Is James Delaney crazy, or can he actually communicate with the dead? The refuses to answer definitively. We see ghosts. We see voodoo rituals. We see a man survive a gunshot to the gut by burning an effigy. The show treats magic with a straight face, suggesting that in the uncolonized spaces of the world (Africa, America), reality is fluid. This rational/irrational dichotomy is the ultimate taboo for a British society obsessed with Enlightenment science.
If Delaney is the soul of Taboo , the city of London is its decaying body. Production designer Sonja Klaus and director Kristoffer Nyholm crafted a vision of 1814 that is devoid of the romanticism found in Dickensian adaptations. This London is a cesspit.
The year is 1814. The setting is a London teetering on the edge of empire, corrupted by the East India Company’s monopolistic stranglehold. Enter James Keziah Delaney (Tom Hardy), a man long presumed dead after surviving the 1812 siege of Fort Erie in Canada. Having spent time in Africa (where he gained esoteric knowledge and, allegedly, fathered a child), Delaney returns to London for his father’s funeral.