Sean Bean => Critics' Corner => Topic started by: patch on October 13, 2015, 06:20:09 AM
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The Frankenstein Chronicles, ITV Encore, Sean Bean
Georgian London is brought thrillingly to life as Sean Bean hunts a ghastly foe
★★★★ ITV Encore, day and date to be announced
VISITORS, don’t worry – CrimeTimePreview hasn’t capriciously decided to cover gothic horror dramas on a whim. This atmospheric and fascinating telling of the Frankenstein tale is actually a monster-mash of the crime and horror genres.
And why not? Everyone from Andy Warhol to Mel Brooks has dabbled with Mary Shelley’s creature, and here director/writer Benjamin Ross and writer Barry Langford have crafted an intriguing journey into the darker recesses of Georgian England.
With Sean Bean heading a cast that includes Anna Maxwell Martin as Shelley and Steven Berkoff as William Blake, it’s a six-parter that rises above your average shock fest or cop procedural. With its well-worked background themes of bodysnatching and abandoned children, the writers have stitched together a story with heart as well as a brain.
Sean Bean is terrific as the investigator Marlott
The year is 1827 and the setting is switched from Switzerland to London. Bean’s Inspector John Marlott is working undercover on the Thames trying to catch opium smugglers when his men discover an ‘abomination’ in the muddy foreshore – a body made from the pieces of eight children.
Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward) is none too delighted when Marlott brings the ‘object’ to the attention of the authorities. The politician fears it is the fiendish work of opponents of the Anatomy Act, which aims to regulate the practice of surgery and remove the barbers and bodysnatchers that give it a bad name. He wants Marlott to expose the perpetrator of this heinous crime, telling him that ‘details of your investigation must remain confidential’.
Sean Bean, who has just finished a stint in the US series Legends, is suitably craggy and deferential as the investigator who is low on the social ladder and has a hellish job on his hands. As he tries to piece together any leads he can about the poor children that may have been used to create the body in the river, he hears tales of kids abducted by a monster around Smithfield meat market.
Dank, shadowy, with great CGI
He is also a deeply compromised protagonist, telling the parents of one missing girl, ‘I know what it is to grieve.’ He has syphilis and has lost his own family.
The production looks splendidly dank and shadowy, and the digital work does wonders in recreating landmarks such as Greenwich as seen from a misty, muddy Thames.
Where series such as The Tudors offered a kitsch pantomime version of history, the creators of The Frankenstein Chronicles are clearly fascinated by the Georgian period and use it intelligently in this narrative. And it’s suitably creepy, too.
http://crimetimepreview.com/2015/10/the-frankenstein-chronicles-itv-encore-sean-bean.html/
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Great review! Can't wait! I can't wait to see this one - "the writers have stitched together a story with heart as well as a brain." I hope so! It's pouring rain with thunder & lightning here in Boston this morning. Would be the absolute perfect day to watch it! :thumbsup:
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REVIEW: The Frankenstein Chronicles Episode One
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/xTHE_FRANKENSTEIN_CHRONICLES_robert-peel-1539x1024_jpg_pagespeed_ic_zsgDmA4Q81_zpsrjxmdmfr.jpg) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/xTHE_FRANKENSTEIN_CHRONICLES_robert-peel-1539x1024_jpg_pagespeed_ic_zsgDmA4Q81_zpsrjxmdmfr.jpg.html)
The opening to “A World Without God”, episode one of ITV’s new drama The Frankenstein Chronicles, is appropriately dark, gloomy and mysterious. We firstly find Sean Bean a.k.a. Inspector John Marlott on the River Thames acting undercover to catch some smugglers in the act.
After apprehending the perpetrators, the real focus of the scene arrives via the murky waters. At first it appears to be the corpse of a child. Grotesquely, on closer inspection, it is revealed to be a collection of crudely stitched together body parts in the shape of a human child.
This provides the first, genuinely unexpected, jump scare moment. Marlott bends down to tenderly hold the “girl’s” hand when suddenly she grabs him back. Adrenaline instantly coursing through my veins, I was glad for the appearance of the credits to regain some composure. This was clearly not going to be the easy ride I thought it would be.
Sean Bean is our guide through this dreary and ominous 19th century London. He plays the gruff, hardened character we are used to seeing in Bean – but he does it so well he’s forgiven for his typecasting. In flashbacks we learn he has his own dark past to contend with that clearly influences his gritty determination in the present.
The proposed “Anatomy Act” (which would eventually be the 1832 Anatomy Act) drives the storyline. In response to the shocking illegal trade of corpses for dissection, British Parliament proposed that anyone intending to practise anatomy required a license. They were to be given legal access to unclaimed corpses, in particular those who had died in prison or a workhouse. This caused uproar in the country with many accusing the government of betraying the poor.
In the midst of all this political unrest, Sir Robert Peel asks Inspector Marlott to investigate a series of strange and chilling murders that seem to be related to the found corpse. When a surgeon examines the stitched-together “girl’s” body, he comments that it is a “composite” made up of eight different children. Icky.
Marlott employs a young street urchin to investigate reports of missing children. He is frightened by his findings and begs Marlott not to send him back on the hunt. Suffice to say, the next time we see the little boy, he’s looking a lot less lively…
The show succeeds in creating truly scary scenes, leaving viewers tense and intrigued throughout. Seemingly Fagan/Bill Sykes’ inspired character “Billy” makes for an intensely threatening villain for this debut episode. He burns a small girl with a hot poker and offers up an older girl to Marlott with the words, “you’re the first”. I wonder if we’ll see more of him. Is he the “monster” that all of the children are frightened of?
The programme is satisfyingly brimming with real elements of gothic horror – we rarely see anything in daylight – and there’s plenty of grotesque imagery and genuine mystery. What makes this programme really successful though is the blurred line between reality and the supernatural; nothing is too farfetched or fantastical to believe, making it all the more horrific.
I will be tuning in to episode two for sure, but this time I will come prepared with a pillow to hide behind.
http://tvdaily.com/review-the-frankenstein-chronicles/
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11989543/The-Frankenstein-Chronicles-review-eerily-effective.html
It was always a pea-souper in 19th-century London – at least according to TV drama. It’s always night-time, too. Things go bump. Dead bodies get discovered. People wearing hats put hankies over their noses to mask the foul stench. All the above clichés were present and correct in period chiller The Frankenstein Chronicles (ITV Encore). The twist was that the “abomination” washed up on the Thames shoreline turned out to be stitched together from eight different children’s body parts. Call Esther Rantzen’s Ye Olde Childline.
Enter Sean Bean as river policeman Inspector John Marlott, who was battling his own demons, naturally. A veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, he was haunted by the deaths of his wife and child, to whom he’d unwittingly passed on syphilis. Soon our stubbly, squinty hero was dragged into a dank, dark underworld of urchin gangs, child prostitution, butchers and body snatchers. Was a diabolical scientist lurking somewhere in the shadows around Smithfield meat market, attempting to re-animate the dead?
The Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), showed interest in the case – although he had his own agenda. Other real-life figures enter the fray in future episodes: poet-painter William Blake (a scenery-chewing Steven Berkoff) and, of course, writer Mary Shelley (the ever-excellent Anna Maxwell Martin).
This gory drama was rather like a Frankenstein’s monster itself, constructed from stitched-together elements of Sharpe, Sherlock, Oliver Twist, Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful. However, it was bold, eerily effective and chillingly atmospheric. Bean’s always a gruffly engaging screen presence and the all-star supporting cast was strong.
Sadly, stuck in a late time-slot on an obscure channel, it’s hard to see this finding an audience. A shame, as it showed real promise. Perhaps ITV should rip it up and stitch it back together on prime time. It’s alive!
Why do they keep putting his shows in crummy time-slots?! :wellll:
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The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 1 review: A World Without God
This review contains spoilers
Sean Bean watches a dead pig float down the Thames in new supernatural ITV drama, The Frankenstein Chronicles...
1.1 A World Without God
Frankenstein’s monster has never been quick on his feet, so, fittingly missing Halloween by a week, The Frankenstein Chronicles slowly shuffles its way onto ITV Encore. With parts harvested from history, fiction, and film, this Frankie follows in the footsteps of Sky’s Penny Dreadful and ITV’s recent Jekyll And Hyde – so far, so 'TV Execs are still mid-ransack over at the Waterstones’* Gothic fiction aisles' – but what has this show got in abundance that those others were lacking?
Sean. Bean.
*Other retailers are available.
First plus of the series: viewers used to Bean characters getting killed off have nothing to fear this time – some crazy bio-scientist can always just piece him back together during the next thunderstorm with leftovers from whatever’s lying around at ITV. Bits and pieces left over from The Bill. Todd Carty, someone like that.
Bringing his intense brand of perma-frowning working-class regular Joe-ness to 19th century river cop John Marlott, Bean’s got lots to frown about with this guy. In 1827 London, a corpse looking suspiciously like Helena Bonham-Carter in minute 86 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has washed up on the bank of the Thames, and Marlott is tasked with figuring out who’s been taking their cross-stitching hobby too far.
Surrounded by the bad haircuts and political rhetoric of the upper-classes of the time, Marlott is bossed about on the corpse conundrum case by Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), and lectured on the moral implications of the looming Anatomy Act by Lady Jemima Hervey (Vanessa Kirby) and Sir Bentley Warburton (Elliott Cowan). It’s as though the sliced/spliced body and the Anatomy Act thing might turn out to be related somehow…
Almost kiboshing the whole investigation from the start is all the cutting edge crime-solving technology Marlott doesn’t have access to as part of the day job, none of it having been invented yet. Yes, CSI: Miami this aint. The Frankenstein Chronicles’ version of a tech montage sequence consists of Sean Bean tensely watching how a dead pig floats down the Thames, really, really slowly.
Helping Marlott with the case: a top-hatted side-kick called Mr Nightingale (Richie Campbell), and some clues just vague enough to seem deep and meaningful, courtesy of William Blake. The Little Girl Lost, Prometheus Bound, that Red Dragon stuff that was used in the Hannibal Lecter film – Blake’s oeuvre has a lot to be mined, symbolism-wise. Plus, at least some of it was probably on the GCSE syllabus for most viewers. The referencess are populist enough to imbue the action with easy creeps, but just high-brow enough to make you feel clever for picking them up.
That stitching together of high and lowbrow; the upper and lower classes; the fictional and historical is what makes this show’s approach to the Frankenstein canon so ambigious so far. Will it be a cop show, with a smattering of ‘Resurrectionist’ scares? Will it turn into full-on gothic horror, with the investigation just an entry point? Will it be a history lesson on the laws and class differences at play in the early 19th century? Whatever this chimera settles into, its offbeat elements are what are working best for it so far.
Floating pig aside, not enough shows can claim a hero with the key characteristics: 'former soldier – dead wife and kids – nice hat – has syphilis'.
http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-frankenstein-chronicles/37771/the-frankenstein-chronicles-episode-1-review-a-world-without-god
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11989543/The-Frankenstein-Chronicles-review-eerily-effective.html
It was always a pea-souper in 19th-century London – at least according to TV drama. It’s always night-time, too. Things go bump. Dead bodies get discovered. People wearing hats put hankies over their noses to mask the foul stench. All the above clichés were present and correct in period chiller The Frankenstein Chronicles (ITV Encore). The twist was that the “abomination” washed up on the Thames shoreline turned out to be stitched together from eight different children’s body parts. Call Esther Rantzen’s Ye Olde Childline.
Enter Sean Bean as river policeman Inspector John Marlott, who was battling his own demons, naturally. A veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, he was haunted by the deaths of his wife and child, to whom he’d unwittingly passed on syphilis. Soon our stubbly, squinty hero was dragged into a dank, dark underworld of urchin gangs, child prostitution, butchers and body snatchers. Was a diabolical scientist lurking somewhere in the shadows around Smithfield meat market, attempting to re-animate the dead?
The Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), showed interest in the case – although he had his own agenda. Other real-life figures enter the fray in future episodes: poet-painter William Blake (a scenery-chewing Steven Berkoff) and, of course, writer Mary Shelley (the ever-excellent Anna Maxwell Martin).
This gory drama was rather like a Frankenstein’s monster itself, constructed from stitched-together elements of Sharpe, Sherlock, Oliver Twist, Ripper Street and Penny Dreadful. However, it was bold, eerily effective and chillingly atmospheric. Bean’s always a gruffly engaging screen presence and the all-star supporting cast was strong.
Sadly, stuck in a late time-slot on an obscure channel, it’s hard to see this finding an audience. A shame, as it showed real promise. Perhaps ITV should rip it up and stitch it back together on prime time. It’s alive!
Why do they keep putting his shows in crummy time-slots?! :wellll:
That's ridiculous. I can't imagine this was "cheap" to make...why waste the time, money and effort and not lobby for a better position? Somebody dropped the ball.
But my other question is with the plot line...how does one "unwittingly pass on syphilis, which resulted in his wife & child's death, yet he remains alive looking quite healthy? Not important I know but still...
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"But my other question is with the plot line...how does one "unwittingly pass on syphilis, which resulted in his wife & child's death, yet he remains alive looking quite healthy? Not important I know but still..." was asked by lab183.
In the latent stage of syphilis, you can have no symptoms. This stage can last a long time in some individuals.
The child would have been born with congenital syphilis. The wife probably went into the final stages quickly and her health overall would have been effected by a weakened immune system caused by pregnancy and childbirth.
The symptoms of early stage syphilis may have been masked by the poor hygiene on the battlefield. Sores and rashes would be likely ignored.
