Ripper Street: 5 Plot Opportunities Inexplicably Dropped In The Second Season

2. Reid Finding His Daughter/Closure

Ripper Street Reid A significant amount of screen time in season one was devoted to the unknown fate of Reid's missing daughter. There were flashbacks, dramatic close-ups of the burn scars on his torso and anguished conversations with his wife Emily. Reid was shown as completely unable to move on, refusing to move so much as a toy in her perfectly preserved bedroom and refusing to either accept that she was dead or discuss her death. The mere mention of her name was enough to send him from a mild-mannered and generally well meaning gentleman to a towering pillar of rage, slamming his colleagues against walls and threatening death if they ever broached the subject again. Granted, finding his daughter might have been too sentimental an ending for the plot arc, and finding her body might have destroyed him. But seeing as nothing in the series one finale changed her status as a missing person, it seems strange that he's now accepting her death as read. If nothing else he could have considered adopting the prepubescent, would-be trafficking victim they found in the same episode rather than sending her to a probably underfunded orphanage which seems a regular staging post for dangerous criminal break-ins.
Contributor
Contributor

Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.