Description
Rainmark Films for ITV Encore
London, 1832. In the aftermath of a successful operation by the Thames River Police to apprehend a gang of opium smugglers the body of a child is discovered, washed up by the tide.
First on the scene, Inspector John Marlott (Sean Bean) examines the corpse and is horrified to discover that it’s not actually a child at all. Evilly disfigured and criss-crossed with extensive stitching, it’s a crude assembly of body parts arranged in a grotesque parody of a human form. Lifting up an arm Marlott traces the sutures with his fingers, down to the little hand.
Which suddenly moves! Grasping his own in a brief but violent spasm.
In Season One, ‘Resurrection’, we follow Marlott on the hunt for the crazed killer behind the mutilated body. This takes him into the dark corners of Georgian London, an underworld of prostitution, drug smuggling, bodysnatching, murder for profit and other even more esoteric vices.
It also brings him up against the nascent medical establishment and powerful political forces wrestling with the march of scientific progress.
As Marlott investigates, the rational evidence points first one way and then another. But at the same time a series of uncanny experiences and nightmarish dreams and visions suggest a frightening, apocalyptic alternate scenario: that a demonic power is at work in the city, reanimating the dead.
Unable to shake the memory of what happened on the banks of the Thames but reluctant to admit the impossible, Marlott brings his enquiry to a dramatic and, to his masters, satisfying conclusion. But only in his moment of triumph is the true horror revealed and an extraordinary final twist transforms Marlott’s world forever.
Starring Sean Bean (Game of Thrones), Anna Maxwell Martin (The Bletchley Circle), Charlie Creed-Miles (Ripper Street), Ed Stoppard (Cilla), Elliot Cowan (Da Vinci’s Demons), Hugh O’Conor (Chocolat), Joe Tucker (Bronson), Kate Dickie (Game of Thrones), Lalor Roddy (Hunger), Patrick Fitzsymons (Game of Thrones) and Richie Campbell (Waterloo Road). Robbie Gee (Snatch), Ryan Sampson (Plebs), Samuel West (Mr Selfridge), Shaun Mason (Cilla), Steve Wilson (Game of Thrones), Steven Berkoff (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Stuart Graham (The Fall), Tom Ward (Silent Witness) and Vanessa Kirby (About Time) will also star.