Sea Dragon Sighted In Essex! How exciting. I’m from Essex and I’ve never spotted much more than a washed-up crab.
If this newspaper headline wasn’t attention-grabbing enough in The Essex Serpent, launched with a double bill on Apple TV+ on Friday, then Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes sealed the deal.
They lead the cast in this gothic period drama, based on a best-selling novel by Sarah Perry.
Set in Victorian England, also starring Frank Dillane, Clémence Poésy and Hayley Squires, it follows the life of Cora Seaborne (Danes), who has been recently widowed and plans to make the most of her newfound freedom.
Turns out her husband was a complete monster so she’s not remotely sad, only traumatised, but distracted by her interest in natural history.
Nothing screams “going through something” more than jumping on the first train to Essex in search of a mythical serpent, dragging your young son along with you.
Her dead husband’s doctor – an aspiring cardiac surgeon – is not too thrilled, as he quite fancies her. He gifts her with a slice of human heart (thanks, but no thanks), yet still she leaves.
In Aldwinter, a village out on the Blackwater marshes in Essex, Will (Hiddleston) is the wild and wildly attractive pastor trying to tell everyone to bloody well calm down.
He has to welcome this latest serpent-hunter. “She’ll be old and wrinkled and she’ll bore us all with the latest talk from society drawing rooms,” he says.
“He’ll be some boring vicar!” says Cora. This is TV code for “they will get it on”.
Will is married to someone delightful of course, but this won’t matter. It was always going to be something of a lust story with Hiddleston on the cast list, dressed as a vicar.
Cora and Will have an interesting chemistry – while she believes in creatures that escaped evolution but not God, he has faith but certainly does not believe in flying dragons.
But when a young woman disappears in mysterious circumstances on the marshes, there’s talk of the Devil.
This is all particularly bad timing for Cora, who turned up at this exact moment, as the locals accuse her of attracting the creature to their community.
Everything then starts to get very weird. Kids collapse, a seagull is a bad omen, there’s a vision of a boat in the sky and Cora is having nightmares… but chasing sea monsters will do that to a person.
A dark plot that ponders the clash of faith and science, with a chemistry that’s hotting up, this has reeled me right in.