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The week in TV: The Frankenstein Chronicles; London Spy; Peep Show; Unforgotten
Not quite sure what we’d do if we were suddenly deprived, historically, of the fact of early 19th-century London. If sex was invented in 1963, murder was apparently invented in about 1826, seemingly amid the smoggy reaches of the Isle of Dogs and the treacherous pilings of Borough and Tobacco Dock: all sucking silt, yellow lights lazily swung, tolls of heavy bells seasoned with fog and heartache. Today there are surely something like 84 boatmen, complete with requisite humps, joke Rada speech impediments and foul clay pipes, employed exclusively by ITV drama location scouts to poke about the nether reaches of the Great Wen in the hope of finding smelly mud and a long shot that won’t suddenly include a FlyBe plane docking at City airport.
So The Frankenstein Chronicles arrived, even as Jekyll and Hyde is treading the same sulphurous cobbles, a potentially disastrous timeslip clash cunningly avoided by much of Frankie having been filmed, indeed, in Northern Ireland. The six-part Frankenstein Chronicles takes as much poetic licence as Jekyll, in that it plays fast and loose with literary truths: Blake pops up, as does Mary Shelley, and a grizzled Sean Bean, now quite shorn of his Sharpe good looks and allowed to just get on with being a good actor. He gnaws the furniture rather decently as the one uncorrupt member of the river police, though gnaws it with that certain Beany melancholy – “I knurr what it is to grieve”; “My days are consumed by smuurk” – which suggests his days are in no danger of being consumed by a sell-out run of Laugh? I Nearly Dropped My Knobkerrie! at the Gaiety theatre.
It’s genuinely rather good, and a beast of wholly different hide to Jekyll: that one, despite the pre-watershed “outrage” at its gothic horrors, remains a thoroughgoing, good-natured mash-up, whereas this offers real rare shivers, missing children and children returned polluted – parts sewn together, abominated – and I’m quite itching to see where it goes next, and whether it can come any closer to explaining William Blake (as close to a bona fide mystic as anyone else these lands have produced). Also, and unusually for this kind of programme, the makers have finally listened to the only 99.99% of the population who can’t abide watching drama so verite that it looks like it’s been filmed from behind a heavy Victorian Welsh dresser through a clump of Swarfega wrapped in staunch blackout curtains tucked inside the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat: a lighting technician has finally done his, rather than an auteur’s, job.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/nov/15/week-in-tv-frankenstein-chronicles-london-spy-peep-show-unforgotten
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"But my other question is with the plot line...how does one "unwittingly pass on syphilis, which resulted in his wife & child's death, yet he remains alive looking quite healthy? Not important I know but still..." was asked by lab183.
In the latent stage of syphilis, you can have no symptoms. This stage can last a long time in some individuals.
The child would have been born with congenital syphilis. The wife probably went into the final stages quickly and her health overall would have been effected by a weakened immune system caused by pregnancy and childbirth.
The symptoms of early stage syphilis may have been masked by the poor hygiene on the battlefield. Sores and rashes would be likely ignored.
:thanks2 Very kind of you to explain!
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THE FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES “A World Without God” Review
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/naamloos_zpslqufiwad.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/naamloos_zpslqufiwad.png.html)
What happens when you take a classic novel like Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein and combine it with the talent of Sean Bean? Pure awesomeness. Well at least that’s what I expected heading into this latest drama from ITV, and following it’s premiere episode I can gladly say that it’s most definitely on the right track to achieving this. Giving us an intriguing story that uses its subject material in a unique way, the creative team behind this show definitely left a lot to explore, with “A World Without God” being a solid start.
The series centers around Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean) as he investigates a crime involving the bodies of stitched-up children. First thing that should be made clear about this show, is the fact that it’s not your usual take on Frankenstein, with the bolt-necked monster not appearing whatsoever in this narrative. That said we do get a story that soaks up the time period of Shelley‘s classic novel, with the dark, gothic vibe being felt throughout the Georgian, setting. A lot of this credit is down to co-creator Benjamin Ross, with his direction of this opening episode being simply magnificent.
It is however the acting ability of Sean Bean that really makes this a program worth watching, as despite Ross and Barry Langford’s plot being more than intriguing, it is the characteristics of John Marlott that really captured my attention. Having already made a name for himself in various films and television shows, Bean definitely brings a certain level of atmosphere to the projects he works on, with his emotionally focused performance here being utterly captivating. He also conveyed the inner thoughts of Marlott in a sensational fashion, with the inspector using his keen mind in his quest to solve this mystery.
Despite being front and centre, Sean Bean wasn’t the only actor to stand out in this premiere episode, with both Tom Ward (Sir Robert Peel) and Richie Campbell (Nightingale) complimenting Marlott perfectly. Da Vinci’s Demons star Elliot Cowan (Bentley Warburton) also stars in this show, giving a much bolder character that suits the actor perfectly. His character is used in just the right way, never feeling overwhelming, with his agenda looking to be one that will be slowly built upon as the story progresses.
VERDICT
The Frankenstein Chronicles “A World Without God” gave us a solid start to this new series, with it’s thrilling plot, gripping mystery and wonderful performances making it definitely worth tuning in to watch. So make sure to catch it before next week’s installment.
http://www.snappow.com/tv-shows/the-frankenstein-chronicles-a-world-without-god-review/
The Frankenstein Chronicles
Series 1, Episode 1 - "A World Without God"
The Frankenstein Chronicles is not a lumbering monster, but a finely crafted, dark Georgian mystery.
Sean Bean, appointed gruff representative of the North of England to the rest of the world, is so perfect in his role as Inspector Marlott that I would not be surprised if the show was created around him, or projected out of some past-life experience, Assassin’s Creed-style. At one point, Marlott actually recollects that prior to being an Inspector, he was in the 95th rifles—and earlier on we see his green tunic—just as the fictional character Richard Sharpe was in the 95th when Bean played him in the Sharpe television series that made his career. Someone might have even whistled the theme tune, but I would need to go back and check, as I was too delirious at the possibility of it being true.
Bean’s Marlott is weighed down and hollowed out by the circumstances of his life—he knows “what it is to grieve” over deceased family members—but he also possesses a nuanced emotional backbone, which is occasionally brought to the fore in the odd magic trick, an emotional recollection, or a desperate chase after a missing child in the midst of a world in which men are haphazardly consumed by peat-bogs, Lords and Ladies condescend to him, and pigs are used in lieu of floating child corpses for investigative purposes
In the slow-moving opening episode, several elements come to together to suggest ambition and sophistication beyond a standard police-procedural with mild horror elements and the odd jump-scare. When Marlott chases after a girl he believes to be a missing daughter in a rose-red dress, I felt like I was watching a Georgian Don’t Look Now; and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find the same creepy ending as the similarities did not appear coincidental. Also, foreshadowing his appearance in next week’s episode (alongside Mary Shelley! Whoop, whoop!), Marlott stumbles across his first real lead: William Blake’s poem “The Little Girl Lost”. With it, he begins to unravel secretive word games reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code (ALYC=LYCA). There are also references to the Anatomy Act and potential sabotage, and a Jack-the-Ripper-esque cover-up attempt by the political and social elite to shift suspicion from the possibility of the killer being a skilled surgeon onto “the work of a barber or butcher”. There is also the hidden history of Nightingale (Richie Campbell), the black officer with a foundling past, which has been described as a piece of “colour-blind casting” by Ben Dowell of The Radio Times, but I believe may be a little more purposeful than that.
When it comes to genre conventions I have one universal rule: if a child dies then all bets are off; anything can happen. Given that The Frankenstein Chronicles use wholesale child dissection as its opening premise, then I’m looking forward to seeing where else the dark tale might lead us. Except for Sean Bean dying, which doesn’t seem likely, does it?
http://www.popmatters.com/review/the-frankenstein-chronicles-series-1-episode-1-a-world-without-god/
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The Frankenstein Chronicles with The Bean
I do like a bit of Bean now and again. Unfortunately his recent venture, Legends, wasn't worthy of any thespian recognition.
The first season was a piss poor chewed up and regurgitated US TV show, which had Sean Bean waiting in each scene for the other actors to catch up with him. It was bogged down by weak dialogues and full of eye-candy with zero talent.
The man can act, and a wee bit of sex on legs on-screen never hurt anybody, even if he is looking rougher than a dog's tongue lately.
In fact I would suggest watching him in Accused: Tracie's Story, in which he plays a transvestite. You might never look at him in the same way or he may feature in your dreams, in high heels and a blonde wig from that point forwards, but you will get to see what he is capable of.
Unfortunately Sean has this slight affliction that never really goes away completely or shall we say lately he doesn't really give two monkeys whether it does. Affliction: Northern accent. You can always hear it just below the surface, so he either picks or gets offered acting jobs where he can be his jolly Northern (yup jolly is totally sarcastic) self or perhaps it has become more of a trademark at this point.
In Legends he plays a spy or spook, who takes on a multitude of identities to go undercover, so it goes a little like this: Sean as a cowboy with an American accent with a Northern English twang, Sean as a drug dealer with a Northern English twang or Sean as a posh upper class Brit with a Northern English twang... The list is never-ending. I think at this point he is just like 'fuck it.'
Which brings us to his new venture into television, The Frankenstein Chronicles on ITV. There seems to be a spate of TV shows jumping on the supernatural, myths and book characters bandwagon at the moment. Penny Dreadful is gloomy, depressing and suitably freaky ass gory, Jekyll and Hyde is a ..well I haven't quite figured that one out yet, main character has a wee bit of road rage, day rage, life in general rage. I'm finding it hard to follow anything in between the moments of rage.
The story starts in London 1827, a suitably gloomy, foggy and creepy setting I might add. Marlott (Bean) finds the body of a child on the banks of the Thames.
The body of at least eight children sewn together to make one. The surgeon, who examines the body says the child was never alive, so why and how did it grab Marlott?
I had to laugh at the accurate portrayal of the upper class snooty English sirs and lords with their sensitivities and utter disgust at the second class humans they are surrounded by, oh woe be me that I must walk amongst the dregs of humanity. Meanwhile Bean is playing an officer of the river police with, you guessed it, a Northern accent.
Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), the Home Secretary, thinks the abomination has been created by quacks, who are trying to stop Parliament from passing a bill on the practice of medicine. Making it illegal for anyone other than a licensed or trained medical doctor to perform certain medical acts or surgical procedures. A few years later was the Anatomy Act was passed:
Passing of the Anatomy Act 1832, which expanded the legal supply of medical cadavers to eliminate the incentive for such behaviour. The Act authorised persons who had legal custody of a dead body to send it to a medical school before burial, so that it might be used for the study of anatomy and practice of surgery. If relatives could not be found
Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 (England) was passed, only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for dissection. We know that this wasn't technically adhered to, especially in the case of Burke and Hare (1828, Scotland), who provided corpses simply by killing people themselves.
Marlott believes from the get go that this is the work of a medical professional. He keeps his controversial opinion to himself, but is bound to knock heads with the upper echelon. He is partnered with Bow Street Runner Nightingale (Richie Campbell).
Marlott weaves his way through the perilous and dismal world of the London streets. His informants a mixture of street urchins, child prostitutes to body snatchers. Little does he know that the promise of a few coins leads a young boy straight into the arms of the monster Marlott is looking for.
The period drama moves smoothly between fact, real life historical figures and the premise of a famous fictional story. Next week the author of said book, Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin), is being introduced into the fray.
It will be interesting to see whether the drama sticks to the 1818 publishing date of Frankenstein and the events being inspired by Shelley or whether it has her writing the events she personally experiences, ergo the birth of Frankenstein the book. Either way her presence opens the door for some intriguing developments.
What do I think of it so far?
I think it has gotten off to a great start and I look forward to watching it unfold. It's nice to see the Bean in something that lets him shine. The Frankenstein Chronicles has a fantastic supporting cast with some very talented fellow colleagues. The scenery and setting are authentic, the dialogues are period suitable and luckily not prone to the cheesy texture of some television shows I could mention. Indeed it promises to be a series full of potential and very memorable. So, yes I am a very happy bunny that the Bean is finally in something worth watching again.
http://genxpose.blogspot.nl/2015/11/the-frankenstein-chronicles-with-bean.html
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The Frankenstein Chronicles with The Bean
I do like a bit of Bean now and again. Unfortunately his recent venture, Legends, wasn't worthy of any thespian recognition.
The first season was a piss poor chewed up and regurgitated US TV show, which had Sean Bean waiting in each scene for the other actors to catch up with him. It was bogged down by weak dialogues and full of eye-candy with zero talent.
The man can act, and a wee bit of sex on legs on-screen never hurt anybody, even if he is looking rougher than a dog's tongue lately.
In fact I would suggest watching him in Accused: Tracie's Story, in which he plays a transvestite. You might never look at him in the same way or he may feature in your dreams, in high heels and a blonde wig from that point forwards, but you will get to see what he is capable of.
Unfortunately Sean has this slight affliction that never really goes away completely or shall we say lately he doesn't really give two monkeys whether it does. Affliction: Northern accent. You can always hear it just below the surface, so he either picks or gets offered acting jobs where he can be his jolly Northern (yup jolly is totally sarcastic) self or perhaps it has become more of a trademark at this point.
In Legends he plays a spy or spook, who takes on a multitude of identities to go undercover, so it goes a little like this: Sean as a cowboy with an American accent with a Northern English twang, Sean as a drug dealer with a Northern English twang or Sean as a posh upper class Brit with a Northern English twang... The list is never-ending. I think at this point he is just like 'fuck it.'
Which brings us to his new venture into television, The Frankenstein Chronicles on ITV. There seems to be a spate of TV shows jumping on the supernatural, myths and book characters bandwagon at the moment. Penny Dreadful is gloomy, depressing and suitably freaky ass gory, Jekyll and Hyde is a ..well I haven't quite figured that one out yet, main character has a wee bit of road rage, day rage, life in general rage. I'm finding it hard to follow anything in between the moments of rage.
