Series review: The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015 -)

This weekend I was away from home. I had gone to an old teacher of mine's house to take care of it while he and his family went on a trip. I took advantage of my stay to advance my main personal project and, without wanting to, started another writtingproject. The origin of this second writing project is, to my surprise, in this interesting series, which has two seasons (and a third is rumored for this or next year).

The Frankenstein Chronicles is a historical thriller inspired in Frankenstein, the famous epic novel by British writer Mary Shelley. It addresses issues that were once at the center of public interest in pre-Victorian London, from Galvanism (Luigi Galvani's theory, which postulates that the brain of animals produces electricity that is transferred to all the muscles of the body ), to the human trafficking and the link between such crime and organized crime.

Sean Bean (the Kenny of Hollywood for the death of his characters in the first minutes or in the first hour of almost all his films) leads the cast incarnating John Marlott, a former military and pluvial police officer to whom a minister of high aristocratic power entrusted him with the task of investigating a series of disappearances of children after the discovery of a reconstructed body with limbs of 6 or 8 children.

The plot is slow but entertaining; the setting is a beauty, literally speaking, because in both seasons we can travel through a socially divided London in an evident way through architecture, from the elegant Bow Street to the deplorable Devil's Acre. The development of the characters, especially the protagonist, is accompanied by the pace at which the events occur. However, what seemed to me a magnificent idea was to include (in the form of a wink) Mary Shelley herself (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) in the list of suspects due to the possible link between her book and the deaths.

With no doubt, this is an excellent tribute to Shelley's work and a great recommendation for both this writer's fans and the lovers of the thriller genre.