I’m, sadly, beginning to get a sense of the pacing of
this series. Which is basically glacially slow. I know it’s full of emotion and
pain and… it’s just that that seems to be the go to marker for any drama trying
to present itself as “serious”. So I’ve seen a lot of it (and, really, In the Flesh not only set the bar for
dramatic tragedy but shattered the bar and used the remains of the bar to beat
our emotions to a bloody pulp)
So lots and lots of scenes of Marlotte woeing about his
syphilis and dead family are very well done, definitely worthy of respect and
praise form their impact. But at the same time they’re all just kind of
predictable and I kind of want to just skim past back to the plot rather than
circling (circling because it doesn’t really go anywhere) round in the same mopey,
well acted, sad, but tired orbit.
Anyway, this book Marlotte decides to get Mary Shelley
involved for… reasons. Some reasons. I honestly have no idea why Marlotte has
seen a child murder and decided that popular literature is really the way to
solve this.
Conveniently Mary Shelley is the woman who handed over
William Blake’s last work to Marlotte and is even now all kinds of torn and
consumed about her work and the pain it caused (not least of which appears to
be rejection by what remains of her own family). She paints herself, in some
ways, as a rebel – a rebel because she would do anything, including break the
laws of god, if it will bring her family back.
Yes, more Marlotte angst, of course more Marlotte angst.
And we still have Nightengale – continually dismissed and
ignored by Marlotte in a way that I dearly hope will be called out at some
point. And Marlotte keeps sending him to secretly follow people which is
beginning to look like a bad joke because the casting director still badly
needs to throw in some Black extras so Nightengale doesn’t look like The Only
Black Man in London
Flora, the girl that Marlotte kind of took in as an
investigative tool last episode is revealed to be pregnant after being raped by
a man who didn’t want to pay the fee that Billy was trying to prostitute her
for. Flora is clear, she wants an abortion, she doesn’t want to continue her
pregnancy, she knows she and the baby have little chance and the babe is likely
to die even if it is born.
Of course the men won’t hear of it – I would put this
down to being a product of there. But let’s face it the storyline could exist
today and it wouldn’t be appreciably different or out of place. Instead, having
heard Flora’s choice, Marlotte decides to dump her in Lord Harvey’s hospital,
giving him an excuse to spy on the man in case he’s…. killing poor children to
discredit an act of Parliament in the name of poor children going to heaven
As a motive this somewhat needs a little more work. I’m
beginning to doubt Marlotte’s investigative skills.
Nightengale, thankfully, in a partial attempt to treat
Flora like an actual human, protests that Marlotte is actually using her as a
sacrificial tool to let him spy on Lord Harvey
Which he kind of is doing
Lord Harvey reminds us that his hospital will be shut
down if Sir Pool manages to pass his law. And we get an uncomfortable conflict
here I’m not a big fan of. See, Lord Harvey isn’t a big fan of surgery, in fact
he’s completely against that. I can understand that as it’s a reasonable
prejudice of the time –but at the same time he’s also apparently discovered
penicillin. Look, him being more compassionate I can buy. But setting up the
religious, anti-progressive doctor as being BETTER at medicine than the
exploratory surgeons attending actual medical school is an annoyingly dangerous
anti-science meme.
He offers his penicillin to Marlotte since Pencillin
does, actually, cure syphilis. Only this is several decades before we started
doing this. He also has some poor guy suffering late stage Syphilis used as a
tool to add extra horror and angst to Marlotte.
We also have brief appearances from Boz and Sir William
the creepy pathologist who is also kind of bemused that Marlotte is
investigating by reading popular fiction
Him and me both
Perhaps finally realising that he should be actually
investigating some child murders, Marlotte decides belatedly to track down some
of the Resurrectionists who are murdering people – which means crawling down a
smelly tunnel. Possibly because his reading list told him to.
