WRITER: Neil Cross[SPOILERS] A man called Lucien Burgess (Paul Rhys) posed as a detective to gain access to a house, kidnapped the residence's babysitter after licking her face, daubed the walls with occult ramblings written in the blood of a previous victim, locked his current quarry in a refrigerator, and regularly drained her blood to drink. Well, what did you expect from a man called Lucien?
DIRECTOR: Sam Miller
GUEST CAST: Ruth Wilson, Steven Mackintosh, Indira Varma, Paul McGann, Saskia Reeves, Warren Brow, Dermot Crowley, Paul Rhys, Catherine Hamilton, Andrew Tiernan, Michael Smiley & Mark Redguard
Once again, I'm not ashamed to admit I found this very entertaining for all its arch silliness. Luther may be littered with clichés, but it's still unlike any other detective drama on TV right now. It's a partly-serialized gender-reversal on the Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling relationship, with Luther (Idris Elba) getting "takes one to know one" advice from serial-killer Alice (Ruth Wilson) on this week's Satanist, while also contending with Alice's mind-games when she had his wife's boyfriend happy-slapped by a gang of girls. Strangely, Alice apparently did it to reunite him with his estranged wife (Indira Varma) -- a plan Luther dismisses as unlikely to succeed, but is proven wrong when he's smooching Zoe by the episode's end.Luther isn't much of a mystery show, as the audience know who the culprits are very early, and Luther's not far behind. This week, it wasn't difficult for the SCU team to match the kidnapper's m.o to Lucien, who was revealed to be a notorious killer who got away with the same murder a decade ago because the police botched an undercover operation into his activities that gave him a legal escape route. Now an infamous cult hero, Lucien runs a shop selling controversial crime-related paraphernalia (like signed prison letters from the Yorkshire Ripper to his female admirers), so the episode was again more focused on how Luther will make Lucien slip-up. And yes, Luther employed laughable means to confirm his theory that Lucien was the felon, by spotting he's naturally left-handed.
It was another broadly-told story, and there's certainly some discomfort in the fact Luther treats its serial-killers as pantomime-esque boo-hiss villains. There was little exploration of Lucien as a three-dimensional personality (he was just an icy creep who wanted respect), and absolutely nothing about how his victim's family are coping with this nightmare. Luther is a very simplifying show, really. It's Ridley Scott's Hannibal when it should be Jonathan Demme's Silence Of The Lambs. But if you enjoy your crime drama with a thick streak of dumb entertainment and an almost comic-book temperament (even the opening titles are like an animated graphic novel), Luther can still be enjoyed on that base level.Overall, I'm still enjoying this series more than my head says I should be. Idris Elba's a watchable lead, I relish Rush Wilson turning up with her quivering lips, Paul Rhys (playing his second vampire this year after Being Human) made for a chilling villain, and there were a few scenes that surprised me (the best being the moment Luther found Lucien's "kill room" and dead babysitter, but had to pretend he didn't because protocol was ignored and his actions would be a loophole for Lucien to go free during a trial.)
Are you warming to it, or is it too silly for your taste?
18 MAY 2010: BBC1/HD, 9PM
