Farewell Luther, you aggressively stupid beast. Please end on a high
Idris Elba’s rogue cop has surely been stripped of his coat for good this time – and the finale was as tense and awful as TV gets. How fitting
Spoiler alert: this article contains spoilers from series five of Luther. Do not read on if you haven’t watched.
With any luck, we’ve just watched the final ever episode of Luther. Oh sure, it’s bound to come back in one form or another; the series has already managed to claw its way back from two definitive-seeming endings in 2010 and 2012, and Idris Elba seems determined to make a Luther film. But, really, there’s no need. Everything about the episode we just watched dripped with finality. Anything more would be a waste.
Alice is dead, obviously. That’s the biggest clue. Because Luther the show needs Alice the character. We know this because we’ve seen Aliceless episodes in the past, and they’ve never been very satisfying. Luther only manages to hit its highest gear when Ruth Wilson is allowed to to run around licking her lips like Hannibal Lecter during a Vaseline shortage.