Luther: Idris Elba Is Back In Action In First Look At Season 5
It's barely Thanksgiving, and already the BBC has doled out one big Christmas gift.
The network revealed on Friday, November 9 the first look at the upcoming fifth season of Luther, which stars Idris Elba as homicide detective John Luther.
First uploaded to the official Twitter account for BBC One, the Luther season 5 footage is quite dark — opening on a shot of Luther tied to a chair with a bag over his head, then unraveling to show the detective trapped in a cat-and-mouse interrogation with legendary London gangster George Cornelius (Patrick Malahide), who believes Luther has something to do with the disappearance of his son, Alastair. To get the answers he so desperately seeks, Cornelius loads a gun to play a game of Russian roulette and then proceeds to electrocute Luther in hopes that he'll spill the desired dirt.
Luther being Luther, though, he quickly turns the situation around to shift worry onto Cornelius, and place the onus on the him to answer some difficult questions.
"Where was he? When he got taken, Alistair, where was he?" Luther asks Cornelius after breaking free from the chair, grabbing his own gun, and pointing it at the gangster and his band of men.
When Cornelius states that he's just "doing due diligence" and making sure that Luther wasn't in or around the location from which Alistair went missing, Luther is dumbfounded — or, at least, as dumbfounded as an ingenious Detective Chief Inspector like himself can ever be.
"Part of it? Why would I be part of it?" Luther says just before the clip cuts to an announcement card detailing that the series will soon return to BBC One.
We first heard that Luther season 5 was a go roughly a year and a half ago, when The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that the series would return for another turn — this time set to run for four episodes. At the time, Luther creator Neil Cross teased that there's "so much unfinished business" to dive into in the new episodes.
"It's a question Idris and I get asked a lot. What happened to John Luther after we last saw him striding unbowed through the streets of his city, his blood red London? It can't be over, can it?" he said. "There's so much we don't know."
He added that fans will learn what Luther has been up to, and discover where the next chapter of his life will take him, in the soon-to-premiere season.
"As for me, I'm scared of the monsters. The face at the window. The hand under the bed. The shadow at the end of the street. Who's going to stop them, if not John Luther?" Cross stated. "In the end, we picked up the phone to some old friends and asked if they'd like to find out what happens next. It turns out, they would. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to find out what happens next."
Viewers haven't seen anything of Luther since the series premiered its two-part, movie-length fourth season back in 2015, so to say that the fifth season has been hotly anticipated would be a gross understatement. Judging by this new footage, the new batch of Luther episodes will feature enough unsettling madness — like the surprising return of Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan, whose supposed death filled Luther with anguish throughout season 4 — and mind-melting mysteries, plus some of that classic John Luther-style badassery, to make the wait well worth it.
Luther season 5 is currently without a release date. It's plausible that the series will return sometime in 2019, though BBC hasn't announced anything to that end.