The story starts in London 1827, a suitably gloomy, foggy and creepy setting I might add. Marlott (Bean) finds the body of a child on the banks of the Thames.
The body of at least eight children sewn together to make one. The surgeon, who examines the body says the child was never alive, so why and how did it grab Marlott?
I had to laugh at the accurate portrayal of the upper class snooty English sirs and lords with their sensitivities and utter disgust at the second class humans they are surrounded by, oh woe be me that I must walk amongst the dregs of humanity. Meanwhile Bean is playing an officer of the river police with, you guessed it, a Northern accent.
Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), the Home Secretary, thinks the abomination has been created by quacks, who are trying to stop Parliament from passing a bill on the practice of medicine. Making it illegal for anyone other than a licensed or trained medical doctor to perform certain medical acts or surgical procedures. A few years later was the Anatomy Act was passed:
Passing of the Anatomy Act 1832, which expanded the legal supply of medical cadavers to eliminate the incentive for such behaviour. The Act authorised persons who had legal custody of a dead body to send it to a medical school before burial, so that it might be used for the study of anatomy and practice of surgery. If relatives could not be found
Before the Anatomy Act of 1832 (England) was passed, only the corpses of executed murderers could be used for dissection. We know that this wasn't technically adhered to, especially in the case of Burke and Hare (1828, Scotland), who provided corpses simply by killing people themselves.
Marlott believes from the get go that this is the work of a medical professional. He keeps his controversial opinion to himself, but is bound to knock heads with the upper echelon. He is partnered with Bow Street Runner Nightingale (Richie Campbell).
Marlott weaves his way through the perilous and dismal world of the London streets. His informants a mixture of street urchins, child prostitutes to body snatchers. Little does he know that the promise of a few coins leads a young boy straight into the arms of the monster Marlott is looking for.
The period drama moves smoothly between fact, real life historical figures and the premise of a famous fictional story. Next week the author of said book, Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin), is being introduced into the fray.
It will be interesting to see whether the drama sticks to the 1818 publishing date of Frankenstein and the events being inspired by Shelley or whether it has her writing the events she personally experiences, ergo the birth of Frankenstein the book. Either way her presence opens the door for some intriguing developments.
What do I think of it so far?
I think it has gotten off to a great start and I look forward to watching it unfold. It's nice to see the Bean in something that lets him shine. The Frankenstein Chronicles has a fantastic supporting cast with some very talented fellow colleagues. The scenery and setting are authentic, the dialogues are period suitable and luckily not prone to the cheesy texture of some television shows I could mention. Indeed it promises to be a series full of potential and very memorable. So, yes I am a very happy bunny that the Bean is finally in something worth watching again.
http://genxpose.blogspot.nl/2015/11/the-frankenstein-chronicles-with-bean.html
I bolded the parts that I had a problem with. I see that this is a blog now and not a professional review, but still I'd like to point out what is wrong here.
Legends has no "thespian recognition"? Seriously? Bean's performances in this show are Emmy worthy, even though the first season did have generic writing. Also, I know his accent is very thick and I know I've read that he isn't the most comfortable with pulling other accents, but he doesn't just say "fuck it", he hides it very well. Lincoln Dittmann for example, I honestly didn't hear his accent at all, nor did I when he played Len Barlowe, and the same goes with the recent Dmitry Petrovich. He may not be the most comfortable with doing other accents, but he does do it well. I remember his irish accent from the Field and Patriot Games, which were well done.
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Review: The Frankenstein Chronicles episode two
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/xTHE_FRANKENSTEIN_CHRONICLES_EP2-feature-1000x400_jpg_pagespeed_ic_UmlDSP5rDz_zps9mhxlmme.jpg) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/xTHE_FRANKENSTEIN_CHRONICLES_EP2-feature-1000x400_jpg_pagespeed_ic_UmlDSP5rDz_zps9mhxlmme.jpg.html)
made a mistake watching the second episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles – I forgot to bring my pillow to hide behind. I should have taken my own advice after reviewing the first episode.
Episode two, a.k.a. “Seeing Things”, plunges us further into the murky waters of 19th century London and the mysterious child murders plaguing our hero, Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean).
Marlott follows his only hunch to the bedside of William Blake (Steven Berkoff), real-life poet, painter and printmaker. Marlott shows him the poem of “The Little Girl Found” believing it to hold clues to the whereabouts of little lost girl “Alyc” (a.k.a. Alice – she can’t really spell her name like that can she)? In his long rattling breaths, close-to-death Blake tells him to find the girl he must learn, “…the truth of the beast… the beast with the face of a man”. Spooky… if still pretty vague.
Blake’s fans and friends surround his deathbed and the most vocal of them is a young woman (Anna Maxwell Martin) keen to get rid of John Marlott, interrupting the intimate situation. Having read that Maxwell Martin would be portraying Mary Shelley, alarm bells were ringing for me – why aren’t you noticing who she is Sean Bean? Don’t you know the book she’s written? It all fits!
Marlott’s hallucinations continue to haunt him, drip feeding us the backstory of his family life. He appears to see his wife and baby daughter in an idyllic afterlife, cured of what killed them – most likely the syphilis that Marlott currently suffers from.
Nightingale’s (Richie Campbell) task to trail body snatcher “Pritty” (Charlie Creed-Miles) pays off when they manage to catch him in the act, having set him up with a rather morbid scenario. Pritty considers himself a legal businessman and claims to be unaware of the dark goings on that Marlott refers to. He does, however, know of a gang that may sink to such depths – murdering to undercut the body snatchers’ trade.
During the “sting” to catch Pritty we return to The Frankenstein Chronicles’ favourite way of terrifying me. The corpse of a young boy lies on the table in front of Marlott until SUDDENLY he’s not lying down but sitting bolt upright staring ahead with his creepy dead eyes. The editing makes us question whether this is related to the Frankenstein-element of the storyline or if in fact we are privy to Marlott’s mercury-fuelled hallucinations. How far into Marlott’s mind are we?
Mary Shelley drops by again to inform Marlott of the death of William Blake and to pass on an assortment of his creepy looking paintings that, let’s be honest, would be more at home in a GCSE art class. Discovering Shelley’s name is an exciting turning point for John as this leads him to finding her famous text, Frankenstein. Hurry up and read it John – connect the dots, we’re way ahead of you.
This episode sees the return of Lady Hervey (Vanessa Kirby), this time on her own and pleading to save John’s soul. She fears the anatomy act would bring on “a world without God” and she also throws in a bit of flirting with the line, “I don’t feel you to be a stranger”. Are we being introduced to a love interest? This is particularly poignant as we learn Lord Hervey (Ed Stoppard) is her brother, not her husband. He himself is intent on sabotaging the anatomy act, lecturing that it will make, “poverty a crime and the afterlife a privilege of the wealthy”.
An homage to the more traditional Frankenstein adaptations comes in the anatomy lecture as we watch a surgeon slice into the arm of a boy and force his arm to twitch and rise up using a powerful electrical charge. The electrical machinery is suitably crude looking that this appears as a perverse form of torture, even if the boy is stone cold dead.
After a woolly disruption to the lecture, Marlott follows the skulking young man we’ve spied in both episodes one and two so far. Tracking him down to a pub we discover the sly gentleman is a journalist by the name of Boz (Ryan Sampson). After a bit of a testosterone battle, Marlott manages to “persuade” Boz to keep an eye and an ear out for any interesting goings on. History buffs will know the significance of the name Boz, recognising it as the pseudonym of hugely successful author Charles Dickens. Will this have significance I wonder?
Towards the end of the episode Inspector Marlott is sought out by Flora (Eloise Smyth), the young girl in the pink dress we first met last week being offered up to the Inspector. She admits to having kidnapped Alice after spotting her pretty pink dress in the marketplace. What Flora doesn’t know however, is where bad guy Billy (Robbie Gee) has taken her. I feel the shadow of the “monster” approaching. Will we be any closer to finding the murderer next week?
http://tvdaily.com/review-the-frankenstein-chronicles-episode-two/
Review: The Frankenstein Chronicles (S1 E2/6), Wednesday 18th November, ITV Encore
Frankenstein Chronicles started off in fine fashion last week, presenting a grim pre-Victorian world where the Middles Ages were starting to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into something resembling the modern age. The trouble was that the 1820s were still filled with people who took their morality from spiritual and religious leanings, and the almost constant fear of death (of which there was much) precipitated an obsession with the supernatural, the occult and the existence of beasts and monsters. This fear and this sense of these two worlds colliding, was heightened when a young teenage girl was found on the banks of the Thames, her body seemingly stitched together from other, unknown body parts. John Marlott, seconded by home secretary Sir Robert Peel, was on the case and was convinced something awful was afoot.
In the hunt for Alice – a missing girl feared to be this thing’s next victim – Marlott found a William Blake poem – Lyca – at the house of a prostitution ring, headed by a gold-toothed leader called Billy. So it was only natural that Marlott sought him out, convinced that his poem contained information about the missing girl. When he entered Blake’s house he found a strange ritual in progress. A near-death and bed-bound Blake (Steven Berkoff) was surrounded by acolytes, chanting something as if to rid him of his illness. Despite being made to feel unwelcome, Blake beckoned Marlott to his bedside and, as the policeman recited his tale, Blake nodded in acknowledgement and told Marlott that he too had lost a child once, and that the Lyca was all about all missing children. Portentously (and in typically hammy Steven Berkoff fashion) he told Marlott that he would have to ‘know the truth of the beast… the beeeeeast, with the face of a man’.
Marlott left the room none the wiser, but he had met a woman who was particularly unwelcome in Blake’s room who, later in the episode, brought him news of the famous expiry and a copy of The Book Of Prometheus, which Blake wanted Marlott to have. She left him his card. Her name was Mary Shelley (played here by the superb Anna Maxwell Martin).
Away from all this intrigue, Marlott and Nightingale were convinced that the bodysnatchers – those legal graverobbers who exhumed bodies and sold them for cash – had something to do with the body they had found. Find out if there was anything irregular about their supply chain and then they would find the perpetrator of these awful crimes. Or so they thought. They caught a gang red-handed, digging up the body of a young boy (told this was grisly), and under questioning the leader, Mr Pretty, told Marlott that someone had been murdering to provide fresh body to the surgeons. he also said this: “A dead body ain’t property. Taking one ain’t theft.”
And therein lay the moral dimension of this series, the concepts of death and the afterlife being discussed and explore through different character at the either ends of the economic and intellectual spectrum, all wrapped up in a murder mystery.
This discussion was furthered when Lady Jemima Hartley (Vanessa Kirby) – along with her brother a fervent opposer of the Sir Robert Peel’s Anatomy Act – came to Marlott’s place to issue him with a warning – that the passing of act could lead to a wider moral and spiritual vacuum, which would deny ordinary people their holy body to be intact and therefore be disqualified on judgement day. “If we deny Christ the poor Mr Marlott,” she asked, “don’t we deny him for ourselves? And that’s what’s at stake here – not merely the future of medicine, but prospect of a world without God.”
She told him the act would also outlaw benign, philanthropic practises, such as her brother’s, who runs a place – a children’s charitable hospital – in East London.
Marlott then went to visit Sir Williams Chester, the chief physician, and instead found his unwelcoming cousin, Garnet Chester in residence instead. After shooing Marlott away, he conducted a demonstration in front of a select audience on the cadaver of a young boy, pumping electricity into his arm, and ‘re-animating’ it. This practise was influenced by the work of Italian physician Luigi Galvani, a pioneer in bioelectromagnetics.
All fascinating stuff, but the case was stalling and Marlott – and Sir Robert Peel knew it. With pressure from Peel for progress – the Chesters were emerging as suspects because of their interest in ‘galvanic’ practises – Marlott retired to his digs, where he received a visitor. It was Flora, who he met at the gang’s hideout at the end of episode one, and she came to him scared, cold and hungry. In conversation in a pub, where Marlott and Flora’s breath could be seen in the cold air (that’s one of the features I love about this series so far) she promised to help him find Alice.
Earlier in the episode a mercury-fuelled dream saw Marlott, his syphilis raging, tell his deceased wife that he longed to be with her again. And then it hit me: with everyone afraid of death and debating death and trying to escape it, he was the only one who didn’t fear it.
https://thekillingtimestv.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/review-the-frankenstein-chronicles-s1-e26-wednesday-18th-november-itv-encore/
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The Frankenstein Chronicles S01E2 “Seeing Things” REVIEW
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/frankenstein_chronicles_1_zps9qqlrkqy.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/frankenstein_chronicles_1_zps9qqlrkqy.png.html)
Essential Plot Points:
Episode The Second: in which our inspector is haunted by a red dress.
We learn that The Anatomy Act also seeks to combat grave robbers, by giving the bodies of the poor to anatomy schools; a fate previously reserved for victims of the gallows.
Mary Shelley appears; it seems she has already written Frankenstein.
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Review:
The difficult second episode, also known as “stretching it out a bit”. Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean) is getting into the swing of things working out of Bow Street for the home secretary.
Still on the search for the stitcher of bodies, Marlott concentrates on grave robbers in this episode. They maintain that robbing graves is an honest way to make a living; after all, stealing something that doesn’t belong to anyone isn’t a crime. However, the Anatomy Act seeks to put them out of business, by making all bodies available to anatomy schools after death. They may well feel aggrieved about this, and certainly have access to the raw materials to create the abomination we saw in the first episode. To this end Marlott pursues a gang of grave robbers as they go about their ghoulish business.
Next on his list of suspects is Sir Bentley Warburton (Elliot Cowen), another vocal opponent of the Anatomy Act. He conspires to interrupt a lecture on the “galvanic response of dead tissue” with a flock of sheep.
