Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Idris Elba, Ruth Wilson, Patrick Malahide, Dermot Crowley, Wunmi Mosaku, Lex Daniel, Enzo Cilenti, Hermione Norris, Anthony Howell, Michael Smiley, Paul McGann, Lewis Young, Sonita Henry, Luke Westlake, Lex Daniel, Michael Obiora, Delroy Atkinson, Gary Hailes, Katherine Orchard, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Roberta Taylor.
The cruelty of life is such that those who should stay dead, sometimes never do, the mayhem of their life interferes with any possible peace that may come your way, their presence, long after you thought you had buried them, somehow returns to cause chaos, to bring you pain, a pain arguably always born out of misplaced loyalty, memory and love.
The dead never stay quiet, there is always something that brings them back, and for D.C.I. John Luther, it is not a ghost that returns, but a spectre in the guise of one whose life is entwined with turmoil, the explosion of personal anarchy to which the detective understands he cannot control.
The fifth season of Luther brings the dynamic of sincere chaos and deadly calm together to create a perfect storm of intention after a three-year gap between series, but one in which the writer, Neil Cross, subtly weaves time as if the less than perfect detective had never been away. It is a difficult act to persuade an audience to fall back in line with a character who has been away from the public eye and the attention of the fan for a while, especially in these times of mass publicity for other shows of a similar disposition jockeying for the chance to be as admired.
What Luther brings to the table is by no means unique, but it is done with absolute sincerity and sense of justice being skimmed, not exactly perverted but taking a line which the ends sought bring around a different kind of justice. In this fifth series of the popular programme that justice is taken to a new extreme as the return of the excellent Ruth Wilson’s character Alice Morgan is highlighted and is a tremendous counterweight to the diseased and dangerous minds of Jeremy and Vivien Lake, played by Enzo Cilenti and Hermione Norris respectively, and the terror they help spread around London, and the fascinating stamp of criminal authority portrayed by the genius of Patrick Malahide as George Cornelius.
An outstanding and deliberate plot which shows the two sides of mania and obsession working against each other and able to pull any one into the web it creates; an obsession in which the result is always going to witness life begin to unravel.
Ian D. Hall