rose, the regrets I have accrued in this life could fill all the oceans twice over. But that, him, the Captain... not one single moment.

---

Capt. Homer Jackson: (seeing a patient out of his surgery) That's gonna itch like hell for a couple days, but that's Mother Nature's way of telling you not to put it there.

Your Father, My Friend [3.4]

Edmund Reid: That's quick work, Chief Inspector.

Chief Inspector Abberline: Your face is known in these parts, Edmund. You raise hell, word will travel.

Edmund Reid: There is hell to be raised, Fred, and I am to raise it.

---

Chief Inspector Abberline: No! Inspector Drake, I brought you here so this man could be corralled, not spun into ever greater acts of lunacy!

Inspector Bennet Drake: (calmly loading his shotgun) I'm sorry your faith in me is not better rewarded, Chief Inspector.

Chief Inspector Abberline: Edmund... think on what you do.

Edmund Reid: For once, Fred, there is no need to think, only to act. Now... (racks his own shotgun) we are leaving.

Heavy Boots [3.5]

[outside Jackson's surgery]

Mimi Morton: I have knocked, I have shouted, but no reply. He is either elsewhere, or he is insensible. My intuition leans to the latter.

Chief Inspector Abberline: As does mine, Miss.

[He kicks the door open, then politely motions her in.]

---

Cpt. Homer Jackson: Never understood the fuss myself. Beer. May as well drink from the river. Warm, flat...

Inspector Bennet Drake: [draining his own pint] Useful qualities, however, when a man wishes to drink of it in great volume.

The Peace of Edmund Reid [3.8]

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid: My life, Miss Susan, a policeman's life, we look for pattern to show us our path. Pattern, form, a design. And so here I offer you one such: you and your Mr. Capshaw set men to thieve from your father. The cataclysm that ensued sees Mr. Buckley and his wife bankrupted. And in that bankrupting, Obsidian Estates absorbs their shop and so reveals the discovery of all that lay within... my daughter.

Long Susan: Pattern. But design, Inspector? Whose?

Reid: Who can say? But was it mere accident that saw neither of your shots hit their mark?

Susan: It was my husband taught me to shoot. And I do not think him inaccurate in his teaching.

Reid: Unless, of course, he thought that one day you might have cause to shoot at him?

[In spite of her tears, she laughs softly with him.]

---

Fred Best: [v.o] London will remember him for this: that he was the detective who, alongside Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, led the pursuit of the man we at The Star named "Jack the Ripper." But whilst his streets might, in the years since, have found some measure of recovery, it is this obituarist's fear that Edmund Reid did not.... If there is justice where he now walks, it might be that the care which he wore so heavily will be lifted from him. Those who knew him, those who did not, those who may have only seen him stride past in pursuit of whatever villainy beset him that day, we might offer a prayer for him. And this might be our prayer for peace. For his peace. We, the children of the East, of the docksides, highways, rookeries, and laneways, we pray for the peace of Edmund Reid.

Cast

• Matthew Macfadyen - Detective Inspector Edmund Reid
• Jerome Flynn - Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake
• Adam Rothenberg - Captain Homer Jackson
• MyAnna Buring - Long Susan
• Charlene McKenna - Rose Erskine
• David Wilmot - Sergeant Donald Artherton
• David Dawson - Fred Best
• Clive Russell - Inspector Fred Abberline