Luther Review: "Episode 4" - Bangs and Whimpers

Ruth Wilson is awesome and not just in "Luther".  Respect.

“This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper.”  - TS Eliot

The world isn’t ending, but Luther appears to be, at least as a series.  When this third season was commissioned about 18 months ago, creator Neil Cross indicated that it would be the last, though rumors have swirled recently about a possible prequel film and, this being British television with such a small episode commitment, it’s entirely possible that Cross and Idris Elba could find their paths crossing again.  But for now, anyway, this is the end of Luther and even a wonderfully whimsical appearance by Ruth Wilson, reprising her role as slightly deranged killer Alice Morgan, couldn’t send the series off with a bang.

The vigilante storyline goes completely off the rails with Marwood having gunned down Ripley.  Throughout the third episode, he consistently portrays himself as the victim and just a member of the masses, trying to right past wrongs and make sure criminals are punished for their crimes.  Now he’s shooting cops (including putting a blunt, unsatisfying exclamation point on George Stark – more on that later), kidnapping pregnant women (yep, another woman bound and gagged), and targeting Mary not once, but twice.  If any show could handle a vigilante storyline well, I would think it would be this one.  After all, as I wrote last night, John Luther is, at least in part, a vigilante.  And yet everything after the first scene of last night’s episode has just been a mess with Marwood’s motivation and methods getting all messed up and everything leading to a confrontation at a police safe house that just makes no narrative sense.

I get that Luther messes up Marwood’s plans (though the whole capital punishment thing comes out of left field), but as Schenk points out, and as I mentioned last week, if any criminal is going to be the “suicide by cop” type, it’s Marwood.  And he even asks John to let him die at the end.  There’s no reason for him to go after Mary the way he does unless he’s just plain crazy, and “just plain crazy” isn’t a real character trait, especially when you’ve gone to such great lengths to establish his backstory and rationale to inform the audience that he is decidedly NOT crazy. 

Ultimately, it feels like Cross just didn’t know how to tell a vigilante story (or at least a vigilante story that didn’t also implicate his hero) and so it just devolved into a bit straight out of Halloween or Friday the 13^th, with the insane killer stalking his pretty young victim and taking out everything in his way.

Unfortunately, that tonal shift also ruined the Stark/Luther storyline, though it wasn’t without its own problems already.  This whole episode, in fact, was just a disaster for George Stark.  First he arrests John for conspiring with Marwood in Ripley’s death and the attack on Mary, which is a pretty big, baseless jump.  Then Marwood guns him down in a stairwell bringing a ridiculously anticlimactic end to everything.  We never figured out why Stark was going after Luther.  We never got any recognition of the fact that Luther was innocent.  After all, Stark was keeping Mary in the safe house in order to lure John back in.  The fact that Luther is allowed to just walk away from the safe house rooftop itself is ludicrous given that he was still a fugitive from justice, having been freed from arrest by Alice.   At no point was any indication ever given that Luther was innocent.  Hell, at gunpoint Erin asked Marwood if John had sent him to kill Mary.  That John Luther is allowed to walk off into the sunset with no further explanation is utterly ridiculous.

My numerous problems with the plotting aside, the performances here were, as always, incredible.  Elba and David O’Hara get one last great scene together.  And what an entrance by Ruth Wilson.  I would watch the hell out of a show with Elba and Wilson traveling the world as itinerant problem solvers.  They just have crazy chemistry.  I’m not sure I entirely buy her description of Mary or that it’s these two walking off into the sunset at the end, but I will never complain when they’re gracing my television screen.

So that’s it for Luther.  Ultimately, its legacy is likely to be that of a show that was incapable of keeping up with its lead actor.  It was never a bad show, but there was never any doubt that Idris Elba was in a league of  his own.

So thoughts?  Comments?  Just want to tell me my blog sucks?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

Luther Review: "Episode 3" - In a Mirror, Darkly

Warren Brown has a fine swan song as Justin Ripley in "Luther"

So, yeah, Luther is a B-horror show.  And like any crappy B-horror show it needlessly kills one of its most compelling characters for no particular reason. 

