The Artful Dodger

The Anatomy of a Second Chance

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he might be writing for television. His serialized novels, with their sprawling casts, cliffhangers, and moral binaries, were the prestige dramas of the Victorian age. *The Artful Dodger* (2023), a rowdy and surprisingly surgical sequel to *Oliver Twist*, understands this lineage perfectly. It does not treat the source material as a sacred text to be preserved in amber, but as a playground. Set fifteen years after the events of the novel in the sun-bleached, dust-choked colony of Port Victory, Australia, the series reimagines the Prince of Thieves as Jack Dawkins (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a surgeon whose hands are as quick with a scalpel as they once were with a pocket watch.



The visual language of the series is immediately striking because it rejects the gloom usually associated with Dickensian adaptations. Gone are the fog-laden alleyways of London; in their place is the harsh, overexposed light of the Australian frontier. The directors use this brightness to expose the gore of 19th-century medicine with unflinching glee. The operating theater becomes a stage—literally, as crowds bet on amputations—blurring the line between life-saving science and grotesque entertainment. This is where the show finds its "lens": the camera moves with the frantic energy of a heist, whether Jack is stealing a necklace or sawing through a femur. The sound design amplifies this, treating the crunch of bone and the snip of sutures with the same rhythmic importance as the dialogue.

At the heart of the narrative is the collision between Jack’s two fathers: the ghost of his respectable naval training and the flesh-and-blood return of Fagin (David Thewlis). Thewlis is the show’s gravitational center. His Fagin is not the antisemitic caricature of the 1948 film nor the tragic figure of the musical; he is a survivor, a cockroach in a velvet coat. The chemistry between Brodie-Sangster and Thewlis is electric, built on a foundation of shared trauma and begrudging affection. Jack wants to be a "gentleman," a concept the show interrogates relentlessly, while Fagin reminds him that in a penal colony, everyone is just one bad hand of cards away from the chain gang.



However, the show’s true modern vitality comes from Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell). In a lesser script, she would be merely the Governor's daughter and a romantic prize. Here, she is Jack’s intellectual equal, a woman barred from medicine by her gender but possessing the theoretical knowledge Jack lacks. Their relationship is not just a romance but a professional partnership, a meeting of minds that feels earned rather than obligatory. The "key scene" where Belle guides Jack through a complex procedure he has the hands for—but not the textbook knowledge of—encapsulates the show’s thesis: reinvention requires help.



Ultimately, *The Artful Dodger* succeeds because it refuses to be a museum piece. It balances the high stakes of a medical drama with the caper energy of a heist film, all anchored by a profound empathy for characters trying to outrun their origins. It posits that while we cannot sever the limbs of our past without scarring, we might—with enough precision and "artfulness"—stitch together a new future. As Season 2 arrives to further complicate Jack’s tightrope walk between respectability and ruin, the series stands as a testament to the enduring flexibility of Dickens' world. It is a sharp, bloody, and deeply human picaresque.