LUTHER (UK) Season 2 Episode 2 – As we saw at the end of last week’s episode, Rippley was confronted by the SAW look-a-like Mr Punch in his car. By the time Luther got to the scene, Rippley was gone, a struggle was evident: he’d been captured. In true form to Luther fashion, Rippley’s new set up was rather grim: noose around his neck, keeping him on his tip toes, Mr Punch is torturing the crap out of him, burning him with hot irons and beating and cutting him.
It’s pretty gruesome stuff, and it makes Luther’s clear headedness in such a situation-he knows not to form a relationship with Mr Punch, to keep him waiting-all the more amazing. Everyone was great in that scene where Mr Punch rings the police station-we’ve seen in a thousand times before in movies and television shows, but the greatness of that scene is that I completely forgot about all of those thousands of movies and television episodes. Idris Elba was brilliant, juggling the great emotional turmoil Luther found himself in versus trying to maintain a clear head and focus on the ultimate goal: capture Mr Punch.
They do, in the end, but not until a marvellously tense showdown between Luther and Mr Punch, who has taken a busload of children hostage. With some nifty detective work and an awesome interrogation scene, Luther and Rippley (escaped, obviously) track down Mr Punch and Rippley gives him a well deserved punch to the teeth.
One of the difficult things about a cop show (and the real world, if that exists), and something that this episode managed to simultaneously explore and dodge without contrivance, is the fact that when you have the cops versus the criminal gang structure, the cops are almost always going to lose. Why? Because the gang can do anything and while the cops say they can protect you, everyone knows that cops have rules. They won’t kill you, not even a rule breaker like Luther, whereas a criminal gang would, in the blink of an eye. For Christ’s sake, they put a nail in Luther’s hand! If they can put a nail in Luther’s hand, they can do anything. Now in this situation, Luther managed to intimidate the witness into changing his story (it involved the girl Jenny whom he ‘rescued’ from rape porn last week, as you do). This whole idea was definitely stretching believability, except it was executed so well with directing and editing effective enough to make this a tense diversion sequence.
In the end she comes to live with Luther, which is much better than staying with her batshit insane mother.
Oh, and Alice pops by to ask Luther to come to Mexico with her. Eh, the scene didn’t really work, mainly because Alice and Luther have far more chemistry as detective and insane criminal, rather than lovers.
Still, it was an awesome episode of television, the sort of police procedural episode I wish could be done more often-showing actual detective work, which makes the stroke of genius moments look far smarter. The writing, from the “hand of God” to the “black hole” monologues were just chilling. The directing was brilliant, the acting, as usual, fantastic. Yeah, this is a pretty damn fine show.
What did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments below.
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