Episode 1

Autumn 1888, and the East End has become a place people are afraid to walk through. The first episode of this two-parter starts with a prostitute found murdered and brutally mutilated, and it gets worse from there. More bodies of "shilling whores" surface in the same area, and Scotland Yard, already thin on the ground in that part of London, is handed a case it cannot control.

Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline gets the job from his superiors, and the episode is largely about how impossible it is. The mutilations have no obvious pattern beyond the victims, the streets are a maze of alleys and tenements, and every witness is too frightened or too wary of the police to help. And on top of all that comes the press. Benjamin Bates of The Star feeds the public frenzy with the relish of a man who has found his story, and the papers turn dread into hysteria. When a letter bearing the name "Jack the Ripper" is forwarded to Scotland Yard, the killer has a name, which is the one thing a legend needs.

Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren watches the tension build and wonders aloud whether the East End is on the edge of revolution. It is the episode's darkest note, because he is not being melodramatic. The city is genuinely close to breaking.

Derek Marlowe and David Wickes wrote it, and Wickes directed. Michael Caine gives Abberline a weary, dogged quality that suits a man chasing a ghost through fog, and the cast around him is properly period-rich: Lewis Collins's Godley, Ray McAnally's Sir William Gull, Armand Assante's Richard Mansfield, Jane Seymour's Emma, Susan George's Catherine Eddowes, Lysette Anthony's Mary Jane Kelly, Harry Andrews's coroner, Ken Bones's Robert James Lees and Roger Ashton-Griffiths's Rodman.

It is a grimy, frightening hour that builds its atmosphere carefully. The killer stays in shadow, which is exactly where he belongs.