‘It’s all very soul destroying, isn’t it – actual police work?’ remarks DCI John Luther to his protégé DS Justin Ripley at the beginning of Episode 1 of this new series; and it’s Luther’s search for some kind of spiritual salvation as much as the crimes he solves that are central to this frequently predictable, occasionally clichéd, but always very likeable drama.
Luther (Idris Elba), who has spent the gap between the last series and now working cold cases, and Ripley (Warren Brown), who has been back in uniform for the same period, are recruited to a newly formed department, Serious and Serial Unit – not headed by the South Park version of Al Gore but by DSI Martin Schenk (Dermot Crowley) – where they are immediately confronted with a failed art student-turned-serial killer who wears a Mr Punch mask not dissimilar to Jigsaw’s in the Saw movies and has a comparable interest in bringing theatricality to the brutal crimes he commits.
‘I’m going to remind people what it’s like to be really scared,’ the killer taunts Luther, but the detective – who is still resident in a slummy apartment that shows precisely what Del and Rodney Trotter’s flat at Nelson Mandela House would have looked like if they’d lost everything and turned to crack for solace – leaves a great deal of the work to Ripley and their new colleague, DS Erin Gray (Nikki Amuka-Bird) instead turning his attention to matters buried deeper in the darker corners of his fevered heart.
Like his sixteenth century theologian namesake, Luther believes that good deeds alone are no guarantee of salvation, and he sets out to help those whom he considers he has wronged in the hope of some kind of redemption. Trusting his moral compass rather than anything as ordinary as the law, Luther does his best to aid Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), the laconic, parenticidal astrophysicist from Series 1, now in a secure mental hospital – ‘It’s all just breathtakingly unerotic,’ she remarks of her incarceration – and unhappy, unwilling star of unpleasant adult movies Jenny Jones (Aimee Ffion Edwards), whose mother Caroline (Kierston Wareing) considers Luther complicit in the death of her husband fifteen years earlier and thus owing of a favour.
Juggling private matters with police work is another strain on the conflicted copper, who is still suffering from the loss and betrayal he suffered in the first series. The Wire’s Idris Elba perfectly captures Luther’s struggle between his inner fragility and robust exterior – not to mention his innate likeability – and is as excellent as he was last year, whether he’s getting tasered and maced in rapid succession, lugging a scantily-yet-colourfully-clad teenager over his shoulder like a rolled-up carpet, or simply sat in his hovel of a flat, wrestling with his inner demons and a pistol. It’s not so much that he carries the show, but that it’s impossible to imagine it existing without him.
The storylines introduced in this opening instalment aren’t as immediately compelling as the corresponding plot in the previous six-part run, but the climax – which will have you shouting at the screen as the tension ramps up unbearably, only for the final moment to be even more of a shock than you thought it was going to be – is as good as anything writer and creator Neil Cross (Spooks) gave us last time round. Having faith in Luther is completely justified.
Airs at 9pm on Tuesday 14th June 2011 on BBC One.