The fear of killer Cholera strikes!

With Ripper Street now three episodes into its first series, audiences know that it isn’t a show to eat your tea in front of; A man staggers through a busy street, throws up, collapses and dies. This isn’t a bad case of the norovirus but people are afraid that Cholera has returned – after the epidemic of which killed many in 1848. Reid gets Captain Jackson to perform an autopsy on the dead man to try to determine what killed him. Jackson pulls out body parts making sure Hobbs – who is assisting him – gets a good look at them and so do we.

Reid and Drake leave Whitechapel to visit the home of the deceased man and come up against Detective Sidney Ressler (Patrick Baladi) who doesn’t take too kindly to having Reid on his turf. But Ressler finds that more people have fallen ill and joins Reid in his investigation. Jackson discovers that it isn’t Cholera, leading the detectives to uncover a plot of mass poisoning. The culprit is Claxton (Simon Gregor) who wanted to gain notoriety by killing more people than the Ripper and become a legend.

I’m enjoying seeing the affect one man had on Victorian London. Reid is usually a calm man but after his wife Emily fell victim he acted with anger giving Claxton a taste of his own poison and promising to make sure people forget all about him; A great revenge. Emily is an example of a strong woman within the show that perhaps it was lacking. Although with Susan (MyAnna Buring) also proving to be feisty it seems as though it’s an issue that has been sorted. Emily is hoping to find a judgement-free place for women who have to sell themselves for money, but before she can she’s struck down by the poison.

Last weeks episode offered a lot of character development and sadly this episode doesn’t focus too much on the characters. That said, Edmund and Emily’s missing daughter is mentioned again and it’s looks like we may learn more about Jackson next week. Although we know little about Drake he’s a great character, brash and handy with his fists getting some of the few amusing lines in the show.

Procedural episodes really have to engage you if there isn’t going to be much focus on the main characters but sadly this case was only interesting once we knew who the killer was. My problem with the last two episodes of Ripper Street is that they’ve been fairly slow for the first 45 minutes and quite exciting for the last 15.