Idris Elba is officially set to put his signature tweed overcoat back on for another Luther movie. But while many people are likely eager to see the gritty detective (anti?) hero back on the crime-solving beat once more, it’s the return of Elba’s co-star, Ruth Wilson, that’s really the most exciting piece of this announcement. Yes, somehow, some way, Alice Morgan is coming back to our screens, and all is now right with the British mystery world once more.
The original Luther series ran for five seasons between 2010 and 2019, followed by the feature film Luther: The Fallen Sun in 2023. Netflix’s first outing in the Luther universe was decidedly mid, a film that couldn’t decide if it was more interested in appeasing longtime fans or targeting newcomers to the franchise. It also lacked Wilson’s Alice, whose complicated and obsessive relationship with Luther (not to mention her generally psychotic demeanor toward… well, pretty much everything) was a big reason the original series was so successful.
This latest sequel will reportedly pick up directly after the events of Fallen Sun, but it’s got its own set of initial problems to solve—namely that it looked a whole lot like Alice Morgan died during her last appearance on the show. In the finale, she murdered Luther’s partner as payback for his lying to her. (Their relationship is really complicated, okay.) This all culminated in a dramatic face-off between the pair at a construction site, where it certainly looked as though Alice fell to her death. Granted, we only briefly saw her body, and this has never been a series that’s been terribly concerned with things like internal narrative logic, but it is something they’ll presumably have to deal with fairly early on.
But the return of Wilson is fantastic news for this new installment’s likely quality. Alice has always been Luther’s most interesting character, a wild card capable of shaking up the status quo at any moment. She occupies a strangely liminal space within the world of the show, one part overt antagonist, one part uncomfortable accomplice, and even sometimes both at once, depending on her mood. Wilson and Elba’s fantastic chemistry is reason enough to tune in on its own, and the complicated, obsessive dance between their characters is the sort of relationship the franchise has never managed to duplicate or equal elsewhere
