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Luther recap: series three, episode one | Luther

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Luther recap: series three, episode one

With both a particularly twisted murderer to catch and a colleague who will stop at nothing to destroy his career, the brooding detective had plenty to get his teeth into

"Help me daddy, it's so hot in hell" – Ken Barnaby

Nothing really happens for the first five minutes. A woman walks home. She gets in, climbs her stairs, removes her coat and puts her kettle on. And yet it's almost impossible to watch. This is Luther, after all. Stillness and mounting dread are its stock in trade. By the time the woman has gone to bed – after about 90 seconds of silently looking out of the window, dangling her feet from her sofa and getting undressed – you're sick with terror. You've covered your eyes. You're regretting your decision to watch the bloody thing in the first place. Something horrible is bound to happen.

And then something horrible does happen, and it's even more horrible than you expected, and as the title sequence rolls you're trying to work out how comprehensively you just evacuated your bowels. It's good to have Luther back, isn't it?

"I'm like Jamie Oliver. I just rummage around the cupboard to see what I can find" – John Luther

Not much has changed in Luther's world since we last saw him. He's still mourning his dead wife. He has a collection of postcards from around the world on his mantelpiece – perhaps from Alice, or the girl he semi-adopted last time – and he still splits his time between heroically taking down baddies by himself and looking as if he hasn't slept for several months. He's still surrounded by his old colleagues. Officer Kill List is still on the scene. Schenk still stalks Luther's every move, like Marley's ghost made of undercooked pastry. Ripley still bounds along behind him like an eager-to-please puppy. Or at least he does at first – more on that later. And then, on top of that, Luther's landed himself a new love interest. It's Mary Day: very bad driver, enthusiastic amateur onomast and somebody with almost zero understanding of the concept of personal boundaries. My hunch is that she's either got a dark secret or that she'll end up dead, but admittedly that doesn't make me much of a genius. This is Luther. Everyone's either got a dark secret or ends up dead.

"The unluckiest guy in the world. Or maybe the luckiest, depending on how you look at it" – George Stark

This time around, Luther's got more on his plate than usual. He's got to catch the murderer from the episode's start – the one whose trademark is staying still for unusually long periods of time, then screaming as hard as he can while violently murdering you, then dressing you up as a bad Siouxsie Sioux waxwork and sodding off – which is proving difficult, because he's a copycat killer and the detective in the original case has just turned up dead. But that's not all. Mysterious forces from on high have also instructed him to solve the apparently cut-and-dry revenge killing of an internet troll.

And this is where we meet perhaps this year's most insidious baddie, DSU George Stark. From his grotty lair – seriously, some Cillit Bang and a couple of uplighters would do that place the world of good – he's determined to destroy Luther's career no matter what it takes. He's found the blood of a dead gangster (one killed by Luther's young protege in self-defence last series) in Luther's underlay and is using it as an excuse to take Luther down for good. Stark puts Ripley in a WWE-style sleeper hold hold until he agrees to secretly record Luther's process, so that he can learn exactly how many corners Luther cuts in the line of duty.

However, this is Luther, a man who hates corners almost as much as he hates irons. Ten seconds into the troll investigation and he has dangled a witness off a balcony. Twenty seconds in and he's told the murderer that they've found his fingerprints, causing the said murderer to destroy the evidence by jamming his hands into a kitchen blender. By the episode's end, Ripley – tired of trying to explain all this errant behaviour –has punched Luther in the face and teamed up with Stark. This cannot possibly end well.

Observations

"I guess he liked to sit at home and slag people off on the internet." This is probably the closest that Luther will ever come to describing us, you know.

I deliberately avoided the credits of tonight's episode, because I really want to believe that the fetish murderer was played by Midge Ure. Discovering otherwise would have broken my heart.

It's a good job the case of the internet troll was solved so swiftly. If the police hadn't got to the bottom of it, they might have had to send Richard Bacon in instead.

Ruth Wilson's been very prominent in the promos for the third series. I hope she shows up soon.

How much of this episode did you actually watch? I think I managed an embarrassingly small amount. I turned away in fear long before the murderer slithered out from under the bed at the start of the episode, for almost the entire duration of the killing in the attic and pretty much as soon as the blender was switched on. Lessons to take from this: Luther is scary and I am a wuss. Sleep well.

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Arica Deslauriers

Update: 2024-05-17