The second instalment of the new series sees what started as a fairly narrow story opening up around John Luther (Idris Elba) as he searches for salvation amid the wreckage of his private life and the darkness that his life as a policeman brings him into incessant contact with. As the plot strands develop – most notably in the case of Caroline and Jenny Jones, whose apparently concluded storyline is anything but over – so does the quality of the programme. It’s almost as if writer and creator Neil Cross needs to force himself into corners in order to create his best work.
This is a much more visceral, violent episode than its predecessor, even in light of the three murders so far. Luther has a nail driven through his hand in an allegory that you don’t have to be Pope Leo X to understand, while DS Ripley (Warren Brown) is branded, half-hanged and choked by serial killer Cameron Pell (Lee Ingleby), whose idea of being nice is taking a van-full of schoolchildren on an unscheduled daytrip to nowhere and sticking a tube from the exhaust pipe through the window.
However, there are moments of tenderness, too. Luther’s compassion for unhappy teenager Jenny Jones (Aimee Ffion Edwards) deepens, their relationship beginning to resemble that of Jean Reno and Natalie Portman in Leon, even in spite of the duplicity of Jenny’s mother Caroline (Kierston Wareing). Meanwhile Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), on the run thanks to Luther’s rather novel way of freeing her from incarceration last week, urges the detective to flee the country with her. ‘You’ve done enough,’ she tells him, ‘now give it up and walk away.’ But John Luther can’t go – at least, not yet. His salvation is not yet guaranteed, his melancholy search for redemption incomplete.
One thing London does particularly (perhaps unhappily) well is dereliction and decay, and Luther uses the more underdeveloped parts of the city to great effect in depicting the crumbling state of the world its titular character inhabits: Luther’s barely habitable flat, Mark North’s externally dilapidated abode, and – most evocatively of all – the abandoned factory buildings and gaping wastelands of the undeveloped docklands. Cameron Pell talks about the emptiness of modern life (‘Nothing means anything; this is a dead city in a dead country’) and the stunningly desolate visuals are testament to some of the truth in the killer’s words, even though it’s all but impossible to empathise with (or even feel any compassion) for him. Pell is possibly the least likeable villain in television drama for some time, his whiny attempts at self-justification only serving to render his sickening crimes still more despicable.
‘He’s nothing,’ Luther says contemptuously. ‘He’s just a weak, pathetic little man.’ It’s hard to disagree. In fact, it’s hard to argue with anything that Luther does – even when he crosses the line into illegality. There’s something so defiantly heroic about him, something so unfailingly noble, that we know instinctively that he’s doing bad things for good reasons and hoping that he’s square with the house when he reaches the end of the road. When that’ll be is impossible to say, but the current (maddeningly short) series ends in a fortnight. Don’t miss any of it.
Airs at 9pm on Tuesday 21st June 2011 on BBC One.