Ripper Street

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

Frank Goodnight:
Wanna tell me?

Captain Homer Jackson:
It's my home field.

[He tilts his his cigarette case, shining the sunlight into Frank's eyes and spoiling his one and only shot]

Frank Goodnight:
Always were a faker.

Captain Homer Jackson:
You shouldn't have killed the boy, Frank.

[Jackson shoots him]

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
I know no man named Judge. I do know a man named Homer Jackson, however, a police surgeon of this quarter who just took down a cold-blooded murdering Pinkerton out of New York. That story enough for you, Best?

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

[Rose wakes up on Bennet's couch after he comes home]

Rose Erskine:
[smiling] So is this the lot for a bobby's wife, then? Never knowing when you're like to come home?

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Yeah, it can be... and as you've said, not long past, it is not much of a life. [his tone hardens] You... you come to me out of fear, Rose, not natural affection. I know I'm not much... but I am worth better than that.

Rose Erskine:
Then what is to become of me?

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Your mistress is returned to her house. You can do likewise, if you wish.

Rose Erskine:
And if I do not? If I decide to finish with that life?

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Then you must be brave, Rose, and look for another. Now get along with you, girl.

Daniel Goldman:
[seeing that Swift and his men have brought two cases of rifles with him] Do you feel you require protection in our city?

Theodore Swift:
I require it in life. Lead on, Daniel.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Mr. Bruton, it was not simple misadventure that put Mr. Fanthorne in the Thames. It was murder.

Ezekiel Bruton:
[bewildered] Murder?

Captain Homer Jackson:
Long day?

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
The longest... a day in which your services would heve been most valued.

Captain Homer Jackson:
I can't always be by your side, Reid.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
And now will be so no longer - now that Miss Hart's pursuers are upon her.

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

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
You are a cynic.

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

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

Long Susan:
This is not freedom, not for your girls, not for you. This is blind violence, the preserve of all those that have left their scars on your back. You have become man, Raine!

Raine:
No! Don't tell me I am that!

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

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

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

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

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
[as Jackson moves to examine a dead body in a jail cell to see if the killer is the Ripper] Is it him? That's what you're here to find out.

Captain Homer Jackson:
Your suddem passion for the furtive?

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
I must be sure before that hell rises again.

Captain Homer Jackson:
[commencing to examine the dead woman's body] Get her ready, Sergeant Drake. Hey! gently! What are those, hands or meat hooks, really? It's no wonder to me at all you're a bachelor!

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[Speaking to PC Hobbs] Look at me, Constable. It is a fool who joins a fight he cannot win. I would far rather have you here alive, talking to me, than otherwise.

George Lusk:
I'll take that boy now, as recompense for my actions here.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
And I will tell you what I told this man, that he is my prisoner and in my protection. You think yourself above the law, you'd best start acting as such.

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

Captain Homer Jackson:
[being called to examine a body] Me, I have other matters to attend to.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
Like hangin' off a tart's tit!

Captain Homer Jackson:
Don't knock it till you've tried it, Sergeant.

Captain Homer Jackson:
[to the corpse he's been examining] This matter of being dead - tell me it ain't all bad.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[speculating ] This was no smash and grab. There was a wider purpose here.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[repeating this quote from the Torah that Rose had said to him] Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

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

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

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

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

Chief Inspector Fred Abberline:
We would. I would!

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

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

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

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
The world is unjust in that way.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
Indeed.

Long Susan:
Lucy, look at you. The truth of this world is that men have designed it for their own purpose and pleasure. And you, my darling, there is not one primitive desire in their childlike minds that you do not fulfill.

Stanley J. Bone:
Gentlemen, ladies! The switch is thrown. The line is live. And beneath this earth here, the electric age forges on. This railway, this underground railway, is the capstone of all we, your grateful servants, would build here. The foundation, ladies and gentlemen, of a new city. A city that, though it rises from dank and fetid earth, will gleam with the purpose and clarity of a summer morning. Because, if the future stands for anything, it stands for hope!