We also meet William Blake (although he doesn’t last very long) and Mary Shelley. The Inspector reads her recently published novel Frankenstein, which gives rise to more Mercury-induced hallucinations. Is the story of “The Modern Prometheus” a work of fiction, or based on the macabre goings on at the school of medicine?
Mr Marlott is also still getting other people to do his legwork for him: Nightingale (his fellow Bow St Runner); a grave robber; and the political reporter known as BOZ, who seems to turn up in all the same places as the Inspector.
After a pleasing and suitably dark opening episode, we’re in for more of the same. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it might have been nice just to move things along a little quicker. It still looks great and acting is excellent all round. A particularly awkward meeting between Inspector Marlott and Lady Harvey (Vanessa Kirby) is – suitably – particularly awkward. Talk of searching for “a beast with the face of a man”, and some of Blake’s other dark imaginings (briefly shown in the book Blake bequeaths to Marlott) give us hope for some more monstrous episodes to follow.
The Good
The Book of Prometheus and the inclusion of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus make for interesting mythos.
The Bad
Not a lot here to move the plot along, just make it more complicated.
We still haven’t met anyone actually called Frankenstein.
The Random
Frankenstein was published in 1823 (second edition, the first was anonymous). William Blake died August 1827. Robert Peel was home secretary between 1822–1827 and again between 1828–1830. So the dates pretty much add up for this being relatively accurately set in 1827.
BOZ was a pen name used by Charles Dickens, who started his career as a political journalist.
http://www.mcmbuzz.com/2015/11/20/the-frankenstein-chronicles-s01e2-seeing-things-review/
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Doctor in the House, The Frankenstein Chronicles and I'm a Celebrity: TV review – video
The Frankenstein Chronicles from 3.51min
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/video/2015/nov/24/doctor-house-frankenstein-chronicles-celebrity-tv-review-video
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Recap: The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 3
The gripping drama is halfway through its intense storyline and we still feel as much in the dark as Marlott does. The production of the show keeps us hanging on, with authentic settings, elaborate Victorian costumes and wonderfully Dickensian dialogue. This week’s review will use some of the episode’s most revealing and intriguing quotations to explore the twists and turns of “All the Lost Children”.
http://tvdaily.com/recap-the-frankenstein-chronicles-episode-3/
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The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 3 review: All The Lost Children
1.3 All The Lost Children
“What would we not do to defeat death, Mr Marlott? Might we not defy God’s laws in order to be reunited with those we love?” asks The Frankenstein Chronicles’ Mary Shelley this week, under some gentle interrogation regarding the murdered, mutilated and missing children in the capital. At this stage in his investigation, Marlott has an intriguing list of leads, taking in literary legends like Shelley – still a controversial figure in the nineteenth century, having been accused of blasphemy in the creation of Frankenstein (there’s thanks for you) – and lowly grave robbers like Pritty, still on the run after escaping the watch of deputy Mr Nightingale last week.
That Marlott has so much to pick through, so many pieces to puzzle over, is what’s bringing Chronicles’ mystery thriller aspects to pulsing life as the main suspects are lined up. Could the Hervey siblings be so charitably-minded that they’d take to corpse mutilation to make a point about the dangers of the coming Anatomy Act? Maybe. Are surgeons like Sir William Chester, part of a medical community excited by the Galvanism movement, this eager to act out the plot of Frankenstein for real? Perhaps. And has Shelley herself had a part in this case beyond providing inspiration for some science and/or religious nut(s) looking to make a killing – business, morality, or medical breakthrough-wise? It's difficult to gauge at this point. None of the opposing tensions at play are too broadly drawn, each side of the Religion vs Science/Nature vs Technology debates are personalised with characters that aren’t too easy to peg as someone to be suspicious of, or someone to trust.
Apart from the one we can trust. Interesting cases and suspects don’t make for worthwhile television without a special lead character, and the tormented but still striving copper John Marlott is pretty special. Not just because Bean was back in military garb (for the Sharpe fans) during a flashback sequence this week, either (though that was rather special – and pretty – too). Unsaddled with the shtick elements most TV dicks get – ‘1970s Ladies Man, Tough Guy’, ‘Cigar Smoker, Acts Confused’, ‘Nosy Old Lady, Has a Typewriter’ – Marlott is just a grafter, an everyman, the much-needed human(e) centre of a story filled with the monstrous and the cold-hearted. His interactions with witness Flora, for instance, are practical – placing her in the care of the Herveys gives him an ‘in’ to investigate them further – but also careful and considered – he wants to keep her and her unborn baby safe, probably not just for the case.
The syphilis, and the mercury-induced hallucinations he has of his dead wife and child, now that could be schlocky– if handled insensitively. Instead, Marlott’s ongoing guilt imbues the series with a certain sadness, and his infection, an ongoing reminder of flesh’s fragility, marked mortality in a canon where a bolt of electricity can undo death. Probably.
Not that the STD scars are just there to make Marlott maudlin and navel-gazey; that infection also adds some nice meat to the body horror that comes as part of any Frankenstein-themed package, the sores snaking across Marlott’s hands and back resembling decay, or the stitching of a body falling apart, perhaps… And Sir Daniel Hervey’s reveal of the patient in the final stages of the disease was a particularly nasty bit of horribleness, for Marlott, as well as the viewer. Along with the horror came more thrills in this week’s episode, which squeezed in not only a chase scene, but also a knife fight, and some Queensberry-rules boxing courtesy of Mr Nightingale (or ‘Joshua’, as he tenderly tells Flora), as well as a quick introduction to the most intimidating cake shop in town.
As we hit the midway point of The Frankenstein Chronicles, All The Lost Children added yet more threads to the series’ thorough stitching of its plot, and depth to its characters. Other bonuses of the episode – it passed the Bechdel Test; there was a snappy Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate done and dusted in less than 30 seconds; and Anna Maxwell Martin’s voiceover readings from Frankenstein highlighted just how engrossing the source material still is. So, some very neat and detailed stitching this week.
http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-frankenstein-chronicles/37998/the-frankenstein-chronicles-episode-3-review-all-the-lost-children
Review: The Frankenstein Chronicles (S1 E3/6), Wednesday 25th November, ITV Encore
We’ve reached the half-way stage of this engrossing, grim series, and so far equal time has been given to finding away through the moral and spiritual quagmire of where medicine and science mix with religion. John Marlott – a policeman seconded by home secretary Sir Robert Peel, who thinks that a murderer struck because he was against his new Anatomy Act – had slowly
Like ghosts emerging from the Georgian London fog, these suspects are yet to truly show their hand, but by the end of this episode I felt we were edging closer to a full presentation of possible murderers. But, like so many series before it, this third episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles took a breath to fill out some back story to some of the characters.
It had been inferred that Marlott had passed on the then-fatal, sexually transmitted disease syphilis to his wife and child. The heavy burden of this guilt had been weighing him down like a planet on his shoulders as he trudged around London, the mixture of the mercury pills he had been taking and the stupefying nature of the cases he was investigating (the stitched-together murder victim and the missing girl Alice, who he had become mildly obsessed with because it obviously reminded him of his own daughter) addling his mind.
We found out a little bit more in this episode. The hallucinatory effects of the mercury caused him to have more flashbacks, seeing his wife when she was alive and his daughter being buried after succumbing to the disease. One single line also told us more about his past. During a meeting with the journalist Boz, who chided him for not knowing what the novel Frankenstein was, Marlott told him that all he knew was that he fought in the battle of Waterloo against Bonaparte’s men, and that was all that mattered. Minimal exposition, but enough to tell us that Marlott had lived a life and had probably brought syphilis back from the war with him.
This fascination with Frankenstein provoked him to visit Mary Shelley in Kentish Town. This stern woman (played with real force by Anna Maxwell Martin), who was both suspicious and disdainful of Marlott, revealed that she, too, had had quite the life – her husband, Percy, died four years previously, and her mother Mary Wollstencraft, died in childbirth. Her father had also died.
When Marlott asked Shelley about Prometheus, she answered: “He stole fire from the Gods and moulded from human clay, like my Victor. A symbol of rebellion. For all of us who oppose tyranny and oppression,” she answered.
“Tyranny and oppression? Or the laws of God?
“What would he not do to defeat death, Mr Marlott? Might we not defy God’s laws, in order to be reunite with those we love?”
This was a telling passage of dialogue, one that seemed to refer to Shelley’s past but also Marlott’s past, too. And even perhaps their futures.
Elsewhere, young Flora was beginning to become an important character in her own right. After staying at Marlott’s and building a friendship with Nightingale, she revealed she was pregnant. Marlott had an idea. He escorted Lady Harvey to church and asked her is he could deposit Flora at her anti-Anatomy Act brother’s hospice. She agreed and took both Marlott and Flora there. Marlott’s plan was to have Flora spy on Sir Daniel Hervey and his workings, because, in Marlott’s mind, he was a suspect. Hervey granted Marlott a tour of his charity hospital, and as they saw people with cancer Hervey asked about the syphilis he had instantly spotted when the two men first met in episode one. He told Marlott he could give him a natural remedy that may help, but Marlott rebuffed him. Instead, Hervey took him to see a patient who was suffering from the disease, his face half eaten by the bacteria and suffering form near-death fits. It was enough to terrify Marlott, his own mortality coming sharply into view.
We also saw Sir William Chester, who behind his smirk is playing his Galvanist cards close to his chest, and we caught a brief glimpse of Sir Robert Peel’s parliamentary opponent, Sir Bentley Warburton, who’s also a suspect.
The episode ended when Marlott and Nightingale went in pursuit of gang leader Billy, in the tunnels that were used to ferry the dead bodies between their point of capture and the hospitals. Something tells me this is going to get darker before anyone sees any light.
https://thekillingtimestv.wordpress.com/2015/11/27/review-the-frankenstein-chronicles-s1-e36-wednesday-25th-november-itv-encore/
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such a good episode. I can't wait until this airs in North America so I can view it in good quality with no interruptions :P
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I totally agree. I watched it on you tube thanks to Patch's links! But, the screen is cropped and I want to see it again in a bigger format. It was a great episode! :thanks2
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I totally agree. I watched it on you tube thanks to Patch's links! But, the screen is cropped and I want to see it again in a bigger format. It was a great episode!
You could try these http://seanbeanonline.net/forums/index.php?topic=4872.msg110085#new
The Frankenstein Chronicles S01E03 “All The Lost Children” REVIEW
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We’re halfway through The Frankenstein Chronicles now, and not really any closer to finding out who was responsible for the original abomination. There haven’t been any more creatures, reports of missing bodies, or murders. These days it’d probably get filed as an aberration and revived as a cold case for some past-their-prime detective. Yet, even though the trail has gone cold, our inspector doesn’t give up, he presses doggedly onwards…
The majority of this episode concentrates on Flora (Eloise Smyth). She was one of Billy “The Child Snatcher”’s girls, but is now under Marlott’s protection. Errand boy Nightingale takes her dress shopping, where we find out she’s pregnant. Worried that she will do the child harm, Marlott seeks to have her stay with Lady Harvey’s brother (Sir Daniel Harvey, played by Ed Stoppard), in his hospital. This, of course, has the added advantage of giving him the opportunity to snoop around the place.
Sir Harvey offers alternative medicines in his care for patients, which would be outlawed by the Anatomy Act. On a tour of the hospital Marlott comes face to (rotten) face with a tertiary phase syphilis patient, and sees what may become of him.
The Inspector also goes to call on Mary Shelley, to ask her about galvanism. She tells him how many friends and family members she has lost and asks would he not, “Defy God’s laws to be re-united with those we love”? We also get a little more background on Ms Shelly, disowned by her parents as her family name has been brought into disgrace because of her “accursed masterpiece”.
Some action in an otherwise character-led episode comes in the form of a chase between Nightingale and the grave robber Pritty (Charlie Creed-Miles). This starts with an exploding door, and ends in a bloody nose. Nightingale finally gets his man after everyone else has managed to (easily) give him the slip.
The end of the episode gives us a cliffhanger, with Marlott and Pritty descending into a tunnel under the city used for moving dead bodies around unobserved.
Halfway through the series and not much has moved on from episode one. We’re still no closer to finding the responsible parties, and no beasts to speak of. Perhaps our inspector needs galvanizing more than some of the bodies.
The effects of syphilis show us something a little more visceral: with Marlott on the mercury again, seeing hideous visions of himself in the mirror.
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http://www.mcmbuzz.com/2015/11/27/the-frankenstein-chronicles-s01e03-all-the-lost-children-review/
"But my other question is with the plot line...how does one "unwittingly pass on syphilis, which resulted in his wife & child's death, yet he remains alive looking quite healthy? Not important I know but still..." was asked by lab183.
In the latent stage of syphilis, you can have no symptoms. This stage can last a long time in some individuals.
The child would have been born with congenital syphilis. The wife probably went into the final stages quickly and her health overall would have been effected by a weakened immune system caused by pregnancy and childbirth.
The symptoms of early stage syphilis may have been masked by the poor hygiene on the battlefield. Sores and rashes would be likely ignored.
I noticed in Ep 3 Sir Hervey talking to Marlot about a natural remedy derived from bread.Could this medicine be penicillin and the saving of John Marlot?
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These work for me, thanks Patch and I was thinking the exact same thing about the bread...I was thrilled to see the herbs and the natural remedies...love that!
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Review: The Frankenstein Chronicles (S1 E4/6), Wednesday 2nd December, ITV Encore
This excellent series has, so far, taken us deep into the depths of Georgian London – its slums, social mores and how it grapples with a concept we still grapple with today: death. What it means, what form it takes and, in The Frankenstein Chronicles, how to cheat it. Marlott has been hunting a deranged killer, but thinks the disappearance of a young girl called Alice could hold the key to finding him............
https://thekillingtimestv.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/review-the-frankenstein-chronicles-s1-e46-wednesday-2nd-december-itv-encore/
The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 4 review: The Fortune Of War
This review contains spoilers.