Luther’s third episode is filled with classic horror tropes.  There’s the couple getting frisky in their car at night on a dark street.  There’s the killer bent on retribution for his loved one’s death.  There’s the public display of the killer’s victims, and the relatively recent trend of letting the public decide whether his next victim will live or die.  Thankfully, at least some of these tropes are turned on their heads: the two lovers are saved from their attackers by the vigilante.  And here’s where everything goes sideways, before going sideways again.

You see, John Luther is a vigilante.  Sure he has a badge and a title, but at his heart, he’s a vigilante.  Or, at least, he’s a man who follows his own moral code rather than any social standard of conduct.  This is a man, after all, who in the very opening scene of the entire series willingly stood by and allowed an admitted pedophile to fall several stories in a factory.  He also offered to cover up his best friend’s crimes until that friend turned on him. 

If anybody could understand a person playing outside of society’s rules, it’s John Luther.  And yet, we’re expected to believe that he now has a problem with people working outside the law to bring down those criminals who have somehow escaped the claws of justice.  The vigilante (Tom Marwood) is taking out killers, pedophiles, and other assorted miscreants.  The John Luther of the first two seasons, hell the John Luther of the first episode of this season*, wouldn’t be terribly upset by the vigilante’s actions.  And yet we get an entire scene with John trying to convince Tom that he “[doesn’t] have the right” to administer his own justice?  Seriously?  I don’t really expect Luther to just let Tom work, but to not address the enormous elephant in the room seems like an unwise decision.

* Remember the guy who hanged a suspect from the third floor balcony?

That glaring problem aside, there was some really good stuff in this episode.  The Luther/Stark showdown continues as Stark tracks down Mary and gives her the file on Zoe, John’s dead ex-wife.  This leads Mary to freak out, obviously, but most awesomely leads to another showdown between Idris Elba and David O’Hara.  Watching these two work is just fantastic.  And the fact that O’Hara can deliver somewhat cheesy lines like “You know what your problem is?  You’ve spent your life thinking you’re the whirlwind.  Well you’re not, John.  I’m the whirlwind,” just goes to show how amazing he is. 

I even enjoyed the episode’s climax, as Luther tries to save a hanging pedophile while a crowd of onlookers—drawn to the scene by the vigilante—attack him.  But having Tom gun down Ripley was just a step too far.  For starters, there was no real reason for it.  He easily found an out in the fence after pulling the trigger so he wasn’t really trapped.  And Tom never really extended his killing to innocent victims, so why start taking out cops?  If either of the two villains this season was to commit a noble suicide it feels like it should have been Tom, not Paul Ellis, and yet here we are, stuck with Tom for another episode simply because it’s what the show’s format calls for.  And it has cost us Justin Ripley as well.  In a word: frustrating.

A few spare thoughts –

We still get plenty of extraneous villainy between the extended beating and threatening of the initial couple and Tom’s stalking of his latest prey.  At least this time it wasn’t a pretty young thing ending up bound and gagged but a middle-aged man instead.

As I predicted, Mary ends up the target of a killer.  It was pretty obviously coming, but we’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s finale to see how it plays out. 

Speaking of the second “going sideways,” I’m not sure what Luther and Schenk thought was going to happen when they put the pedophile’s primary victim on national television to plead for his life, but that is what I expected.

“But what’s the point of knowing your weak spot if I don’t get a chance to poke it a bit?”

So thoughts?  Comments?  Just want to tell me my blog sucks?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV

Luther Review: "Episode 2" - Is Luther Really a Horror Show?