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

Deborah Goren:
[referring to Lucy's baby whom she is to fostercare] No father or uncle?

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
No, it's men who are the ruin of this family, Miss Goren.

Deborah Goren:
This family and many like them, Inspector... you disagree?

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
No, no. No, merely my wife would say the same.

Deborah Goren:
Mrs. Reid must be a woman of great sense and clarity.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
She is that - yes.

Deborah Goren:
Then I would like to meet her.

Commissioner James Munro:
[to Reid referring to the new subway tunnel under construction] They are but a few weeks old, but these places already have the chill of eternity.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[while bribing Wet with information that will make a salcious story for the tabloid journalist] Corruption and sex, Mr. Best. Surely it does not become more honeyed than that!

Preacher:
Stay away from the water. It is the King returned. King Cholera.

[last lines]

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

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[Speaking with Ressler] Have you ever heard of ergotism?

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
I'm with you.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[to Reid] Money never begat courtesy.

Harlot:
[referring to the now dead "john," Algernon Winston] So where is he then?

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
He's cold clay, woman. As gone as your girlhood. Best find another fine suit to climb inside.

Sidney Ressler:
[confused about the chemicals Jackson and Reid are occupied with in the morgue] What are they doing now?

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
If you don't know, and I don't, sir, it's best not to ask.

Madoc Faulkner:
Do it.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
I cannot, Colonel.

Madoc Faulkner:
An order, Sergeant!

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
I am not your Sergeant anymore.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
You see, I, I'm, you know I'm not a rich man. But what I cannot offer you in wealth and luxury, I, Miss Rose, I offer you my whole heart, for always. For when I look upon you, I feel a mercy I thought lost to me. And I would work as hard as any man is able and harder to provide every day for your happiness and to be a better man, if you would, that is to say if, if you might consider doing me the utmost honor of being at my side.

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
Sergeant Drake. No man's heart aches forever, I promise you.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
Jackson, when I send for you, you will come! Or else I'll...

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
Yes, I know, you're gonna do a thing, lock me in a place, drop me on my so forth and what have you, right?

Madoc Faulkner:
[his last words] The Egyptians were fools. How can any god presume to know the weight of one man's heart?

Madoc Faulkner:
And Inspector, when you return to your home this eve, give thanks to your god you will never set eyes upon the things I have witnessed. The bravest of men butchered like pigs. Sons and brothers in their hundreds left for carrion. Dirt beetles crawling at feast in their torn hollows... and all for queen and country.

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
Look, Drake, I know that we've had our differences, but I know I've been thinking, and, well, whatta yuh we bury the hatchet, huh? Because from where I'm standin' me and you seem like two fellas with plenty in common.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
We have nothing in common.

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
Men who walk through the fire never shed the heat, Sergeant. They see in each other the burns that other people don't.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[inquiring why Drake wants a raise] Bennet, may I ask, does this request come from Rose?

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[after Drake is silent] Your interest in the girl hasn't escaped me.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
I, uh... I don't think I take your meanin'.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
Heh, Bennet...

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
[He chuckles] A bobtail like that will look you deep in the eye only so long as she's deep in your pocket.

Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake:
No, she's not... You don't know her.

Det. Insp. Edmund Reid:
All my yeas of policing I have known her kind plenty as have you. I am - I am simply saying... beware the kitten's claws.

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
[while in bed with Rose under the sheets] Is this not the most honest face you have ever sat on?

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

Rose Erskine:
Why do you say that?

Cpt. Homer Jackson:
Jesus Christ, what doesn't?

Captain Homer Jackson:
All right. Jus' gonna settle with Duggan my way.

Long Susan:
You'll not settle anything with Duggan.

Captain Homer Jackson:
Oh, tell me Susan, huh. You tell me what to do. Tell me how I'm supposed to help you, 'cause you kept this goddam thing a secret. Now the son of a b*tch is turning the screw. All I wanted was you and me.