1.4 The Fortune Of War
Taking its title from where the series left us and Inspector John Marlott last week, episode four of The Frankenstein Chronicles took us right back to the grubby Fortune of War pub. The 19th century’s answer to Harvester isn't somewhere many people would voluntarily return to, but Marlott had work to do, hoping to bump into snatcher, killer, stitcher n’ seller suspect number one “Billy the Child Catcher”. The leads that led Marlott here: deputy Joseph Nightingale knows that dead bodies are transported through the tunnels snaking underneath the Fortune of War; grave robber Pritty knows which locals are dealing in death to pay the rent; and witness Flora knows Billy was the one who snatched missing child, Alice. Unfortunately, those three pointers are taking our protagonist somewhere dark with no escape route, and we know there’s nobody high or low, religious or scientifically-minded, in Chronicles’ gritty locale who can be completely trusted.
It was a tense start this week, and things didn’t get easier on us or Marlott just because Billy didn’t show (yet). In an already very full suspect pool, episode four threw in even more dastardly wrong ‘uns. Cut-throat cult ‘The Bishops’ were the ones skulking around the tunnels in black lace and rags, making business deals at the end of a blade (and that was Game Of Thrones’ Kate Dickie--Lysa Arryn--under one of the veils, unsettlingly pitching her voice ‘Nancy from Oliver!: Nightmare Edition’ high). Looking like they’d stumbled in from a stock horror archetype convention, right down to their super-villain gang name and Goth get-ups, the new family on the block quickly became less fantastical. The Lady Gaga head gear? Well, the tunnels are dusty, aren’t they? ‘The Bishops’? Not a comic-booky gang with a religious bent, they’re just plain ol’ Mrs Bishop and her kids, supplementing their income with a bit of murder-to-order on the side. As with all the players we’d already been introduced to, there was extra character detail to find under the surface traits.
With more bad guys creeping out of the shadows week by week, it’s a good thing Marlott has got himself a couple of people who’ve proven their loyalty, number one being Nightingale. Richie Campbell’s work on the series is becoming a much-needed spot of kindness in such a harsh setting – Nightingale’s softer eyes a counter to Marlott’s haunted ones. Though, Joseph is just about bordering on becoming an old sop (some more boxing next week?!) when it comes to witness Flora.
Ah, Flora. Back on Marlott’s doorstep this week, the willing-to-help Flora made her return just when the plot required a young woman to serve as bait for some suspects – what good luck, in a series full of such bad luck, hmm? Like the ‘the red-headed lad’ from back in episode one – who was dead meat as soon as Marlott had him investigating where the missing children were disappearing off to – Flora is placed around proceedings at just the right points to get the plot moving where it needs to go. In other (lazier, not as quality) productions, she might have been sacrificed early on with no characterisation beyond ‘disposable sex worker is here to help the hero’, but so far she’s stuck around for more than ‘fridging’, and that's a surprising relief. Especially considering she’s dodging the double-whammy of horror and thriller tropes that aren’t always so kind to more peripheral female characters. And she's a fighter; as soon as Nightingale points out to Marlott – busy planning just how to use her as bait for Billy, etc. – that Flora can barely stand after losing her baby, she quickly straightens herself up, resolving to hide any hesitation or weakness. She’s great, and here’s hoping she’ll make it out of the series alive and un-reanimated.
But you never know, now that Billy is back on the scene. Missing the date at the Fortune, Billy was back to remind Flora “You’re mine, and I still got use for ‘ya […] I’ll slit you up, all the way down to you know where”. So here’s one we’re hoping doesn't make it out of the series alive. His character touchstone – not the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, because Billy is worse – goes well with this ep’s Nightmare Nancy; we’re talking Bill Sikes. Though, Sikes wasn’t this intimidating (and that Bill was even scaring off his best buddy Bullseye by the end of Oliver!).
The tensions at the start brought us to a tense middle, a suspenseful sting putting Flora in trouble, culminating in a showdown with the Bishops at the brick kiln. We also got another visit with the much-nicer-than-The Bishops-and-less-stabby Hervey siblings, dining with Warburton (who had better have brought along a nice dessert from the Weird Cake Shop he disappeared into last week). During luncheon we learned that breathy Lady Hervey is still sweet on Marlott, or her brother Daniel should look into getting her an inhaler, and that Daniel totally helped Flora out with an abortion, him being less preachy than his sister and Warbs.
We also learned that scenes with Sean Bean and Ed Stoppard, who is playing Daniel Hervey, are really, really very good, and there should be more of that sort of thing (along with more of the afore-mentioned boxing stuff from Joseph).
Wrapping up the tense beginning and middle came the equally tense ending, courtesy of Boz and Mary Shelley, who had both been suspiciously absent for most of the episode. It turns out Boz has been busy, deciding to go after the story that Marlott had promised him and dubbing the case 'The Frankenstein Murders'. Which is bad for poor Mary Shelley, who only just managed to get out of London before the controversy cycle started around her again. Poor, innocent, on-the-run Mary Shelley... who finished The Fortune Of War walking around what looked like a set from film adaptations of her book; strapped operating table, Galvanism equipment, et al. So maybe she can’t be trusted, either. It's difficult to predict after an episode full of baiting and switching for the characters, and for the viewers watching them.
http://news.abomus.com/en/UK/news/kultura/frankenstein-chronicles-episode-4-review-fortune-war
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The Frankenstein Chronicles S01E04 “The Fortune Of War” REVIEW
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/4_zpsutsrdby6.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/4_zpsutsrdby6.png.html)
Essential Plot Points:
Episode The Fourth: In which our inspector arrives at a dead end.
We discover Flora is without child.
Billy the Child Catcher is caught, and isn’t the monster.
BOZ writes an expose on the “Composite Corpse” for The Chronicle.
Review:
If you thought The Frankenstein Chronicles couldn’t get any grimier, you’d be wrong. At the end of the last episode our resolute Inspector Marlott and his unwilling accomplice Pritty were seen descending into a tunnel under the public house that gives the episode its title. At the end of the filth-strewn tunnel we meet the Bishops: a particularly odorous and exceptionally mucky bunch of miscreants. Led by Ma Bishop (Kate Dickie), they specialise in finding fresh bodies for the surgery schools. Suspecting them of using bodies which aren’t actually quite dead yet, Marlott asks them to find him a fresh corpse for “company”. Yep, he poses as a necrophiliac with a preference young girls.
Meanwhile Flora returns from her stay at Sir Daniel Harvey’s hospital sans child, claiming she miscarried.
Using her as bait Marlott and Nightingale catch both Billy (Robbie Gee) and the Bishops. However it transpires that the two are not connected in any way, nor are they connected to the washed-up body. The Bishops are willing to murder to obtain bodies in good fettle for the surgery schools, but draw the line at children. The escapade is not without its casualties, however, and Flora ends up unconscious after spending too long in the noxious fumes from a brick kiln.
Boz visits Marlott’s old employers, the River Police, and bends some ears to get the lowdown on the washed-up corpse. He pens an expose for The Chronicle on “The Frankenstein Murders”, riling Mr Peel.
Marlott has managed to exhaust pretty much all his leads, and he’s no closer to finding the perpetrator. Perhaps he needs to cast his net a little higher up the societal ladder, it would seem as though Miss Mary Shelley and Mr William Chester are certainly hiding something. Shelley visits a galvanist’s laboratory at the end of the episode; its bloody table looks like something straight out of the pages of her book. Inspector Marlott has been busy clearing the decks, hopefully ready for a monstrous finale…
The Good
The plot is moving along again, tidying up some loose ends.
Plenty of action, intrigue and scandal.
Marlott and Lady Harvey’s strange and awkward courtship continues.
The Bad
Still no monsters
http://www.mcmbuzz.com/2015/12/04/the-frankenstein-chronicles-s01e04-the-fortune-of-war-review/
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I was thinking the exact same thing about the bread...
I was "take the drops.I want a second season" at this point!
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/Naamloos0_zpsyhenzljj.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/Naamloos0_zpsyhenzljj.png.html)
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I was thinking the exact same thing about the bread...
I was "take the drops.I want a second season" at this point!
Oh no! Please tell me you don't think they will kill him off at the end of this, do you?! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo! :hellno
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Oh no! Please tell me you don't think they will kill him off at the end of this, do you?! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I hope not,seeing the pace of the investigation,Marlot'll never get who did it in the 2 remaining episodes.
It takes at least another season to do so and hoping for more. (http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/funny%20stuf/cow-fingerscrossed_zpsdayvak9j.gif) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/funny%20stuf/cow-fingerscrossed_zpsdayvak9j.gif.html)
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Oh no! Please tell me you don't think they will kill him off at the end of this, do you?! Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I hope not,seeing the pace of the investigation,Marlot'll never get who did it in the 2 remaining episodes.
It takes at least another season to do so and hoping for more. (http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/funny%20stuf/cow-fingerscrossed_zpsdayvak9j.gif) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/funny%20stuf/cow-fingerscrossed_zpsdayvak9j.gif.html)
I think he HAS to solve the crime by the end of this season or the audience will be very annoyed with him! But that doesn't mean Marlott has to be killed off --just because we're all conditioned to think that's the default ending for Sean's characters. Next season could have another crime to solve, and maybe a romance with Lady Harvey. I fervently hope there is a season two.
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The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 5 review: The Frankenstein Murders
The plot is starting to pay off in this penultimate episode of Gothic galvanism series, The Frankenstein Chronicles...
This review contains spoilers.
Ending with the reveal that ‘the composite’ of body parts found at the start of episode one probably crawled to the water by itself, we were left with the teaser of a look at the reanimated creatures in the next episode. And, you never know, perhaps “the secrets of heaven and earth […] the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature” will be revealed, as well. But we’ll settle for more weirdness; its stranger parts are what makes this show such an interesting chimera.
http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-frankenstein-chronicles/38198/the-frankenstein-chronicles-episode-5-review-the-frankenstein-murders
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The Frankenstein Chronicles S01E05 “The Frankenstein Murders” REVIEW
Essential Plot Points:
Episode The Fifth: In which our inspector has a creeping suspicion
The anatomy act is passed.
We discover Garnett Chester was responsible for Flora’s pregnancy.
We discover Garnett Chester may be responsible for the composite corpse.
We discover Garnett Chester’s dead body,
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/31_zpssvebfwhc.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/31_zpssvebfwhc.png.html)
Review:
Frankenstein. The name alone is enough to make most people think of monsters, even if it actually belongs to the creator of such horrors. And so we reach the penultimate episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles, and still we have no monsters to show for it. While the body count creeps up slightly this episode, it’s more political intrigue than monstrous goings on.
We begin with Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin) confessing to Inspector Marlott that Sir William Chester is more than capable of murder in pursuit of his great obsession: galvanism. Indeed, she has seen him killing in the name of science before. She then leaves town, which is frankly a blessing as Martin’s delivery has about as much life as the fictional monster her character created.
Marlott sets out to investigate Sir William (Samuel West), but discovers that maybe it’s his cousin, Garnett (Mark Bazely) who is a more likely fit.
The excellent Robbie Gee makes another appearance as Marlott persuades Billy to confess he supplied the bodies of children to Garnett. Marlott takes the evidence to his boss, Home Secretary Peel, who promises to deal with it personally. Next thing we know Garnett’s body ends up in William Chester’s office at the hospital, wrists slashed with a scalpel, seemingly by his own hand.
Meanwhile Boz’s expose in The Chronicle has put the Anatomy Act in jeopardy, Sir Bentley Warburton (foppishly played by Elliot Cowan) demands an emergency sitting of parliament.
Peel digs the dirt on Sir Bentley with a dawn raid on a sweet shop; the same sweet shop where Warburton gave Nightingale the slip in a previous episode. It seems the proprietor’s perfumed pompadour isn’t the only thing peculiar about the premises; it’s home to some seemingly salacious goings on. The raid brings some much-needed levity to the episode, with shrieks of “Please don’t tell my wife,” and men in frocks running this way and that. Threatened with scandal Warburton withdraws his opposition and the act is passed.
Marlott is now in line to become supervisor of the newly-created Metropolitan Police Force, and everything is nicely wrapped up.
Except… Chester has form for making things look like suicide, and he has plenty to gain from the Anatomy Act. Namely a plentiful supply of dead bodies to experiment on in his pursuit of galvanism. Marlott now believes Chester has succeeded in bringing the dead back to life, and that the original abomination actually crawled its way to the river…
Sean Bean continues to play the dogged inspector true to form. A veritable ray of sunshine to oppose his dour melancholy comes in the form of Flora, excellently played by Eloise Smyth.
Not much has been made of Marlott’s condition. We get about one interrupted dream or hallucination per episode. It would have been nice to see him descend into madness, mirroring his discovery of the wretched and corrupt world around him. Instead he looks a bit tired and has an expanding sore on his hand, hidden by a dirty bandage.
While there’s a lot going on this episode, you can’t help but feel that the whole series has perhaps missed an opportunity. Aside from the literary characters this could be any political drama set in 19th century London. That’s not to say any of it is necessarily bad, but it could have been made better by maybe diving deeper into some of the Blake/Frankenstein mythos instead of briefly hinting at it and leading with the politics. With only one episode left, it’s a bit late to turn things completely around, but here’s hoping for at least a monster, even if it is only Sean Bean with no nose.
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/21_zpsbawucwlp.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/21_zpsbawucwlp.png.html)
The Good
Marlott gets a kiss.
Plenty of political intrigue.
Moves the plot along at a brisk pace.
The Bad
Anna Maxwell Martin’s insipid performance as Mary Shelley is really starting to grate.
