Kelly and I blasted through the first season of Luther last week, courtesy Netflix Canada, and I loved it. Luther himself is not my favorite detective ever. He’s even more emo than Kenneth Branagh’s Wallander (and that’s saying something!) and his approach to crimesolving appears to be a) be very intuitive; b) have a personal crisis; c) see if there’s any way to contrive a fatal accident for the killer. I’m not saying he’s dumb–he’s not–but the point of him is less that he’s a brilliant detective and more that he has appallingly bad boundaries.
He doesn’t get into his murderers’ heads so much as just fall into their thought patterns and flail about trying not to drown.
The standout thing in Luther is his relationship with a character named Alice Morgan, who is herself a murder suspect. Alice is played by the gorgeous and genuinely enigmatic Ruth Wilson (she was Jane Eyre to Toby Stephen’s smouldering rawr of a Rochester) and wow, she is so interesting. The two of them form a bond that makes the Clarice Starling-Hannibal Lecter connection pale to the point where they might be no more than Facebook friends.
Here’s Wilson in a trailer for another thing I must see:
I cannot wait to see what the Luther writers do with Series two. Though I may have to, given the limits of CanuckFlix licensing agreements.
What are all of you watching now that Game of Thrones and Mad Men have packed up their toys and fucked off?
After twenty-two years in Vancouver, B.C., I've recently moved to Toronto Ontario, where I make my living writing science fiction and fantasy; I also review books and teach writing online at UCLA. I'm a legally married lesbian, a coffee snob, and I wake up at an appallingly early hour.