Long Susan:
Don't.

Captain Homer Jackson:
Shoulda done this from the start.

Long Susan:
You don't know him.

Captain Homer Jackson:
He's about to know me.

Commissioner James Monro:
Reid, have you or have you not been told this is not your damned case? I would have thought you had enough on your plate bringing some semblance of order to this hellhole of a division. Or have I missed something? Did you manage to catch your whore-killer who made a bloodbath of your streets? Or does he remain amok while you skip after fanciful notions of Russian assassins? I will tolerate no further insubordination! Do you understand?

[last lines]

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

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
On that I would agree with him.

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

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
A little.

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

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
No.

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

[Constantine tortures Jackson into signing a false confession. Once Jackson has done so, Constantine takes it away, and reads, "Signed... SUCK MY YANKEE BALLS." He turns furiously back... ]

Captain Homer Jackson:
[points to his crotch] Come and get your cream, Peaches.

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

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

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

Peter Morris:
[to Jackson] Freedom is not given. It is taken!

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
[to Monro] The strikers are hardly revolutionists, sir. A working man deserves fair pay.

Volsky:
The chess game our two empires are playing in India, Persia, Afghanistan, this is the game we play here in London. Do you know what we call it in Russia? Tuniry teney, "tournament of shadows." And that is what you are chasing, Inspector, a shadow. And the closer you try to shine your little torch the less you will ever see.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Do you think, Fred, that hanging my American will return your sleep to you? Obsessions are addictions, which may not be defeated by actions in the physical world, but by a change of temper in the mind.

Joseph Lavender:
No, I cannot say. It is what I have tried to tell you. Yes, that night, I saw him but I saw nothing in him. Where his face should be, only darkness. This Ripper, he is dybbuk. You chase him, you are fools. Whatever peace you have known, you will know it no longer. Only calamity and turmoil, evil on your shoulder.

Captain Homer Jackson:
If I could see a way of clearing myself of this, would you grant it to me?

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Not if it'll involve you leaving this room, Captain.

Captain Homer Jackson:
It does not. Just tell me you ain't burned Frank Goodnight.

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

[examining Rose's room in the shelter, seeing signs that she has been kidnapped]

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Sergeant, we are going back to work. Does that suit you?

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Yes, Mr. Reid. It does.

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

[Drake stops undressing, and she reaches for his bracers]

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Miss Bella?

Bella:
Sergeant?

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
Would you keep a secret for me?

Bella:
Til my death.

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

[She puts a tender hand on his cheek, eases him into the chair, and curls into his shoulder]

Rose Erksine:
[writing a letter] "Dear Bennet, I wish that this letter finds you well and in good health. I myself continue to improve under the auspices of Mrs. Reid's generous charity. There are many things I regret in this life, but it is the way I have behaved with you that brings me most shame..."

[stopping, she puts the letter into a drawer, unsigned, and sighs]

[Reid releases Jackson from his cell and hustles him into the Dead Room, where Victor Silver's dead body is lying]

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
I need to know where he's been in the last forty-eight hours. You can tell me.

[Drake drapes an apron over Jackson's neck, un-cuffs his wrists from behind his back, then re-cuffs his wrists in front of him]

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
He has Miss Rose under key somewhere.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Others as well.

Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake:
[holds up a bottle] This was about him.

Captain Homer Jackson:
[indicating his handcuffs] You expect me to work like this?

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
Yes, I do! For now, yes!

Captain Homer Jackson:
Well, then get him stripped, god damn it!

Emily Reid:
[referring to her husband's sleeping at the police station] 'Tis the third night this week you've slept in that cot. Is it more comfortable than it looks?

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
No, no, I, uh... I am tired, Emily. I would fall asleep on pins.

Detective Inspector Edmund Reid:
[to Abberline about Jackson's arrest as the Ripper] Obsessions are addictions which may not be defeared by actions in the physical world but by a change of temper in the mind.