David O'Hara and Idris Elba stage an epic standoff in "Luther"

As I was reading the critical response to last night’s season premiere of Luther, a thought hit me.  What if I’ve been looking at this all wrong?  What if Luther isn’t a crime drama?  What if it’s actually been a horror show all along?  Watching the second episode from this perspective does change things a bit.  It certainly doesn’t excuse the fetishization of the killer (though it certainly explains it).  We still get a long, wordless scene of him riding the bus after his latest kill and we get an extended scene as he stalks through his next victim’s house (complete with overwrought music), tastes her toothbrush, and dewigs in front of a mirror.  None of this material provides any insight into the killer (Paul Ellis as we learn), mind you.  Everything we learn about him we learn from his elderly mentor, who was the original Shoreditch Creeper, who killed Ellis’s mother, and whose nurse is the new target.  For a gritty crime drama, this treatment of the killer and his victims* would be trite and merely “Awesome Serial Killers [Being] Awesome” as Alan Sepinwall put it earlier this week.  But considered through the lens of a B-horror movie, it’s oddly appropriate.  Not really interesting or informative, but appropriate.

* Would you be surprised if I told you we get a scene with multiple women sobbing while bound and gagged?

Viewed now as a horror show I thought the second episode was a definite improvement on the premiere.  We spend a lot of time tracking down William Carney, the original Shoreditch Creeper who turns out to be an elderly man who was imprisoned for forty years for unrelated crimes and who is now mentoring Ellis and using him to finish his past intended crimes.  It’s not entirely clear why Ellis is helping the man who killed his prostitute mother, though suggestions are made that he was neglected and perhaps was grateful to Carney.  The lack of motivation for Ellis is perhaps this story’s greatest failing as we never get any real sense of why he’s doing what he’s doing.  And when combined with the absurd anticlimax (Ellis throws himself out a third story window when it becomes clear John has physically bested him), it just leadenly sinks.  Ellis’s suicide is also a convenient cheat because it allows the police to arrive (Luther confronted Ellis alone obviously) just in time to see a dead killer on the ground and John looking down on him from the window.  Obviously, Luther’s been in this position before (and let the criminal die before), but this particular example is just an easy out for writer Neil Cross.  With the killer’s suicide he doesn’t need to follow up on the case at all and he gets to throw more gas on the Luther-as-criminal fire.

But the main investigation is really just the side dish to tonight’s delicious entrée, which is the confrontation between Luther and Stark, as John tracks Ripley to Stark’s hideaway and completely turns the tables on his investigation.  The scene between Idris Elba and David O’Hara is just electric as John stares down his opponent before taking his evidence and walking out leaving a string of threats hanging in the air (“If you take me down I will take you down even faster and even harder”).  It's tough to think Stark will just let his investigation go, even if see him tearing down his own creepy victim wall.  But if Luther was more of this and less “Awesome Serial Killers [Being] Awesome” it would be a much better show.  The fact that Ripley refused to turn on John is just icing on the cake.

A couple of spare thoughts –

The investigation into Jared Cass’s death kind of fizzles with Ripley just arresting Ken Barnaby at the end.  I really expected there to be more to it, though Barnaby blending his hand to avoid giving fingerprints pretty well cemented his guilt.

Luther and Mary progress in their relationship with a day of phone tag following their night at the café.  It’s nice to see John as something other than a hard-edged cop though, knowing this show, there’s bound to be an unhappy ending.

“Mr. Carney, I’ve got a message for you.”

So thoughts?  Comments?  Just want to tell me my blog sucks?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV

Luther Season Premiere Review: "Episode 1" - Idris Elba Is Awesome and Little Else Matters

Idris Elba is awesome in "Luther"

Let me preface everything that follows with the fact that Idris Elba is an amazing actor whose work I will watch no matter what I think of the rest of it and he’s been nominated for an Emmy twice before this very role (though in the movie/mini-series category despite Luther not being a mini-series or movie; but that’s a whole different rant).  John Luther is a wonderfully complex character who runs the gamut from scared, desperate animal to ruthless, unfeeling vigilante.  The television world is a better place with Idris Elba in it.

That said, the rest of Luther is just not a good show.  I binged the first two seasons of the show this spring (all of ten episodes so it wasn’t a terrible commitment) and two things were made exceedingly clear by the end: Luther is just another in a long, tired line of crime procedurals that fetishize their criminals and, secondly, Luther is too much in love with its main character for its own good. 