Perhaps there’ll be a monster in the last episode…
http://www.mcmbuzz.com/2015/12/12/the-frankenstein-chronicles-s01e05-the-frankenstein-murders-review/
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She then leaves town, which is frankly a blessing as Martin’s delivery has about as much life as the fictional monster her character created.
I think she's rather good; something so nineteenth century about her.
Not much has been made of Marlott’s condition. We get about one interrupted dream or hallucination per episode. It would have been nice to see him descend into madness, mirroring his discovery of the wretched and corrupt world around him.
Oh, it's there, but we don't need to be bashed on the head with it. If he goes mad, there will be no season two, so no, we don't want that.
... but here’s hoping for at least a monster, even if it is only Sean Bean with no nose.
LOL How old is this guy?
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I haven't seen a review for the season's finale yet,but imo it just screams out for a second season. :thumbsup:
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Yes, it does!
I didn't see any of the last half hour coming. Very cleverly done in that if it is indeed the end, the viewer isn't left hanging and unsatisfied, but it could easily be continued.
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:applaud: :drip: I second that! Cheers to Season 2!
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The Frankenstein Chronicles S01E06 “Lost And Found” REVIEW
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/12_zps9rkfpn1r.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/12_zps9rkfpn1r.png.html)
Essential Plot Points:
Episode The Sixth: In which our inspector is stitched up
Lord Daniel Hervey is found to be the villain of the piece.
Inspector Marlott is set up for Flora’s murder, and swings for it…
…but returns
And so we reach the end of our tale, the final episode of The Frankenstein Chronicles. Six episodes later and Inspector Marlott (Sean Bean) has followed clues up dark alleys, down dirty tunnels, and all around Olde London Towne. Mind, if you’d only watched the first episode, then came back for the finalé, you probably wouldn’t have missed much plot-wise. Which isn’t to say the episodes in between were bad, or lacking substance, just that as far as the main storyline goes, they were pretty much filler.
So it would seem our poor Inspector Marlott has been looking for monsters in all the wrong places. The Chesters were not to blame for the creature washed up way back in episode one. Lord Daniel Hervey (Ed Stoppard) is the culprit, and has been up to all sorts of diabolical goings on at his remote “hospital”. Upon investigation Marlott finds Alice, the little girl lost, also from episode one. In the process however he gets himself caught by Hervey’s slow manservant Loris (Brian Milligan), the real “monster” of Smithfield market, and killer of children.
Next thing he knows, Marlott awakens at home in bed with a bloody shirt. Laying on the kitchen table is Flora with her throat slit. Nightingale chooses the wrong moment to visit his sweetheart and finds Marlott leaning over the body with bloody knife in hand.
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/22_zpsrfezvqdk.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/22_zpsrfezvqdk.png.html)
There follows a swift trial in which Nightingale as the only witness damns Marlott to the hangman’s noose.
There’s a great scene as Marlott is taken away to the gallows in a cart pursued by a group of reporters, brandishing their notebooks and pencils like paparazzi. It’s also nice to see some old friends turn up to see the inspector off; Boz, Pritty and Ma Bishop all make an appearance. It’s little touches like this which has lifted the series up from a run of the mill 19th century political drama.
As Marlott drops and the noose tightens, we see his vision of the forest, his dead wife standing by an empty crib, he looks up to the sky to see an eclipse, everything fades to white and the credits roll.
No, hang on with the credits. There’s still half an episode to go. We hear Daniel exclaiming, “He lives,” as Marlott wakes up in a laboratory. He has been brought back to life, not with the elemental force of galvanism, but with the natural science of extract of baby foetus: perhaps the first medical use of stem cells.
Hervey seems convinced that he’s done everyone a favour. In “cleansing” Marlott and curing him of his syphilis, he has created the evolution of mankind, and the perfect wedding present for his sister. She doesn’t quite see it the same way, and is generally a bit upset that he got her a revived Sean Bean.
So Marlott has now become the monster, the beast with the face of a man.
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/52_zpsjisbut8f.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/52_zpsjisbut8f.png.html)
The episode ends with a musical montage (set to Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”); Lady Hervey marrying Warburton; Alice returning home; Marlott escaping from the tower. Hervey’s manservant Loris gets his comeuppance with a fork in the eye and a particularly crunchy ride down some stone steps. Before the credits roll for real, we see Marlott shambling away from the tower, destination unknown.
And so we come to the end of the series. Production values have been excellent throughout, in particular the costuming and millinery. Acting has also been (for the most part) top-notch; Vanessa Kirby as lady Jemima Hervey is a particular standout, especially in this episode as she comes to terms with Marlott’s descent into syphilis-ridden madness, subsequent death and then re-animation.
The series had enough political intrigue to keep you interested, and guessing who the bad guys really were. Behind all the talk of monsters, beasts and murder, there was a decent drama hiding. The Frankenstein angle seem a little overplayed, preparing you for a darker, more monstrous drama that the show never intended to be. Maybe the show has only been setting the scene for season two, with Sean Bean returning as the avenging monster with a heart of gold.
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/71_zpsfrsgmyhc.png) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/Sean%20Bean/sean%20bean%202/frankenstein/71_zpsfrsgmyhc.png.html)
The Good
A monster!
We find the real creator of the composite corpse.
Sean Bean and Vanessa Kirby make for a great beauty and the beast.
Talk about having your cake and eating it – Sean Bean dies, because, well, he’s Sean Bean… that’s what he does. But then he lives! Was he cast solely to give that whole twist some an extra dimension?
The Bad:
Everything in between this episode and the first was pretty much filler as far as the plot is concerned.
And The Random:
Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” was a staple in horror film soundtracks from back in the day. It’s a great and effective piece of music, but it’s use here is a little cheesy.
Apparently it’s Lord and Lady Hervey, and not Harvey as we had previously written!
“He lives!” is clearly a nod to all those Frankenstein films where Dr Frankenstein hollers something similar. There’s no such moment in the original novel, but in the famous 1931 Frankenstein movie the Doctor yells, “It’s ALIVE!” while in Bride Of Frankenstein (1935) he cries, “SHE’s alive!”
http://www.mcmbuzz.com/2015/12/19/the-frankenstein-chronicles-s01e06-lost-and-found-review/
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Episode The Sixth: In which our inspector is stitched up
:mutley:
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The Frankenstein Chronicles episode 6 review: Lost And Found
The Sean Bean-fronted Gothic cop show shuffles successfully off into the cold beyond for its closing chapter...
This review contains spoilers.
1.6 Lost And Found
So many potential plot directions had been set up for the finale of The Frankenstein Chronicles. The mysteries of missing children, stitched corpses, suspicious surgeons and untrustworthy politicians had stretched so coiled-tendon tense that the final snap promised an electrified punch. That the hit didn’t really ever come, leaving us flinching and “…huh?” was confusing, unfulfilling… and ballsy as hell.
This is how ITV mystery-thrillers are supposed to go – weird murder/murders, good casting, red herring, red herring, red herring, wrong person framed, good guy turns out to be bad guy, showdown in last ten minutes, hero wins/dies, credits roll, audience satisfied: can move on with lives. Lost And Found didn’t get the memo – instead, blowing its Big Bad reveal early on, jettisoning the tension, then just kinda… following the protagonist around until the credits. And it was fantastic.
Just think of all that potential denied. We’d been teased (and teased, and teased) with reanimated creatures galvanised into life to be revealed at last – maybe they’d descend on John Marlott, Joseph Nightingale, and Flora No-Last-Name-That’s-Not-a-Good-Sign in a bloody showdown by the Hackney marshes? Nope, no zombie hoard this week. Mary Shelley, scarpering out of London sharpish after being dragged half to death in the tabloids, showed a flicker of excitement when hearing reanimation was possible and totally happening in the capital in last week’s ep. That was promising – would she enter the melee with a flintlock to help our heroes here at the end? No. Sir William Garnet, heavily hinted as the villain of the series – he’d saunter in and explain his evil plot to Marlott at gun point, sic Billy the Childsnatcher on him, rig something to blow, right? He didn’t show up at all. All those things could have happened, but who would have predicted how we would actually spend the episode while the time ticked down?
There was some satiation of expectations, sure. Marlott died, as Sean Bean characters do – Sean Bean performances being just too darn good for this cruel world we live in. And the reanimation element was never going to be wasted, not when there’s an opportunity to bring him back; we knew that. Apparent good guy Sir Daniel Hervey had his heel-turn (genre rules dictating that should happen in the last ten minutes, but it came closer to the first. Also, while we’re on this point, Nightingale should have been seemingly mortally wounded, Marlott should have struggled with Hervey for a knife, win, rescue Nightingale – you get it). Herv even slapped an underling like a bad guy should, giving Marlott some nefarious side-eye while he was at it. That’s what you’d want and expect. But that was it in terms of giving the audience what we’ve been given over and over again and ready ourselves for as a result – nothing else was sacred, even the sanctity of Marlott’s dead pig race evidence was ripped away. The dead pig floated to Greenwich, but guess what – the super-villain headquarters wasn’t in Greenwich at all. It was opposite Greenwich. Can we ever trust a dead pig race again?
Instead of big final fights and revelations, the episode bravely went with just…yeah, showing Marlott’s afterlife unfold in an unhurried way – Brother Hervey calling him ‘his Adam’, trying to feed him, showing him some kindness. Sister Hervey being given a roped n’ stitched undead Sean Bean as a wedding gift (better than a toaster – also, this ticks off the ‘at least one completely nuts element per instalment’ requirement that I assume the production/writing team set for themselves during the creation process), with the suggestion they’d carry on a relationship in secret. Then a closing montage set to Gothy organ music of Marlott escaping the Hervey compound, and walking out and away from where we can watch him.
I still can’t figure out whether the ending was a squib that didn’t go off, or a shot at something deeper than series like this are usually allowed to aim for. Or if it was even intended as a clever/cruel bait-switch for the viewers – I like that idea the best, but the actual intention doesn’t matter. The finale was surprising, and weird, and the cast was great throughout. How many other shows could have made disappointment so satisfying?
http://news.abomus.com/en/UK/news/kultura/frankenstein-chronicles-episode-6-review-lost-and-found
Sister Hervey being given a roped n’ stitched undead Sean Bean as a wedding gift (better than a toaster
:mutley: and much hotter!!!
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The Frankenstein Chronicles
Series 1, Episode 6 - "Lost and Found"
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In the season finalé of The Frankenstein Chronicles, we finally have our monsters, the residential mad scientist is finally revealed, as is the answer to the only real question on our lips: will Sean Bean’s John Marlott make it to the end without dying? Well, all situations aren’t as mutually exclusive or clear cut as they might at first appear to be. “Lost and Found” covers the most ground of any episode thus far, attempting to wrap up events in the first three acts before dropping an absolute bombshell on the narrative in the final act, delivering on the slow-burn sci-fi horror promises of the season arc in a way that will make fans heavily petition for a second series should it get cancelled.
Why would it not get renewed? One of the issues I’ve not really addressed is how The Frankenstein Chronicles has only been aired on the ITV Encore channel in the UK, which (approximately) nobody has heard of, and can’t even be accessed without a subscription to Sky, Sky Go, or Now TV. For the love of all that’s decent, this show deserves a proper full-fat audience. Whether the A&E network over in the US can make a decent fist of it, we’ll have to wait and see; but take my advice and pre-order the DVD if you can’t get access to ITV Encore. It’s a small price to pay to watch one of the most interesting shows this year, and if you love gothic drama then it’s a no brainer (or a Frankenstein monster brain at the very least).
Picking up after last week’s revelation that child-raping villain Garnet Chester (Mark Bazeley) may have been set up by his cousin, Sir William Chester (Samuel West), to take the fall for the hideous acts of “recombination”, the story tantalizingly floats the idea that this is where the journey ends. Marlott is waiting after hours outside of Chester’s hospital, and witnesses his own boss, Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), make a suspicious nocturnal visit, leading him to surmise: “It confirms my worst fears, he knows what Sir Wiliiam is up to; he has done all along, and this monstrosity reaches to the very heart of our government”. Case closed. Light up a Meerschaum, pour yourself a Cognac, and kick off your Hush Puppies, Sherlock; you’ve earned it.
Except, when Marlott returns home to pick up his old service pistol and has what appears to be a full blown syphilis-induced paranoid attack on his young ward, it becomes apparent that we’ve all been duped: it’s not shady Sir William, but the munificent Lord Daniel Hervey (Ed Stoppard) who has been “steeped in blood, in ways you can’t even begin to imagine”, whilst his man-servant, Lloris (Brian Milligan), is the child-snatching “monster” that all the children fear. Cue the dramatic suspense sound effect!
This then becomes something of an uphill battle for Marlott in convincing others that he’s now got the right suspect (suffering from the “the boy that cried were-wolf” syndrome, perhaps?). When Marlott enquires of Lady Hervey (Vanessa Kirby) “Has he told you about raising the dead?”, he may as well have also asked about Daniel’s ability to crack the moon in half with a well-placed expulsion of wind—there is no way that Marlott can sound credible whilst he’s ranting like a frothy mouthed foreteller of the End of Days—even though they are fast approaching the predicted “World without God”.
It’s also at this point that Marlott deserves his first reprimand of the episode for a Keystone Cops-esque blunder, when he realizes that Lord Hervey’s Abbey hospital is on the other side of the river from the exact spot where he’s been placing the blame. How did Marlott not make this connection, and why didn’t I think about looking across the river? I wouldn’t be surprised if on revisiting earlier footage we could see the Abbey in the background, possibly with Lord Hervey stood on the embankment, flipping us the bird. It’s not the last time I kicked myself whilst this week’s episode laughed at me.
Without Nightingale (Richie Campbell)—who has ironically decided that his job in law enforcement is more important—Marlott ventures into Lord Hervey’s territory, passing over the Cave Baestium floor seal and mingling amongst the same ruined grounds where he saw Alice (Jessie Ross) in his “visions” from earlier episodes. Once more, when the reality of police work fails Marlott, the mystical fronds of the narrative lead him towards the truth, which is rapidly of limited success and comfort for Marlott, who finds Alice still alive in a dark underground cellar, but in quick succession finds himself knocked out, bound to a chair, and forced to drink a green liquid as crows circle and caw overhead.
Marlott manages to wake up in his own bed (which is a feat he was obviously assisted with—I’ve drunk my fair share of green liquids), with the caveat being that he’s covered in someone else’s blood (I wouldn’t know anything about that…). Once Marlott gains his bearings, he discovers some shocking truths. Lying on his bed, the Inspector is finally confronted by Blake’s works, which Flora (Eloise Smyth) laid out on the floor for him last week.
Getting to this point was one of the longest teases of the show, and the pay off made me hate myself. Arranged in two concentric circular patterns, taking the first letter from each point in the inner ring spells CAVE, with the outer circle spelling BAESTIUM. You know, exactly like the seal at the Abbey. Were this review in an audio format, to accurately convey my emotions at that point, the rest of the sound file would be an extended, painful raptor scream from Jurassic Park, followed by the whimpering sound of a barrel of crying puppies—if puppies could also mutter expletives.
As early as the second episode, where Blake’s works were introduced, I suggested that the images contained accompanying text; the first letter of each is made bold, which may be a clue like LYCA was, or the suggestion may be less convoluted as three of the four panels can be plainly read and understood within the context of the show: “Adam”, “Christ”, and “Monster”, but in the end, I literally couldn’t put all the pieces together. Furthermore, these are the same artworks that have been used in the opening titles for the show. The solution to the entire case has been before us from within the first couple of minutes of the first episode. I admire the tenacity of the filmmakers, but I also want to hurt them for making me feel as utterly useless as Marlott must do in the last episode, when his greatest clues are offered when it’s too late to act upon them.
Midway through the episode, Blake’s artworks aren’t even the big surprise of the scene. Remember the blood? That used to belong inside poor Flora, who is now resting on the dining room table as a centerpiece for the dead—which Marlott discovers at the exact moment that Nightingale walks into the picture.
After these revelations, The Frankenstein Chronicles sets off on a path that may divide viewers. With Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin) gone, there are no more contextual historical revelations aside from Hervey’s confession; and with the politics completely jettisoned (aside from brief considerations about Peel’s position in all of this), the narrative focuses exclusively on Sean Bean, who gives a career best performance as a man who has been wrongly accused of murder—and whose life simply gets worse from there.
From a prison cell, Peel refuses to believe Marlott’s accusations as Lord Hervey appears as the Devil on Peel’s shoulder to reveal that “the patient misconstrues the Doctor as the source of all his agony”. Nightingale compounds the situation, giving a court-room testimony that Marlott’s behavior was “deranged”, and Marlott’s defense lawyer also “helps” by offering that his client was “not in possession of his moral and mental faculties” due to his venereal disease. This chain of devastating events explains why, in addition to the symbolic connotations, Marlott was burdened with an STD throughout the season—the corruption of the physical body allegedly reflects the state of the inner soul. If only there was a way to have a different body.
Oddly enough, for a show that has taken its time getting to the climax, I thought that the whole build-up in this episode towards the last quarter was more rushed than it needed to be. It feels like the season was designed to be an episode or two longer, and these events—which are arguably the showcase for Sean Bean and his phenomenal ability to play a down-trodden and distressed everyman—are greatly truncated; or perhaps, the reason that John Marlott’s decline’s so affecting is precisely down to how swiftly he has been brought down by the political, social, legal, and moral failings of his era. When Marlott exclaims “I’m not a murderer!”, leaping forward to be restrained by both arms being manacled to bench, the constrictions of his world are made manifest.
Another moment that feels slightly off is when Boz (Ryan Sampson) meets Marlott in his cell and explains that he’s “leaving the newspaper business [and] going freelance with a book of sketches; thought perhaps this visit might form the basis for one of them”. Yes, this is confirmation that Boz is Charles Dickens, the author of Sketches by Boz, and is famous for his observations about “Scenes” about places such as Newgate prison, but this is hardly the time to trumpet a new business venture—even if it is a pretext for sending
Boz out to find Alice (Jessie Ross)—Marlott’s Get Out of Jail Free ticket—in order to make the following scenes more tense. I’m surprised that Edgar Allen Poe didn’t take the opportunity to play the priest offering to take confession, so he could tell Marlott he had just started his writing career too.
And with that, Sean Bean—sorry John Marlott—dies on the gallows, kicking, struggling, and with a burlap sack on his head.
And then, he wakes up to the sound of “He lives”.
Uh oh.
Lord Hervey has taken it upon himself to bring Marlott back from the dead, which for the briefest of moments appears to be almost charitable as he shows Marlott his own hand—minus syphilis—but then, along with Marlott, we notice with the new addition of thread sewn around the wrists, and then the neck, and then we hear Marlott’s animalistic moans as he realizes he has a different body: somebody else’s body.
Marlott spends the rest of the episode crying, moaning, or entirely silent, and you can’t really blame him. The detective has crossed a line he had no intention of passing, and it would be impossible for him to close the case now, at the hands of the criminal he’s been chasing for ten episodes. Marlott has also been separated from the afterlife reunion with his deceased wife and child, and it’s quite devastating to witness the end point of the season’s journey featuring a man—our hero—who now wants nothing more than to be left alone to die.
Lord Hervey, on the other hand, is like a kid at Christmas with a shiny new present, proudly explaining that Marlott is “the next step, an existence where there is no suffering, because there is no death”, and going so far as to parallel Doctor Frankenstein, calling his new recombination “The One. My Adam.” Yeah, because that turned out well. We discover that through the tutelage of Johann Dipple (who we looked at in the episode 3 review: he checked out Sir William’s PhD thesis. Damn it, another tiny clue Marlott missed!), Lord Hervey has arrived at a point beyond the work of the Chesters and galvanism, announcing to a bewildered Marlott: “Perhaps you were expecting electricity?
The keys to life lie deeper than that, much deeper. Inside us. All around”. All of the galvanism talk throughout the season was a massive red herring! Hervey also casually mentions that “the substance that brought [Marlott] back from the grave came from [Flora’s] feotus and thousands of others like it”. Just when I thought he was beginning to channel his inner-Wet Wet Wet to say the answer was “Love is all around us”; nope, dead babies; dead babies are all around us. Not quite as catchy, but Hervey seems pleased by the revelation.
Lord Hervey also explains that the main reason he chose Marlott as his test subject was due to his sister, Lady Hervey (Vanessa Kirby) proclaiming the virtue of her white knight. (Note to self: don’t make Game of Thrones-styled eternal pledges to women I barely know; it never ends well). Lord Hervey is the classic villain who can’t grasp the concept of the wrong that he has done, which leads him to bring his own sister into the fold, offering Monster Marlott as a grotesque “wedding gift”. Was this on her Amazon wedding gift list? I fear that we’ll never find out.
Vanessa Kirby, as Lady Hervey, perfectly executes a sublime horror scream response, backing into a corner, hands to face, eyes wide open, and making unnaturally discomforting shrieking sounds, whilst her brother almost laughs with incredulity at her disconcertment. I noticed that in this episode, Lady Hervey wears a variety of green outfits; has this always been the case? For comparison, Mina’s (Winona Ryder) clothes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are mainly green, because according to costume designer Eiko Ishioka, she wanted to symbolically reflect “her youth, simplicity, and naiveté”.
Conversely, green is also the color most commonly associated with Boris Karloff-era iterations of Frankenstein, so this could be her Bride of Frankenstein wedding dress color, to contrast with her actual wedding, where she is wearing a more traditional whitish grey color scheme. (Not that white became a tradition until 1840—13 years after The Frankenstein Chronicles is set—when Queen Victoria was married.)
Lady Hervey makes it her “penance” to help Marlott, but in the last throes of the episode, and of the season, to the soundtrack of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor (a horror classic used in the opening titles of the 1931 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and more famously in Hammer Horror’s 1962 iteration of The Phantom of the Opera), Marlott stabs his captor, Lloris, in the eye with a fork and escapes, running down the path out of the Abbey to freedom, whilst shots are intercut of Lady Hervey’s wedding—with Lord Hervey in tow, so he’ll still be roaming the shadows of London in season two—and Alice returning home to her parents.
Does The Frankenstein Chronicles deliver us a satisfying ending? It perfectly sets up the next season in one major way, as I’m confident that we’re all wondering what a Monster Marlott will be capable of. Lady Hervey’s wedding replaced what was sure to be Nightingale and Flora’s wedding until events conspired against them, and as such it doesn’t really carry as much emotional weight. Lady Hervey (sorry, Lady Bentley) is now trapped in a loveless marriage to a man who has now given her brother, Lord Harvey, the potential for unlimited extra funds for his experiments, so it will be interesting to see how he deals with Marlott’s escape.
Nightingale fizzled out for me, so I’m not in a rush to see him again—even though he’s probably the first person Marlott would turn to as he can now corroborate his story, and I’m sure Nightingale would be up for some revenge. Now that Alice has returned, Boz can expose Lord Hervey as Marlott intended, but I would expect that storyline to be snuffed out fairly quickly once the engines of politics and power start to grind. It’s a shame that Mary Shelley left the series in episode 5, but with her departure, there’s room for more cameos in the second series, as we edge ever closer to the Victorian period of English history.
On balance, the season ended just as brilliantly grim as it started except, instead of a floating dead body, we now have one sprinting and moaning about London. Have the scales started to tip from the pretenses of rational science to the monstrous and truly fantastical? I’m looking forward to finding out in the second chapter of The Frankenstein Chronicles.
http://www.popmatters.com/review/the-frankenstein-chronicles-series-1-episode-6-lost-and-found/
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I’m looking forward to finding out in the second chapter of The Frankenstein Chronicles.
Does he know something we don't? That'd be awesome.
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Monstrous times, but no Frankenstein in this smart reimagining
There have been plenty of Frankenstein ‘reimaginings’ (as we call them these days) over the years, but one excellent recent example didn’t even feature a Frankenstein at all.
The Frankenstein Chronicles was filling our home screens (albeit tucked away on ITV Encore) in late 2015, just as the big screen gave us Victor Frankenstein – a disappointing reworking, which aimed to do for this film classic what Guy Ritchie had done for Sherlock Holmes. It managed the impressive period sets, lots of noise, shouting and fighting, but not much else.
Igor (Daniel Radcliffe) is promoted to a main role (the Watson to Frankenstein’s Holmes), but the central characters aren’t very engaging, and even the big climactic scene in a Scottish castle doesn’t have much to commend it, apart from an appearance by Mark Gatiss.
In contrast, The Frankenstein Chronicles was produced on a much lower budget, by the talented folk at Rainmark Films. But it was much more gripping, and dealt a final episode that had such unexpected twists, it left me in a state which a younger person might describe as OMG WTF.
Set in London in 1827, it doesn’t actually feature Frankenstein, but centres on a River Police officer, played by Sean Bean. Instead of following Frank in his lab, this focuses on the investigation which follows the discovery of a child’s body – stitched together from the parts of several kids – washed up on the banks of the Thames.
This London is cold and dirty, and a pretty monstrous place to live – with hunger, disease, and violence the everyday realities. It also involves some real-life characters – Robert Peel, William Blake, ‘Boz’ (the young reporter Charles Dickens?), and Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, as well as smart references to other period TV pieces.
No more spoilers, because as I write this (January 1st 2016) you probably haven’t seen it yet (why was it hidden away on that channel at 10pm in midweek?); but I will tell you I found it cleverly written, brilliantly acted, good looking, gripping, and ultimately shocking.
Most importantly, it demonstrated a truly imaginative way of reviving the Frankenstein story. And in a ‘reimagining’, that’s really what you need.
https://pieceofpinkpie.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/monstrous-times-but-no-frankenstein-in-this-smart-reimagining/
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“The Frankenstein Murders” – Frankenstein on TV and Film AD 2016
A special romantic catch-up with Jokerside’s favourite morality tale this Valentine’s Day! Love has a crucial place in Mary Shelley’s tale and Jokerside takes a look at 2015’s Victor Frankenstein on film and The Frankenstein Chronicles on TV through many glasses of pink sparkling wine. They’re needed. ❤ ❤ Spoilers abound ❤ ❤
The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015)
Similarly transposing the myth to London is ITV Encore’s The Frankenstein Chronicles. But this time, that relocation is very much the point for all the publicity that hailed it as a reimagining of the Frankenstein myth.
With a wonderfully atmospheric start that manages to blend the music of Sherlock with the look of recent Dickens adaptations, The Frankenstein Chronicles is very much a product of its time. But it also carries the breadth of its influences on its stitched sleeve from the start. That opening, set in the Greenwich peninsula of London is pure Great Expectations. It’s London of 1827, dodging the Victorian era by a few years to remain Georgian, and instead of a startled Pip Pirrup on Bugsby’s Marshes, there’s the grisly discovery of a young girl’s corpse, with twitching, stitched hand “Parts of at least seven children. Disarticulated and reassembled” as they say.
The heart of The Frankenstein Chronicles is Sean Bean’s grizzled, plain-talking John Marlott, a name carrying a cunning reference to Bean’s famous role in Sharpe, and the kind of bullish and moralistic policeman familiar from many a 19th century police drama. For the Chronicles are indeed a police procedural, with Bean appearing in almost every scene. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, where neither Igor not the good Doctor are really allowed to fall into society, but always sit beyond it, Marlott’s rough and ready copper fall into the mysteries of high society are at the root of the story. And for all the intricacies of the plot it boils down to a resolutely simple whodunit, or whoisFrankenstein?
