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Luther: An Unlikely Friendship In this dark, British murder mystery/thriller, our protagonist is John Luther, a homicide detective in London, played by Idris Elba. In the teaser to the pilot, he’s chasing after a serial killer. The technical support unit is outside; Luther chases the guy through a warehouse facility. He finally gets a confession and the investigation is going to be over. In this scene, Luther needs the truth from this thug. While his nemesis is hanging over a 40-foot catwalk, Luther interrogates him. INT. KTR MEDICO WAREHOUSE, UPPER LEVEL, WALKWAY - NIGHT Struggling not to weep, Luther stares at Madsen. LUTHER Tell me. Please. Just tell me what you did with them. I looked and I looked and-- But he sees only-- MADSEN’S TINY GRIN OF TRIUMPH. Flawless evil. An UNBEARABLY LONG BEAT. Then Luther LETS GO OF MADSEN’S SHIRT. Madsen CRIES OUT--clings there for a moment-- !1 then his hand SLIPS--slides--a MAD FLURRY as he scrabbles for purchase--a FROZEN BEAT --and Madsen TUMBLES into the night--down and down into darkness-- On Luther’s face as he falls. Note the final choice Luther makes. That choice is going to completely destroy him, because he discovers he’s capable of more darkness than he was previously aware of. It rocks his world to the point where, after that introductory teaser, we see he’s taken quite a bit of time off from work. When Act 1 begins, he’s just getting back to work, and he now questions everything about his life. One of his favorite pastimes, which we see more in Episode 2, is that he likes to go up to the roof of his apartment building and stand at the edge. He feels torn between life and death, because he glimpsed and was so present in a moment of life and death. His conscience is haunted by the outcome of what happened. Luther is questioning everything about his existence. In this first case, as he comes back to the Serious Crime unit, he goes to a house where there’s been a brutal murder. A husband, wife and the family dog are dead; it’s a bloodbath. It’s the daughter in this family, a character named Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), who is the wild card. While John Luther is a great detective with amazing instincts, a real specialist in terms of profiling serial !2 killers, when he meets Alice, she disarms him. She’s trembling; she's the one who called the police to report the murder of her family. But the more he gets to know Alice, the more he realizes she’s the one who murdered her parents and pet. What makes her such a compelling, original wild card character is the paradox that she’s a serial killer who doesn’t deny she did it. Even better, she challenges Luther to prove that she did. It’s all a game for her. INT. SCU, INTERVIEW ROOM - NIGHT 3 Luther glances at his notes. LUTHER I see you got your Ph.D. at eighteen--astrophysics, was it? ALICE Dark matter distribution in Disc Galaxies. LUTHER That’s the stuff that--makes up the universe. Except we can’t see it. It doesn’t interact with the stuff we know about in the way we’d expect. ALICE No, but its presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter. We know it’s there. We just can’t see it. Would many police officers be able to gain my trust by having this conversation? LUTHER Well, I just like to read books. !3 ALICE It beats burning them. LUTHER You, though--you’re the one who’s practically a genius. ALICE Practically? She raises a feline eyebrow. And Luther grins--satisfied and predatory. Two people--sizing each other up. Knowing each other for what they are... and liking each other. LUTHER So you went up to Oxford at--? ALICE Thirteen. LUTHER Wow. I mean, that’s very young. It’s bad enough, just being the clever one in the family--these kids, prodigies, they have it really tough. They’re not one thing, they’re not another. Freaks, really. But I expect your parents were proud. ALICE Very. There were newspaper articles-- pictures of mum, dad and me, smiling in the library. When I was nine, I proved tan-1X. They bought me a dress. Got me on the news. LUTHER But still. What must it have been like? You’re thirteen, your classmates are--what?--twenty, twenty-two? No friends your own age. No boyfriends. ALICE That’s quite a presumption. Actually, I matured very early--sexually. !4 He meets that challenge with unwavering eye. LUTHER You familiar with Ockham’s Razor? ALICE All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best solution. LUTHER Well, what this principle tells me is, the only other person we know to have been in your parents’ house this morning--it was you. ALICE I don’t see how it’s possible to arrive at that conclusion. LUTHER There’s no evidence of an intruder. ALICE But absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. LUTHER Okay, fine. I’m making a leap--but a tiny leap. More of a hop, really. ALICE (celestial smile) Is this where you ask if I hated my parents? LUTHER It’s about that time, yeah. ALICE Did they make me a freak? Yes. Did I hate them? Absolutely. Did I kill them? No. LUTHER Can you prove that? !5 ALICE I can’t prove a negative. It can’t be done. LUTHER Well, innocence is a negative. It’s the absence of guilt. ALICE Meaning the burden of proof is entirely yours. If you think I did this, then you need to demonstrate how and when. He sits back. Gazing at her in frank admiration. LUTHER And I won’t be able to do that, will I? ALICE Well, you can certainly try. We learn Alice Morgan was a brilliant child prodigy. She has much in common with The Talented Mr. Ripley, Leopold and Loeb, the antagonists in Murder by Numbers and Hitchcock’s Rope, where genius characters commit a perfect crime. Part of the fun for us as audience is to see if there really is such a thing as a perfect crime. Alice has a perfect foil in Luther, somebody she knows is unstable, based on his backstory. She learns quite a bit about him, stalks him and baits him to prove she killed her family. He knows she did it. What makes her an even more interesting wild card character—and what becomes a brilliant part of the show—is when he realizes he’s not going to be able to pin these murders on Alice, he starts to develop a certain respect for her. Even though !6 she’s a stalker and insinuating herself into his life in dangerous ways that might even threaten his estranged wife’s life, he still finds himself voluntarily meeting Alice. He draws upon her expertise and perspective on crimes and cases that he solves—not unlike a Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling dynamic—developing a respectful friendship with her. Alice is somebody Luther feels comfortable with, because they’re both outsiders in their own way. It’s a unique taboo relationship. There are also elements of such a relationship in NBC’s The Blacklist. The difference is, at least in Luther Season 1, Alice is at large and free, just living off her intellect; she seems to have a borderline personality. She doesn’t, however, have a conscience, neither rules or boundaries. A common aspect of a wild card character is that he or she can do anything at any time and we really don’t know what to expect. They are the epitome of unpredictable. To me, the most interesting aspect of Luther is his friendship with Alice. I’d never seen their dynamic and love the moments with them together. There’s one great scene which is like a seduction, the way she flirts and tempts him to figure her out. This adheres to director Mike Nichols’ dictum that all scenes are one of three things: a seduction, a negotiation, or a fight. The wild card chemistry can be so compelling and addictive that, in the case of Luther, it’s almost disappointing that there’s a procedural element to the show, where, in addition !7 to this longer arc, he profiles and cracks open a new serial killer case each episode. I would have loved to have seen a longer, more complicated momentum develop with Alice, perhaps with her case spanning the whole first season. It can be done successfully, as we considered in Chapter 2—The Season Long Procedural. In those scenes of Luther and Alice, there’s heat that’s addictive for the viewer, keeping us wanting more. Episode Cited “Episode 1,” Luther, written by Neil Cross; BBC Drama Productions/BBC One. !8.

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