Luther

Yesterday evening at 5pm I started watching the TV drama Luther on Netflix and found to my surprise that it was 00:15 when I stopped. I thoroughly enjoyed the show and it's sick and twisted cast of characters in the roles of the villains, not to mention the police forces and Luther himself. The drama is a lot more serious than other BBC dramas I have previously watched like Doctor Who and Merlin, for the obvious reason that this is catered for a much more mature audience.

In the first episode the character of Luther is introduced and summarized in just one short sequence, and already the viewer gets the feeling that they know enough about the character to feel acquainted with them, unlike Game of Thrones where (possibly because of the huge number of major characters) it takes a very long time, in some cases even more than one season, to get a similar knowledge of any particular character. Luther is seen as caring more about the job and the lives of innocents more than the lives or dignity of criminals, in one case deliberately resulting in the death of a criminal. In a Sherlock Holmes-esque way Luther appears to be one step ahead of all of his colleagues, but unlike Holmes he has vulnerabilities that his enemies sometimes exploit, such as his wife with whom he has marital problems, leading to him exposing another weakness in his anger outbursts.

But the more interesting characters are the criminals, with each oncoming one presenting a different and often deadly challenge to Luther - find a woman before her blood is drained or release a killer's father from prison or else policemen will die by the masses. The most interesting, though, is a woman called Alice whom Luther has a bitter relationship with - he has plenty of evidence to know that she killed her parents but her knowledge of his vulnerabilities allows her to exploit him into not arresting her. She spends her time investigating as to why Luther allowed a criminal to die, but her methods often lead Luther to get increasingly frustrated with her.

What I didn't like, however, is the seemingly isolated episodes. Like Doctor Who, there is a persistent theme that shows in each episode - in this case being Alice - but each story seems to be detached and this, in my opinion, detaches the viewer from the world of the series. Although the location is well-known and understood both the large gaps between episodes and the constantly changing locations of murders it's harder to absorb yourself in the world than with The Walking Dead, where the location remains the same even across multiple series (Series 3 and the trailer for Series 4 both mostly take place in the prison). In Doctor Who, the isolated stories are less reliant on immersing the viewers into their worlds usually because they take place on alien worlds or exotic locations, with the exception of some on Earth (although some of these episodes, like The Empty Child which gave me many a nightmare as a kid, are two-parters, or are set in one persistent location like Blink, where the characters remain almost exclusively in an abandoned house).

From Luther I think that I have learned that immersion can only be achieved with consistent flow, so keeping a familiar or repeated location will help to absorb viewers into the world of a piece. Also, I learned that first impressions can be very important in constructing a character's representation for the entirety of a piece so to allow the characters to be able to be sympathised with by an audience they should remain the same as they have done from the beginning, because of how important early judgments can be.