Entertainment

‘Street’ signs

Fans of “Ripper Street” won’t be disappointed by tonight’s season finale — which ties up some loose ends and leaves other plot stones unturned.

“We wanted to make sure that, if we got only one series, that it would end in a way fans would find satisfying, at least, in some ways,” says “Ripper Street” creator Richard Warlow.

“We didn’t want [the first season] to be incredibly open-ended because fans get frustrated,” he says. “They get invested in a series, some big questions are put to them, and then they don’t get any satisfaction.

“As a TV watcher I’m slightly resentful of those situations . . . and I didn’t want ‘Ripper Street’ to be like that.

“I wanted to reward fans of the show with some answers.”

Tonight’s episode, “What Use Our Work,” does just that, but Warlow needn’t have worried, since BBC America renewed “Ripper Street” for a second season before the first episode aired.

The series, set in East London’s Whitechapel district in 1889 — reeling from a slew of unsolved “Jack the Ripper” murders — stars Matthew Macfadyen as troubled police Inspector Edmund Reid, trying to cope with his young daughter’s death and the rift this has created in his marriage — while dealing with the long, murderous shadow cast by the Ripper (a lateral “character” whose looming presence is felt throughout).

Reid’s entourage includes hard-nosed Sergeant Bennet Drake (Jerome Flynn) — always up for a fight and devoted to Reid — and “The American,” Captain Homer Jackson (Adam Rothenberg), an ex-Pinkerton detective and cutting-edge surgeon whose shady past was revealed in the season’s penultimate episode.

(Turns out Jackson’s real name is Matthew Judge, and that his girlfriend, brothel madam Long Susan, is the daughter of an American shipping magnate. They fled from America after Jackson/Judge killed a fellow Pinkerton.)

Warlow says he has a “strong sense” of where his characters will be in Season Two (filming begins in late April/early May). “It will be between six months and a year from where we left the characters,” he says. “I wanted to move into the final decade of the 19th century; the feel, the landscape and the culture has slightly changed.

“For Reid, to jump ahead any further would have been unfair to the character and [to] the issues we need to answer,” Warlow says. “We’ll be far enough ahead that’s he’s been able to get back to some sort of sense of normalcy.

“In Series 2, we’ll be looking at more of the political and cultural movements of the time as inspiration,” he says. “The premise of Series 1 was a group of people trying to make peace with their past.

“In Series 2 . . . how do they then go about living in a Victorian culture that’s economically depressed with . . . the feeling of doom and calamity that ends of centuries always bring?”