Luther

This new season maintains a consistent tension throughout its run and even when the creeps are familiar, series creator Neil Cross frosts them with a layer of sinister that feels impossible to duplicate or, if not that, at least would be tough to attempt.

This season, the fifth, is a typically tidy four episodes — short arcs being advisable when you routinely suspend all the laws of logic, psychology and police procedure. Neil Cross, who created the show and still writes it, has a gift for packaging the lurid and the preposterous into hypnotizing psychodrama that moves fast enough to keep you from thinking too hard.

The new season, written by series creator Neil Cross, has multiple callbacks to season one (the denouement brings things full circle) and fills in the blanks on where Alice has been and on her relationship with Luther, perhaps with too much information at times (allusion and mystery works better for their relationship than flat-out explanation).

It allows the mind to roam across many questions while the story unspools efficiently before you, asking little in the way of mental or emotional investment and giving much in the way of solidly old-fashioned whodunnitry. Pairs well with apple crumble and custard or large slabs of Dairy Milk.

Alice's vendetta against an equally lethal gangster keeps distracting poor Luther from a lurid case involving a fetishistic serial killer. It's all a bit much, but if it weren't, it wouldn't be Luther. [27 May - 9 Jun 2019, p.12]

Unfortunately, it’s the law of diminishing returns.

The enthusiasm for the latest four-episode run -- which again features Ruth Wilson's implacable killer, Alice Morgan -- dissipates amid a subplot involving another psychosexual serial killer, feeling more tired than usual.