Luther gets the year off to a breathless, gruesome start
The fluffy festive TV has finished, then. Like the antithesis of cosy Christmas viewing, crime thriller Luther (BBC One) came bulldozing back onto our screens with guns held to heads, bombs hung around necks and graphic multiple murders.
Donning his grey overcoat and hopping into his rickety Volvo to chase down criminals was DCI John Luther (Idris Elba, taking a holiday from Hollywood to revisit his signature character, three years since the last episode). The grizzled, growling sleuth was accompanied by a new sidekick in by-the-book DS Catherine Halliday (the wonderful Wunmi Mosaku). And a spate of elaborate killings soon had Luther ducking under yellow crime scene tape and squinting moodily at mutilated corpses.
The perpetrator was a knifewielding psycho in a sinister glowing clown mask – the result of LED lights sewn into his hoodie to confuse CCTV cameras. The horror sequence where the murderer stalked his prey on the top deck of a London night bus was the stuff of urban nightmares.
With such stylistic flourishes, writer Neil Cross has clearly been inspired by Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels. But Cross’s hard-boiled script also brought in real-life references too, with a mention of “Grindr Killer” Stephen Port.
Thank goodness (or badness) for the climactic last-second arrival of Luther’s nemesis-cum-love interest Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson, in a role millions of miles from her recent turn as her own grandmother in Mrs Wilson). Luther and Alice is a twisted romance in the tradition of Hannibal and Clarice Starling and their unusual partnership was missed in the last series. Alice’s sociopathic scenerychewing and camp one-liners should prevent this four-parter, which is screening on consecutive nights, from becoming too relentlessly dark.
This was a breathless opener where the next action sequence was never more than a few minutes away. Elba prowled through the city streets with charismatically bruised physicality. The multiple plot threads – a gangster’s missing son, a haughty shrink (Hermione Norris) with a murderous husband, Alice’s return – will presumably be knitted together over the next three episodes.
It veered dangerously close to torture porn at times, with lingering shots of stab wounds and severed extremities. Thankfully, our murderer dodged the series’ previous accusations of misogyny by being an equal opportunities monster, happy to butcher men or women. Even fictional serial killers are politically correct nowadays. Michael Hogan
Amid a year of exciting television, the arrival of the first female Time Lord felt frustratingly low key. While I loved Jodie Whittaker’s nurturing, off-kilter performance, the series as a whole fell short of expectation, swapping thrills and sci-fi sparkle for plodding history lessons and tedious moral lectures. So I was cheered by the New Year’s Day special of Doctor Who (BBC One) which proved that the series’ head honcho, Chris Chibnall, had finally got it right.
What this episode, titled Resolution, proved is that Doctor Who is a series that needs, in part, to embrace its 55-year history. The reintroduction of the Daleks was like a much-needed reunion with an old friend – albeit an old friend who was a malevolent killing machine intent on wiping out the entire human race. We first saw the Doctor’s most famous foe, not in all its metallic glory but as a piece of mutated ooze (its innards), scaling the walls underneath Sheffield Town Hall. Its subsequent attachment to a delightful archaeologist called Lin (Call the Midwife’s Charlotte Ritchie) will have given viewers the requisite amount of goosebumps, and its control of her mind was terrifically done.
We were given just one solitary Dalek (was that a budget cut?) but it held its own against an unspecified line of military personnel – the Doctor’s old friends Unit having been wound down due to lack of support from European neighbours. But, unsubtle Remain sentiments aside, this episode whizzed along at a cracking pace and managed to capture some of the adventure which has made the rebooted series such a success. Though there was still the odd bit of sub-hollyoaks dialogue, with the arrival of Ryan’s (Tosin Cole) errant dad prompting a perfunctory lesson from the Doctor about the nature of fatherhood.
Doctor Who will now not return until 2020, but hopefully by then Chibnall will have worked out what his responsibilities really are: to keep the flame of one of the greatest TV shows ever made alive. Ben Lawrence