Luther Season Finale Review: “Series Three, Episode Four”

Not that the same could be said for DSU Stark. I had big hopes for this character, that maybe he’d become as good as DCI Reed in the “bent cop” stakes, but no. He just became a tedious bore, a man whom even DCI Erin Gray – not someone to dislike anybody dedicated to taking down Luther – had come to hate. That his death was pointless and almost incidental was a fitting end to how his character had progressed after only four episodes. Part of me wanted Luther to go all Breaking Bad and not glamourise Luther himself, or to make him into a megalomaniacal villain, a policeman corrupted by power and his own abilities who needed to be stopped. Stark could have become the new hero of the series, but no. Nothing that adventurous. Just a pop in the chest while Marwood was on his way to grab Mary and Alice. Simple as that.

Marwood’s actions betray his grandstanding in the last episode, that ending aside. For all the long build-up, all the exposition into his moral character and his raisin d’etre, he turned into your standard shotgun-to-the-head murderer, which was also a bit of a disappointment. That said, he was definitely scary, and his two confrontations with Luther were fantastic – one being a mano y mano fight, in which Luther receives a bullet to the knee (from which he quickly recovers) and the other being one top of Paragon Tower, during a stand-off, where Luther has to choose between Alice or Mary. I didn’t anticipate the ending, but it was well-played.

The old “stand-off on top of a building” has been done a million times before but that windy rooftop combined with the swat teams below and Erin’s last minute move to trick Marwood and buy the others some time all built up to a heart-pounding finale. It wasn’t quite the explosive full-stop that we’d come to expect, but it was a nice rounding off to this chapter of the show. Whatever will they do next?

That question isn’t as rhetorical as it might seem – there’s talk of a film on the way. In an interview with IGN, Idris Elba says that he envisages a Luther movie happening, and that it could possibly be an origins story. Which hopefully won’t be awful. We can live in hope, but a great movie would be a good way to bring this fantastic show to a close.