Rooted to the twists of the tale, and as interesting as historically-stretching, is the blend of William Blake and none other than Mary Shelley alongside Robert Peel and countless other historical characters. None come off particularly well. But intriguingly, set a decade on from the publication, Shelley, played by the ever-excellent Anna Maxwell Martin, is dogged by her novel. As the roots of that come to bear on the present, throwing up a number of medical red herrings it’s a shame that Marlott’s character is the only person in the country never to have heard of Frankenstein. A lot hinges on that, but still, we find out he’s been quite preoccupied. Cu: many shots of him poring over the tone.
Credit to pulling in William Blake, albeit briefly, and casting Steven Berkoff in the role. It’s a nice acknowledgement of Blake as influence on Shelley, and her as influence on the story itself.
Chronicles ramps up references wherever it can, from the reappropriated monastery hospice to the heavy influence of Dickens which carries through the episodes far beyond the opening nod to Great Expectations. Soon Marlott would take a Nancy under his wing and tussle with her Bill Sykes. Come the peak of Episode four, a journalistic expose makes no bones of the links to Jack the Ripper and the threat of a surgeon-like serial killer in London’s midst.
It’s an interesting and strong conceit, with the grizzled fearless undercover copper uneasily mixing with the aristocracy against the backdrop of Peel’s dedication to push through his Anatomy Act. Passed in 1832, that Act gave surgeons greater remit to dissect corpses, tackling the public outcry over grave robbing. Of course, it eliminated much of the everyday horror that fuelled by the likes of Burke and Hare and inspired much gothic horror including Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein and Dracula. “Medical science has grown beyond their comprehension” – the associated superstition and the suspicion of hoaxes the truth adds considerable substance to the tale. And it’s satisfyingly odd when it becomes key to the extraordinary series finale.
It’s unfortunate that significant clues as to the villain can be found by looking at who is fictional and who real in this universe. Also, that Marlott is afflicted from Syphilis from the off. We’re left in no doubt as to the seriousness of the disease – with a graphic representation of the tertiary phase – and while the affliction’s symptoms add a crucial ambiguity to what’s real and what’s not, it follows similar patterns laid down by the well trailed occurrence of consumption in Penny Dreadful earlier in 2015.
Like Victor Frankenstein, and very much an indication of where Frankenstein finds itself in the 21st century there’s great exploration of who’s actually the monster. There’s a broad field to choose from and although it serves up a Frankenstein figure, it’s bold enough to actually remove the figure where Victor Frankenstein suffered by putting him front and centre.
There’s a poor pun, given without irony, but bound to raise an ear in a Frankenstein tale. In all it’s a rather complicated and sprawling plot that really all boils down to love. It’s interesting to catch the older Mary Shelley, abandoned by life, to drip in the morals surrounding abortion and then a rather feeble love story between the girl Bean saves and his idealistic young deputy. It’s the shocking resolution to that which leads to Marlott’s downfall. And there’s even time for the unlikely love affair between Marlott and sister of the villain of the piece, the far out of his league Lady Jemima Hervey. Lady Hervey herself pledged in a loveless marriage and quite probably come the end, the unluckiest character in the piece. She, as with Marlott are merely pawns in a large game of political machination versus the work of an utter mad man.
From the start the other unlucky contender, Marlott, is too haunted. By his disease, his past and the growing mystery of his lost child and wife, he’s too dogged to be anything other than doomed. “Come back to us John, don’t forsake God…” – “God’s forsaken me…” come the hallucinations, apparently prophetic glimpses and warnings.
Come the end, the drawn out twist conclusion is remarkably unexpected considering the signposts that followed Marlott everywhere. It really plays the misdirection well. And come the inevitable, the misconceived love story suddenly shifts focus. This isn’t about the love of Frankenstein or Igor, but love felt for the creature itself, Hervey’s “Adam”. It’s particularly poignant as we see Marlott ripped back from the afterlife with his wife, one of the key sequences sitting up there with the Marlott’s deduction that the young corpse he found had crawled to the river, not washed up. Lord Hervey’s most successful creature becomes the method for the mad man’s sister’s absolution (she also being its aunt) and even little Lyca/Alyc, the search for whom lay at the heart of the story, is returned safe and well. The love that emerges come the end wanders more into the territory of King Kong, but also manages to capture the gloomy sentiment of Shelley’s novel astoundingly well; quite the opposite of Victor Frankenstein.
Effectively shot, if highly bleak, Chronicles mainly suffers from its over-earnest seriousness – even come the extreme melodrama of the organ scenes at the end. There’s no relish in the Frankenstein of the story, even when he appears. The script and over produced grime and authenticity is similar to the slight stiltedness of BBC and Amazon’s Ripper Street. It packs in the horror jumps, which taught me to be scared of open doorways, but not an ounce of necessary humour. The ending is sequel friendly for what was originally conceived as a miniseries and I wonder if they’ll get the chance to correct that. The situation the leads find them in suggest it would be a tall task to add even a mote of comedy.
Flashbacks reveal Shelley’s influences and the despair that came from experiments at James Hogg’s abode. And aside from that experiment with galvanisation not producing a monster from, the friends’ playing with dark science comes across a bit like Flatliners. Still, it’s particularly striking as we see little other evidence of the villains hard at their own evil work. And it’s the flashback that kicks the series into gear and intriguingly turns this programme into the real creature of her inspiration. Given her sudden, awkward and disappointing exit, a sequel would do well to expand Mary Shelley’s role.
Most of all, the flawed but worthy The Frankenstein Chronicles must be awarded added points for painting it’s inspiration in such a terrible light. As Mary Shelley says of the book that dragged her family name into disrepute and left her an outcast: “It has caused great misery in this world and I must make sure it doesn’t cause anymore”.
Well, indeed. Frankenstein, making the world a better place for 198 years.
http://jokerside.com/2016/02/14/the-frankenstein-murders-frankenstein-on-tv-and-film-ad-2016/
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I went to see Uncle Vanya at the theatre here the other night. Vanessa Kirby (Lady Hervey) was in it as the beautiful Yelena. She is unbelievably THIN. She was good in the play but the most thrilling female perfomance of the night was by Jessica Brown Findlay, who played the doomed Lady Sybil in Downton Abbey. Here she is playing a plain spinster torn apart by unrequited love. She was totally, heart-stoppingly BRILLIANT .. !
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The Frankenstein Chronicles DVD Review
(http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad116/patchfolk/SDC_2312143_2016-13-5--00-15-37_zpswklvj49a.jpg) (http://s927.photobucket.com/user/patchfolk/media/SDC_2312143_2016-13-5--00-15-37_zpswklvj49a.jpg.html)
Aside from finding that most re-tellings of the tale (perhaps unsurprisingly) add their own take to the story… I found the main character Frankenstein’s monster quite a sad one. So when the chance to review The Frankenstein Chronicles came up I jumped at the chance.
So with that background and history as a launching point… I am really looking forward to where this series will go and thankfully series 2 has been picked up… now I have to wait! :(
http://www.impulsegamer.com/the-frankenstein-chronicles-dvd-review/
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‘The Frankenstein Chronicles’ Review: Sean Bean’s Netflix Series Comes Roaring to Life After Three Years in Purgatory
Brought back from the dead and well-stitched together, "The Frankenstein Chronicles" is a solid, strong-boned detective story.
Much like the mysterious characters’ laborious attempts to create living beings from dead flesh, “The Frankenstein Chronicles” had a long journey to American audiences. Acquired by A&E in 2015 to bolster its fledgling scripted originals programming, the Sean Bean-starring period drama never made it to the Arts & Entertainment network. Despite success with “Bates Motel,” the cable network couldn’t break through the peak TV pack with anything other than reality television (long live “Storage Wars”), so it scrapped the written word and moved on from such “Chronicles.”
But “Frankenstein” refused to die. The first season was met with strong reviews in the United Kingdom, airing on ITV’s Encore station, and was renewed for a second six-episode run. That much content cannot be ignored in today’s buyer’s market, especially with Bean’s internationally known mug leading both seasons. In swooped the streaming giant, and another Netflix “original” was born.
So was it worth the wait? Largely, yes. “The Frankenstein Chronicles” is far from an epic, addictive spectacle to rival the best dramas on modern television, but, as it stands, it’s the best new drama Netflix has offered in 2018 — miles ahead of past period dreck like “Marco Polo” (not to mention the company’s low-point, a.k.a. “Gypsy”) and offers more solidly built science-fiction than what’s seen in “Altered Carbon” and “The OA.” Plus, the end of Season 1 is perhaps the most Sean Bean-y scene Sean Bean has ever Sean been in.
Thanks in no small part to nuanced turns from Bean and “The Crown” star Vanessa Kirby(!), “The Frankenstein Chronicles” feels authentic even when it’s dropping names like Mary Shelley and alluding to characters like Dracula. The end of Season 1 is just terrific, both setting up the second season to a plethora of possibilities and concluding Marlott’s arc in clever fashion) not to mention the meta Sean Bean-ness of it all). While it’s unlikely to be remembered for as long as it took to make, “Frankenstein” certainly earned its shot at a long life on Netflix.
“The Frankenstein Chronicles” Seasons 1 and 2 are streaming now on Netflix.
http://www.indiewire.com/2018/02/frankenstein-chronicles-review-netflix-season-1-season-2-1201931568/
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The Frankenstein Chronicles: It’s Alive! Or is it?
Originally released for British television, The Frankenstein Chronicles (a two-season series), has dropped into Netflix’s new queue for U.S. binge watcher consumption
Part tale of the macabre, part police procedural, part historical drama, this show has a little bit that might appeal to many — though with no fast-paced action, gun fights or chase scenes, it certainly isn’t for everyone.
Mirroring the pages of long-dead poets and the poisoned pen of the late Mary Shelley, The Frankenstein Chronicles takes the long road to reach its climax. Though not just another regurgitation of the classic horror novel, it definitely takes the pacing of the original Frankenstein film to heart.
Like many of the classic horror stories of that era, it starts on a dark and stormy night, a corpse and a man with a haunted past (played by Sean Bean of Game of Thrones).
Set in 19th century London, Bean plays police officer John Marlott.
Stumbling upon the morbid remains of eight children all patched together as a single corpse, Marlott heads down a rabbit hole of capital crime and church conspiracy. All the while, a turbulent clash between religion and science takes place among parliament.
Marlott’s journey into the seedy underbelly of London leads to questioning the likes of famous poet William Blake and the infamous writer herself, Mary Shelley (played by Anna Maxwell Martin of Bleak House). Shelley harbors a heavy heart and dark secrets, as a copycat killer terrorizes the city.
Netflix’s new thumbs up/thumbs down rating system fails me yet again, with The Frankenstein Chronicles being neither a triumph nor a total fail. On my own one=out-of-five scale though, I’d give the first season a solid 3.5-out-of-5 and the second and final season a shaky 4-out-of-5.
Chock full of mad science, twisted tales of sin and corruption, plenty of gore and a powerful cabal set on world domination, The Frankenstein Chronicles might just suit your fancy come a cloudy day with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.
The Frankenstein Chronicles is now available to stream on Netflix, with two six-episode seasons.
https://showsnob.com/2018/02/28/the-frankenstein-chronicles-netflix-review/
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The Great Bingeable Gothic Mystery on Netflix
Every English major knows that in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, actually, it’s the doctor who’s named Frankenstein. In Netflix’s new horror mystery show The Frankenstein Chronicles, actually it’s… no one is named Frankenstein. The Frankenstein Chronicles, joins the recent spate of TV horror shows that have reimagined classic horror works, but instead of being a prequel like Bates Motel or a reboot like Hannibal, The Frankenstein Chronicles stitches together a completely new creature from parts of Shelley’s classic novel (see what I did there?).
The Frankenstein Chronicles stars Sean Bean (Ned Stark from Game of Thrones) as John Marlott, a “river detective” in 19th century London who finds the mutilated corpse of a young girl in the water. Except it isn’t one girl, it’s a corpse composed of body parts from eight different children sewn together. The disturbing surgery catches the eye of the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), who fears the corpse was made to discredit the controversial “Anatomy Act” he is promoting in parliament. The act would both professionalize the medical practice and would allow the surgery schools to use and dissect the corpses of the poor. Marlott is tasked with investigating the murders and, presumably, clear the surgeons of any wrongdoing. Soon Marlott and his new partner Joseph Nightingale (Richie Campbell) are getting sucked into the dark underworld of kid snatchers, murder gangs, and corpse selling.
When Marlott is not crawling through the murky underbelly of London, he is mingling with elements of high society including aristocrats opposed to the Anatomy Act and Mary Shelley (Anna Maxwell Martin) herself, an introduction that is a bit awkward but later becomes pivotal to the plot. Marlott also has problems of his own, including a tragic past and a bad case of Syphilis whose mercury medicine gives him eerie hallucinations. The show is filmed in gloomy Gothic fashion, and the period costumes and set designs are well executed. Sean Bean is in excellent Sean Bean form as detective Marlott, playing the character as half-haggard half-heroic. The surrounding cast is strong too, especially Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret on The Crown) as a impoverished noblewoman.
The Frankenstein Chronicles is one of those “Netflix Originals” that originated elsewhere. The first six-episode season aired in 2015 on Britain’s ITV Encore and was originally going to be brought to to the US by A&E, who acquired the show and then seemingly gave up on its prestige drama aspirations. It’s a nice pick-up for Netflix though. While The Frankenstein Chronicles is hardly groundbreaking television, it’s a well made and perfectly bingeable TV show that mixes Gothic mystery with historical drama and just enough scares to keep you up at night.
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