Episode one grabs your lapels and drags you headlong back into the Whitechapel filth, and within a few short minutes the air is thick with horror and calamity thanks to "an event".
On the evening of 31 August 1854, families living in a cluster of cramped, overcrowded houses in Soho, London, were struck by a horrific calamity.
Sometimes only another economic calamity can erase the memory of the one before.
The result has been hugely frustrating, not least because this may be the last opportunity to question Blair in such a way on what remains the greatest foreign policy calamity in the postwar era – with graver consequences even than the Suez debacle.
Presented with a national calamity that also constituted a political opportunity, nothing stood between them and all the mistakes that haste can make for their children's children to repent at leisure.
At the height of the Greek calamity in 2011, he hosted a secret meeting of top eurozone leaders.
The Guardian's diplomatic editor Julian Borger has a preview of Obama's prepared remarks, and this is what he is expected to say on Syria: The crisis is no longer limited to Syria; it is a regional calamity with global ramifications.
Wenger could do worse than find evidence of Arsenal's calamity against Birmingham to play, on slow motion, as some kind of torture warning to his current troops.
And there's since been a further calamity.
Even the poll tax, the measure that would send her into that fatal downward spiral, was avoidable calamity.
In urban resilience terms, this means being able self-regulate and manage when calamity does strike.
