Town pastor Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston) is skeptical about the serpent being real and tries to temper the growing hysteria in his parishioners’ fire and brimstone thinking. The faithful of Essex are like the flip side of the groupthink that makes up Pawnee in “Parks and Recreation,” and think the serpent is payback for their sins. She reasons that the creature does exist and that it could have “escaped evolution,” creating its own path. That person is Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), an archaeologist who ventures to the small village of Aldwinter in Essex to investigate the creature and search for fossils. That gives a special magnetism to a story that needed none.Heaven forbid that many of those ideas be embodied by a woman right on the cusp of the 20th century. Perry is good at catching the special collective dread that enflames communities - the fear that something sinister is stirring, waiting just out of sight.
The self-styled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, traveled through the county, cutting women to see if they bled - if not, they were witches. Not only was there really a mythical winged serpent that terrorized locals there in the 17th century, but it was the location of the notorious Essex witch trials. It can't be an accident that Perry placed her story about collective panic in Essex.
Though even he, in moments, thinks, "But was it too great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish?" Those wings belong to the titular Essex Serpent, a water serpent terrorizing the village - or according to William Ransome, just rumor a born of the dead man who washed up on shore, the missing sheep, a lost child, the unseasonable darkness, and a strange waver in the line of the water. Near the coastal village of Aldwinter, where Cora eventually moves to be closer to the Ransomes, nature is not inertly beautiful, but dangerous and alive: A sheep is sucked into the mud, boats are taken by the water, earthquakes split houses, and the residents wake in the mornings "from dreams of wet black wings."
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