Copper Season 2 Episode 1 Recap: Home Sweet Home

If you haven’t kept up with the BBC series Copper, buckle up.  Season 2 started on Sunday night, and there’s plenty of debauchery in old New York to go around.

For those unfamiliar with the show, a quick primer: Copper is the story of Kevin Corcoran, an ex-Union soldier now working for the metropolitan police of New York: specifically, in the 6th Ward: a very special downtown area in the Bowery, known as Five Points.  Corky struggles to keep law and order in a country is still splintered from the Civil War.  New York’s own landscape is starkly segregated by class: the rich live uptown, the poor live downtown.

Abiding in tenements, the underbelly of New York is made up of immigrants and minorities: freed slaves, Chinese opium dealers, Irish gangsters and crooked politicians walk the streets.  We find Corky in a unique position: his wife Ellen, long presumed dead, was discovered alive at the end of last season at Bellevue, the infamous mental hospital in New York.  Following the death of their daughter, she’d been drugged and imprisoned by Corky’s own best friend — a fellow metro policeman guilty of multiple homicides.

This kind of lawless behavior is as common among the Metropolitan police as the criminals they seek to control.  Even Corky has found himself engaging willfully in illegal behavior — frequenting whorehouses, over drinking, and — like any good Irishman — fighting.  Prone to violence, he posses an inherent nobility that makes him uncommonly good at his job,

But there’s new management in the 6th Ward.  We meet Brendan Donovan, a Union General from the homeland recently appointed to whip the Metro into shape.  Heading up a nebulous syndicated called “The Organization”, Donovan seems to be a prototype of Boss Tweed — soon to be full of political clout, devoid of scruples.  He knows better than to forbid his coppers from drinking and debauching (in Five Points, there’s no other way to live).  But he makes it clear they are not to do it in uniform: keep it “behind closed doors” is his explicit order.  He faces an uphill battle: gaining respect for a ragtag group of immigrants who barely know the laws they are meant to enforce.

This appears to be music to Corky’s ears.  He’d rather be crimefighting than doing almost anything else.  That’s why he leaves his newly freed wife to care for the willful ward, Annie, he adopted last season.  Raped and abused from a young age, Annie eventually ran away when her sister was murdered.  Corky solved the case of her sister’s death and ended up taking Annie into his home.  Though she is young, she bears deep scars from her trauma and can be alarmingly jealous — together with Corky’s fragile wife, she is downright dangerous.  As she winds a music box that formerly belonged to Corky’s deceased daughter for the express purpose of upsetting his wife, it’s clear that Annie has no intention of getting along with Ellen for the sake of creating a happy home.

Kevin is easily distracted by the tasks set out by Donovan: bring to justice the gangster and pimp Buzzy Burke.  Corky manages it with little fanfare (though Burke did briefly hold Corky’s wife at knifepoint).  But Burke lasts only a few hours in prison before he meets his maker at the hands of a former copper: Francis Maguire, Corky’s former best mate and current inmate.

The next day, Maguire finds himself in a courtroom to face his charges, but all the evidence against him has mysteriously gone missing.  With no evidence, he must technically be released, much to the dismay of Corky, who made a special trip to the hearing just to see Maguire get his just due.  But there’s no law in the Bowery that doesn’t have a loophole — and Maguire gets to walk free, despite having murdered two women.

Justice is ill served all over Manhattan — just uptown, a rich widow Elizabeth Haverford hides a deep secret from her rich playboy fiance, Robert Morehouse.  At the end of last season, Robert risked life and limb to prevent a madman from starting a fire that surely would have burned down all of lower Manhattan, if not the entire city.  A confederate who opposes abolition, Lincoln and supports secession, the madman, Kennedy, required funding — funding that polite, British Mrs. Haverford was too happy to provide.

As the search for Kennedy rages across the country, Elizabeth fears that her own part will be revealed.  She stoppers her guilt as any rich woman would — with opium and wedding planning.

When a young man is brutally killed on the streets of Five Points, Corky suspects the victim’s own brother to be the murderer — a game of horseplay gone wrong.  But the boys’ mother fiercely denies that it could be so, and Corky’s sureness is shaken. By the end of the episode, the body of another young man is discovered in similar fashion.  Being the good detective that he is, Corky knows there is no such thing as coincidence — and while most would think nothing of the untimely death of another guttersnipe in Five Points, Corky smells a pattern.