A great New Year treat for all us Lutherans out there with another life in the day of troubled 'tec John Luther, played of course by Idris Elba. Over four tense, exciting episodes, various people and situations reappear from his troubled and sometimes chaotic past and are replayed in what seemed like a valedictory, loose-ends tied-up way, intertwined at the same time with another separate fetishistic, gruesome murderer, who Luther also has to find a way to stop.
Both story strands were equally engrossing, the former seeing Luther caught in a war between his two oldest nemeses, a conflagration which includes along the way the shocking murders of two of his confederates, one old, one new and a repeat reminder of our first ever arresting sighting of Luther all those years ago, holding an individual up by their arm from a great height in a life or death situation to prevent them falling.
The other strand sees Luther on the trail of a deviant killer, who dons a luminous mask in the act of extreme violence but whose actions ultimately lead a trail to a beyond strange husband and wife team, he a heart surgeon with abnormal tendencies and she a psychoanalyst whose counselling seems more to fan rather than douse the flames of his implacable madness.
As ever with Luther, for all the realistic acting and locations, you could never confuse the plotting or characters with real-life. Luther is a larger-than-life, intuitively brilliant cop, able to make spot-on deductions and identifications from airy nothing. In the end you have to accept this bloody and vengeful alternative reality which Luther walks, surrender to it and just roll with the hefty punches thrown.
As ever Elba bestrides the whole enterprise, taking every setback, physical and mental, squarely on the chin but always going forward following his sometimes warped but essentially well-intentioned instincts to try to right every wrong. Ruth Wilson reprises her twisted Alice character as she openly takes on crime king George Cornelius, played by Patrick Malahide, in a no-holds barred contest only two can play
Like I said, this had the look of last orders please with no easy way these characters can walk around the block again, apart from one important consideration, that our man is still in the game. Still, if this was the last time, it was certainly a tour-de-force and a fitting ending to one of the best cop shows on TV for years.
