A British SWAT team rushes to the front of a burning building, shields raised, as rain pours down in the dark streets. The police look on with guns drawn, flanked by the detectives in their flat caps, including one owlish man in spectacles who seems to be in charge. Their eyes all gaze in the same direction—toward the flames. They are waiting. This is is something more than an accident. At the doorway, a hulking figure emerges, framed by fire. He’s dragging another man by the collar—a criminal, we can see by the body language—and despite his heroics, he looks weary and a little sad as explosions destroy the building he’s just left. This is Detective Chief Inspector John Luther, one of the most morally ambiguous and psychologically volatile police figures in an overflowing genre. He deposits his prey with minimal satisfaction, and the owlish man, DCI Martin Schenk, tells him with an impossibly dry delivery that tomorrow’s inquiry will be a rather long one.
Luther walks back to his car alone, and somewhere across the city, a lone woman is doing the same. The men and women she passes in the street-front pubs are celebrating, but she steps around them. She gazes behind her when she unlocks her apartment door. Nobody there. Inside, she sits on her bed and removes her heel. We see her hand reach down for a pump from a point-of-view shot beneath the mattress. After one shoe comes off, there’s another speculative pause. We can feel her ears prickling—is something there? But no. She curls up and sleeps.
Later in the night, we’re watching her like voyeurs from across the room. The music has been ominous, brooding. Like the SWAT team earlier, we are waiting. And it finally comes, with an onslaught of strings—a man in a black tuque slides out from beneath the bed.
Cue theme music.
The third series of Luther—the darkest, sexiest and most poetic detective show on television—debuted last night on BBC America, and it was clear from this opening scene that all the elements that made it one of the most worthwhile British imports had survived the two-year hiatus between seasons intact.
Most of America’s TV criticism apparatus has been focused on Breaking Bad lately, and it’s interesting that as that show approaches its finale, we’re treated to one of the few dramas in the world that can match it for pure visual suspense. The lingering hand-on-heel shot in the opening scene was the best example from last night’s episode, but it was one of many tension-builders that left me breathless and ragged when the hour had ended. The music, too, doubles as an inciting character, building and building and toying with your emotions as you prepare to be shattered and horrified.
Lucky us, there’s still plenty of horror to go around. Luther has a habit of finding himself in the orbit of grotesque serial killers, and the latest psychopath doesn’t disappoint. After sneaking out of the woman’s bed, he murders her and dresses her in what looks like fetishistic post-punk clothing—black dress, torn stockings, black wig and, most disturbingly, an entirely new face. The details echo back to a serial killer from 30 years earlier called the “Shoreditch Creeper,” but knowing that these types of murderers tend to escalate rather than pause, Luther can’t make sense of it.
And his superior officer isn’t helping his concentration—for reasons that are vague at best, Schenk adds another case to his workload—a cyber-bully murdered in his home. We quickly learn the reasoning—Luther’s loyal sidekick (heretofore, anyway) is brought by Luther’s frustrated enemy, DSI Erin Gray, into a decrepit store basement to meet a superintendent named George Stark who has recently come out of retirement to try to out Luther as a dirty copper. Stark, whose accent sounds Irish, is a tough cookie who makes threatening pronouncements about Luther like, “he doesn’t know it yet, but his good fortune ran out the day I heard his name.”
Stark and Gray are convinced that Luther plays outside the bounds of the law—true—and that he’s murdered criminals with whom his morals don’t align—not exactly true, strictly speaking, though death does follow him a pace or two behind. Ripley, who took an enormous personal and professional risk to protect Luther at the end of series one, agrees to wear a wire—to me, the only sketchy plot point of the episode—and Stark and Gray listen in as the partners investigate the cyber-murder.
Immediately, the case is quintessential Luther. In an attempt to recover a stolen laptop, he holds a friend of the victim over a condominium railing in order to extort information. It works, and because Gray can’t get a visual and Ripley won’t say what’s happening, he escapes. Ripley hacks into the laptop, where they find a picture of a young girl photoshopped with sexual obscenities. They locate the girl’s parents, who are still mourning her loss. After she died, the father, Ken Barnaby, began to receive harassing emails from the troll that popped up along with taunting websites—messages saying the girl was in hell, pornographic photoshops, taunts on Father’s Day and images of her graveyard. In the midst of the interview, the father breaks down in the kitchen.
When Luther and Ripley leave the apartment, it’s clear that Barnaby killed the troll, leaving him tied up and graffiti’ed in ritualistic style. But it’s also clear that Luther doesn’t intend to pursue the lead—he demurs when Ripley insists on Barnaby’s guilt, and promises to “take care of it” after the more important serial killer case has been solved. And here we have Luther at his most divisive, because veterans of the show realize that he’s content to let the man walk free—his own version of justice, laws be damned. Murder is only murder if the dead man didn’t deserve it.