Here comes The Artful Dodger (Disney+), clattering out of its Australian prison cell for a second series of rambunctious yore-time nonsense. Let joy – and breathless protagonist Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) – be unconfined, mate.
But not for long.
“Oi!” bellow the wardens, puffing their cheeks in fury as the urchin turned surgeon turned (stitched-up-like-a-bleedin’-kipper) convict wriggles out of their clutches and makes for the harbour. “Tee-hee,” replies Dawkins as he slaloms between rhubarbing extras in mud-spattered britches. But strewth. Who’s this? A black-caped figure blocks our hero’s path to freedom. “I am Inspector Boxer, from London,” rumbles the stranger from the depths of his expositional cravat. “Here to replace … [the brow darkens] … Captain Gaines.” Dawkins gulps. Captain Gaines? The same Captain Gaines what got shot in the mug by notorious cutpurse Red (Miranda Tapsell) at the end of series one, a murder that saw the innocent Dawkins, after a series of lies and betrayals, condemned to the noose? The very same. The game, surely, is up. But hark! A cry goes up from the cobbles. An extra has been attacked by a shark and will surely cark it unless a passing surgeon – one who has, ideally, just escaped from the local nick with the help of gurning recidivist Norbert Fagin (David Thewlis) – attends to his shredded calf forthwith. A reprieve! Dawkins rushes to the rescue, Inspector Boxer reluctantly mumbles something about giving the man room and lo, the Artful Dodger lives to smirk another day. Or does he?
It feels important at this juncture to point out that the entirety of the above happens within the first five minutes of the second series’ opening episode. No recaps or flashbacks here. Just the caption “Six months later” in 900pt Buckle Up, Bozos font and a juddering blast of Blur’s Song 2 (“woo-hoo!” indeed) as the viewer is left to gather her skirts and sprint after the action in search of elucidation. Confused?
Earnest … Maia Mitchell as Lady Belle Fox in The Artful Dodger series two. Photograph: Disney
Let us rewind the hands of the Extremely Modern Period-Drama Clock to the events of season one, for a clearer sense of what the Dickens is going on.
Conceived by James McNamara, David Maher and David Taylor as a sequel to Oliver Twist, the series is set 15 years after the events of the novel, with Dawkins and his former surrogate father Fagin now living in the squalid New South Wales penal colony of Port Victory. Dawkins has made a name for himself as the colony’s leading surgeon, but the lure of heist-based mischief with the scuttling, manipulative Fagin and his band of oi-oi-saveloy brigands ensures trouble is forever just around the corner. There is a romantic foil in the earnest shape of Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell) who, as the governor’s daughter, is expected to stanch her yearnings for Dawkins and a future as the world’s leading lady surgeon. The finale found Dawkins and Fagin banged up by Gaines, its series-long preoccupations – the ties that bind, the notion that one can never truly escape one’s roots – coalescing in scenes of great tenderness. It was, all in all, very good indeed.
And now? Lawks-a-mercy, it’s … OK.
While Dawkins is pursued by Inspector Boxer (Luke Bracey, an Australian who appears locked in mortal combat with his own vowels), Belle’s noxious mother, Lady Jane Fox (Susie Porter), gives our hero an ultimatum: stay away from Belle for two years or it’s back to the noose ye go.
Alas, the frantic pace that underpinned the first series now feels slightly desperate, with every available surface festooned with chase sequences, punch-ups and pounding “contemporary pop”. The result? A drama that appears to be in a race with itself to reach the closing credits. It’s all a bit The Artful Dodger: U Got 2 Pick a Pocket or 2. The guiding principle appears to be “more of the same, but with additional gun-fingers”. And the emotional richness sparked by those intimate, sweetly bashful conversations between Dawkins and Fagin? All gone (for now), buried under a wobbling pile of used surgical dressings and the less awkward demands of yet another heist (“we’ve got bigger problems than your feelin’s!”).
So, huzzah for the pace and the balls. But boohoo for those who, having hoped for more than merely a louder re-tread of the first series, may now find themselves, as Fagin grumbles at one point, “a bit bleedin’ put out”.