Luther 5.1: Back in Fine, Depraved Form

Luther was back for its fifth season on BBC America last night.  First and foremost, it stars Idris Elba in the title role, one of my all-time favorite actors since I first saw him in The Wire as Stringer Bell, second-in-command in a drug empire, so erudite he was studying economics in night school and quoting Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

The Luther character is a detective genius who has been through the mill in his personal and professional life, which often are the same and almost always intertwined.  As the trailer for this season aptly shows, Luther's wife and young partner were both murdered in previous seasons.   In the first episode of season 5, Luther continues to take a physical pounding, from the likes of a crime boss we saw in fine crafty and brutal form last season, but the apex case is a sadistic serial killer who's getting more frequent and gruesome in his killings.

Luther's opponent here is not just the serial killer, but a shrink, Vivien Lake (played by Hermione Norris, who was so good as Ros on MI5).  Lake is understandably protecting the serial killer, Jeremy, from the police. He's not Lake's patient but her husband, and likely her partner in sexual kinkiness, which may or may not extend to the killings.   At very least, Lake sacrifices one of her troubled patients, James, setting him up to take the fall for the recent spate of murders that presumably her husband committed.   James commits suicide before the police can nab him, but the case isn't closed.  Luther's new partner, Catherine Halliday, shows her mettle and realizes something is not adding up with James as the killer.

So Luther's faced with the fine kettle of depraved fish we've come to expect on this series.  But the knock on his door in the last scene was better than icing the on cake.  It was from Alice, back from the dead, played by the inimitable Ruth Wilson, back from our side of the Atlantic in The Affair.

See also Luther: Between the Wire and the Shield ... Luther 3.1: Into the Blender ... Luther 3.2: Success ... Luther 3.3: The Perils of Being an Enemy ... Luther 3.4: Go Ask Alice

 

Justified 4.1: Literate Boyd quotes Asimov and Keynes

I've been quietly watching and much enjoying Justified on FX the past few years - it's that kind of show - but decided it was time to bestow a review upon it.

I picked a good time.  The first episode of the 4th season had Boyd Crowder (played by the brilliant Walton Goggins of The Shield fame) delivering not one but too sage literary allusions, both from among my all-time favorite writers and thinkers.   Isaac Asimov got a Boyd shout-out about death being nothing - Asimov of the Foundation and robot series (and, in my view, the best science fiction writer in history) - followed by quote from John Maynard Keynes, whose economics (government spending is the way out of recession and depression) I and nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman very much agree with.  Krugman, by the way, is also a big fan of Asimov's Foundation series, and while I'm at it, I should mention that another quote from Keynes - "when the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, Sir?" - is among my all-time favorite quotes.

See, that's the kind series Justified is.   You can get a universe of profundity and allusions in just a grain of a scene or conversation.  Boyd's erudition is approaching that of the legendary drug boss Stringer Bell on The Wire (who had Adam's Smith's Wealth of Nations on his book shelf).  And Boyd's relationship with Raylan Givens (well played by Timothy Olyphant) - Boyd's a white-knight with dark surges criminal and Raylan, his cousin, a US marshall - is one of the best two-sides of a coin relationship in TV drama today.  In fact, family is the primary mechanism of Justified, with Raylan's father and on-again-off-again wife also propelling the show.

As with previous seasons, the plots at the beginning are diffuse and gradual.  There's not much point in my even telling you about them.  But like tectonic plates, you can rest assured that they will come together with explosive power by the end of the season to make a uniquely satisfying piece of television narrative.

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Hey - here's a postcard Isaac Asimov sent to me when I sent him an essay I had written about the Foundation series in 1979:

And here are two of my own science fiction novels:

"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"There's a delightfully old-fashioned feel to The Plot to Save Socrates. . . . Levinson's cool, spare style reminded me of the writing of Isaac Asimov. . ." - Colin Harvey, Strange Horizons