As to the first point, the most obvious example of the fetishized killers is the twins from the second half of season two.  A pair of killers operating separately (all the better to give a nice cliffhanger in between episodes) are at first thought to be killing for racial motivated reasons but then are discovered to be killing randomly as part of a game.  We’re treated to their dice-rolling as they select their victims, the meticulous selection of the weapon of choice, the long, slow build-up to the crime and then most of the grizzly act itself.  Luther is relentless in its depiction of violence. 

That same relentlessness is on display in tonight’s third season premiere, though we never actually see the acts being committed (with the exception of a fight scene between the killer and his victim's husband).  The killer in the first two episodes (the four-hour season has been split in half to give us what are essentially two-hour movies) is a fetishist who dresses his victim in a wig and makeup after killing her and stealing her shoes.  The details are largely irrelevant (other than to note that the killer’s MO is familiar to Luther from a series of killings thirty years ago), but the ways we visit the killer are incredibly over the top.  In the opening scene, we get the class “under-the-bed” shot as the intended victim slowly undresses and gets into bed.  The startling crash of strings as the killer reveals himself under the bed is straight out of Halloween.  We get a long scene on the bus with the killer as well as an extended look at his picture wall, filled with images reflecting his victims.  And don’t forget the overwrought music.  None of these scenes gives us any insight into the killer, they're simply all there to show us a scary serial killer being scary.  Remove Idris Elba from the equation and this could easily be another episode of The Following or Criminal Minds or the disaster that was “Mohai,” last year’s Halloween episode of Hawaii Five-0. 

Some shows can get away with fetishizing killers.  Hannibal does because the murders and their barbarism are essential to the development of their investigator, Will.  We see the effect the murders have on him so they’re not just killing for the sake of killing.  The tableaux on Hannibal are also so fantastic that they eschew any sense of realism.  I mean, there’s a totem pole made of human bodies.  How realistic can the violence seem after that?  But in Luther there’s no hyperrealism and there’s no levity.  The violence is needlessly prurient.

As to the second point, that a show built around an antihero loves its main character is not a surprise.  But the best of these shows are willing to acknowledge their character’s flaws and admit that they’re not perfect.  But Luther’s vigilantism is never presented as anything other than a positive character trait, even when he’s hanging a suspect over a third-floor balcony.  This is especially galling considering that a main plot in the third season is a new Detective Superintendent launching an internal investigation of John’s methods, even going so far as to enlist the help of John’s partner, Ripley.  It’s a little hard to believe that Ripley would be so willing to turn on John.  He was, after all, the one man willing to believe John when all the world believed he’d killed his ex-wife.  Still, the far more worrisome aspect is the fact that this new threat, Stark, comes from completely out of nowhere, gives no reason for his vendetta against Luther, and does nothing really to advance the issue of whether John is fundamentally a good cop or a bad cop.  Creator and sole writer Neil Cross wants so badly for us to love his character in spite of all his failings that he’s unwilling to really delve deeply into his character's deeds, even when the opportunity is presented.

Ultimately, the question to answer in any review of a season or series premiere is “Should you watch this?”  When it comes to Luther’s third season (and really the series as a whole), the answer is "Yes".  If you like Idris Elba and enjoyed his work in The Wire, Pacific Rim, or, hell, The Office or anything else he’s done, then Luther is worth watching just for the master class he puts on (not to mention Ruth Wilson’s incredible performance when she finds her way into an episode).  If you’re looking for the next great crime drama, this isn’t it.  But at only four hours (and only fourteen for the entire series) it really is worth it.  After all, Idris Elba is awesome and little else matters.

A few spare thoughts –

There’s another murder case being investigated involving a “cyber troll” being murdered.  It seemingly culminates in a gruesome finale, but some of the leaps John makes to find the killer (who I’m still not entirely convinced is the true killer) are a little speculative.

John has a nice car accident meet-cute that doesn’t really go anywhere in the season premiere, but might give us a nice look into his personal life in future episodes.

“What is this, Nazi Russia?”

So thoughts?  Comments?  Just want to tell me that my blog sucks?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV