Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, said Freud. But darlings, let me tell you – a snake is never just a snake. And certainly not in The Essex Serpent (Apple TV+), the new six part miniseries adapted by Anna Symon from Sarah Perry’s 2016 bestselling novel of the same name.The Essex Serpent Season 1 Download
At the tail end of the Victorian era and recently liberated by her wealthy, abusive husband’s death from cancer, young widow Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes) abandons London society and moves to Aldwinter on the edge of the Blackwater marshes to pursue a much more fulfilling life as an amateur paleontologist in comfortable clothes. With her she takes her devoted maidservant Martha (Hayley Squires) and her autistic (in modern day terms) son Frankie. Her husband’s former doctor, Luke Garrett (Frank Dillane), becomes a friend – and, in time, a contender at least in his eyes for her affections – and visits often.When sightings of the legendary monster of the marshes begin, Cora theorises that it may be a living fossil – an icthyosaur-like being that escaped evolutionary pressures in the ancient wetlands – while the locals cleave to superstition and supernatural explanations for what they call “the Blackwater Beast”.
Between the two stands the Rev Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston), a man of God but also of the Enlightenment, keen to keep the growing fears and fancies of his flock under control and not call on divine or diabolic explanation unless all others have been exhausted. In this, he is not helped by his curate Matthew, a fire and brimstone type (whose name is surely meant to evoke the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, who began his career in Essex in the 17th century) who sees the serpent as a sign from God that urgent repentance of the villagers’ sins is needed.