I haven’t been insanely excited about the prospect of a Jerry Bruckheimer-helmed, Johnny-Depp-plays-a-Native-American The Lone Ranger movie. But now that Ruth Wilson’s apparently going to play the female lead, I feel sort of obligated to be at least moderately optimistic about it.

I didn’t give Wilson nearly enough love in my paean to Luther, but she’s one of the best parts of an extremely strong show. She plays Alice Morgan, a serial killer with an extremely strong internal code who, after tangling with John Luther when he investigates her murder of her parents, gets very attached both to him and to the idea of his relationship with his wife. Alice is a stylized, controlled character, but not a cold one, and a real departure from the hysterical female killers we usually get in pop culture. There’s no question that she’s crazy, but she’s a very distinct kind of crazy. And it’s fascinating to watch her relationship with Luther develop: it’s a very functional back-and-forth that serves the interests of two wildly dysfunctional people, and it’s a very satisfying friendship between a man and a woman, something we see on screen all too rarely.

In any case, Wilson, who looks like an evil version of Emma Stone, deserves to be richly remunerated for her excellent work, and I’d love to see her more on this side of the pond. I just hope between this and Noomi Rapace’s (she played Lisbeth in the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies) role in the next Sherlock Holmes movie, which looks…not good, we don’t develop a habit of importing hugely compelling and unique European artists and then using them in totally boring ways. It’s a real risk, and an unfortunate one.

Idris Elba’s performance as Stringer Bell in The Wire is what made him a sensation in America, but he hasn’t found the next iconic thing on this side of the pond yet. But back in the U.K., he’s absolutely burning up screens in Luther, a co-production with the BBC and BBC America, about a cop on the edge of psychosis. It’s an astonishing performance compressed in a much smaller space than his stint on The Wire (the first season is streaming on Netflix and the second begins airing on BBC America in October), raising important questions about everything from the allure of violent relationships to psychopaths’ capacity for empathy. And though it’s a very different show, watching Luther made me revisit both my understanding of Stringer Bell and the way I see The Wire as a whole.

Where Stringer’s a selectively brutal man who would like to see the overall violence of the drug trade diminish to make it easier to do business, John Luther’s a habitually violent man who’s built a magic circle around his wife, Zoe. There’s this scene in the first episode where Zoe invites John over for what he think is going to be a conversation about rekindling their marriage after a separation. Instead, she informs him that she’s seeing someone else. He responds by tearing down a door in her kitchen. It’s terrifying in precisely the same way Jeremy Sisto slapping Kerri Russell in Waitress was terrifying: that the character is doing something violent isn’t surprising, but where that violence is going to stop is entirely unpredictable. In the course of the series, we’ll see Luther struggle with a man who is playing a dual game of Russian roulette with him, we’ll see him casually and viciously punch a suspect in the face while he’s walking down the street in order to get enough blood to take the man’s DNA sample. But there’s an intimacy to Luther’s violence around Zoe: it’s a demonstration of the intensity of his feelings for her that he’ll destroy her door, that he’ll shatter one of the glass walls of his office, that she makes him totally out of control. That’s frightening, and it’s meant to be.

But it’s also powerfully alluring, the major metaphor for the attractions of darkness in a season that makes Law & Order: Criminal Intent look tame. In all the world, the show suggests (probably unrealistically), Zoe is the one person John wants to keep safe, even from himself. The intensity of his violence to the world around him is matched by his tenderness to Zoe when she seduces him, and the extent of his grief when she is murdered. Luther’s love for Zoe is so powerful that it becomes a kind of fetish object for Alice, a serial killer Luther began the season working to apprehend but who, by the end of it, becomes his only friend. Alice is invested enough in Luther and Zoe’s relationship that she will kill to protect it, and ultimately, to honor it. Even as the show infuses an obsessive relationship, one that’s violent even if Zoe’s never physically struck, with a kind of dark beauty, Luther suggests that the only person who could hold up Luther and Zoe’s relationship as an ideal — and the only person who can connect to Luther as he becomes the truest and most fractured version of himself — is someone who is fatally damaged herself.
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