I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!: Labyrinth

(Photo source: FictionMachine)

An updated-in-2020 version of the following blog post can be found in If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. The 2020 book was written and self-published by yours truly. Get the paperback edition of If You Haven't Seen It, It's New to You now!

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"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a new series of posts that will appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I will reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

Luther is turning into yet another TV show that has no reason to go on after the departure of its breakout star, and I'm not talking Idris Elba. The star I'm referring to is Ruth Wilson, who's currently busy with Showtime's The Affair. But I can see why Elba is eager to go on playing DCI John Luther for as long as possible and why he enjoys playing him way more than any other role, like the role so many of his fans want him to aggressively pursue, James Bond. And who could blame him? As Luther, Elba gets to live out fantasies he must have always had about outwitting or intimidating all the ugly-looking white psychos who either make life difficult and unpleasant for people of color in the U.K. (and in any other country marred by racism) or scare Chris Rock out of sharing an elevator with them.

At times, Luther interestingly feels like a non-comedic version of Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine in which he takes away power from the racist Trenchcoat Mafia in the only way he knows how: by making mincemeat of them and their whininess comedically. But as a procedural, Luther is nothing really extraordinary, and the psychos Luther tangles with tend to be boring and one-dimensional--except for gorgeous but sociopathic astrophysicist Alice Morgan, an antagonist-turned-ally beautifully played by Wilson. Without Alice to play off of, Luther as a character feels a little less alive. All the character has going for him are the badass way he stuffs his hands into his pockets, Elba's charisma and occasional sense of humor in the role and my favorite trait of Luther's. It's the one trait of Luther's that has kept me interested in Elba's show, even though I dislike shows built around serial killers: an immense love for the late David Bowie, whose music helps Luther to think.

Luther's favorite hero isn't Sherlock or Shaft. It's Bowie, and it's hard to dislike a detective character who worships Bowie and applies his songwriting process to criminal profiling. Without Alice, the show doesn't really have a reason to go on living. But I'm not worried about the show right now. I'm more worried about DCI Luther. How's he dealing with Bowie's passing? Without Bowie around to record another album and give him motivation to outwit serial killers, Luther's probably now an even more broken man than he already is.

In the underwhelming, Wilson-less Luther two-parter that premiered last month on BBC, the only enjoyable moment briefly revisits Luther's admiration of the Thin White Duke and his ability to quote the deepest of Bowie deep cuts. In this case, "We Are the Dead," a track from 1974's Diamond Dogs, gets Luther to realize that a cannibalistic serial killer is suffering from Cotard's syndrome, a mental disorder in which the patient thinks he's dead. DS Emma Lane (Game of Thrones alum Rose Leslie), a younger detective who partners up with Luther to track down this madman, who killed DCI Theo Bloom (Darren Boyd), her partner, with a bomb, quotes a line from Star Wars to Luther--she and Bloom were Star Wars fans--but Luther's tastes in sci-fi lean more towards Bowie concept albums like Diamond Dogs. That's probably the only kind of sci-fi Luther's into, so the Star Wars reference sails past him. Sensing that Star Wars isn't helping a still-grieving Lane to stay focused on her work, Luther attempts to get her to stay focused by introducing to her his favorite method of staying focused. He asks Lane, "Do you know any David Bowie?" She replies, "Um, yeah, I liked him in that film, the one in the maze, with the baby and the puppets," and Luther's wordless response is a funny little look that says, "Are you bloody kidding me?"

The film Lane's referring to is, of course, the Jim Henson-directed, George Lucas-produced Labyrinth. She outs herself as having come from the generation of little girls who grew up watching on telly a teenage Jennifer Connelly rescue her kidnapped baby brother from Bowie's Tina Turner wig-wearing, codpiece-clad Goblin King, and that film was their first taste of Bowie. Meanwhile, I'm from the generation that was first exposed to Bowie via MTV, which was dominated by Bowie's outlandish and suave presence for most of the '80s. But MTV would only play either the Lodger/Scary Monsters years (the funereal, gloomy-looking video for "Ashes to Ashes" used to creep out my five-year-old self, who was allowed to watch anything that wasn't R-rated movies, and that anything included funereal, gloomy-looking Bowie videos), the chart-topping Nile Rodgers era or the "Blue Jean"/Labyrinth/Glass Spider stuff. So I was totally unaware of the sounds of pre-1979 Bowie--a lot of his pre-'79 material (like the 1973 tune "Drive-In Saturday," which I was originally going to name the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" after) is on some other level of excellence--and I had to discover those sounds somewhere else, and that place was the local new wave station, which, in my teen years, was Live 105. In the late '80s and early '90s, that station was especially fond of "Suffragette City," "Golden Years" and "Young Americans," so those three became among my favorite Bowie tunes (my all-time favorite Bowie tune, by the way, is a tune I discovered much later, when I started downloading singles off iTunes: his Giorgio Moroder-produced Cat People theme, which is currently in rotation on AFOS, until my station goes off the air for good on January 31).

KITS also ended up being the station where I first learned Bowie passed away. I was flipping from station to station (no pun intended) on my portable FM radio while making myself a late dinner, and I stumbled into a double shot of "Rebel Rebel" and "Ziggy Stardust," two Bowie tunes I hadn't heard in ages. I couldn't help singing along to both tunes while cooking and was like, "Wow, Live 105's listenable again."

Then the Live 105 DJ explained that he was playing nothing but Bowie tracks for an hour, after being shocked to receive about an hour ago the news of the death of this legendary musician (and sometime actor) he admired because Bowie made it okay for him to be different. I too was stunned to learn about his death because Blackstar, the Kendrick Lamar-influenced album that's, sadly, now his final album, had been released only two days before on Bowie's 69th birthday, and also because Bowie was a seemingly immortal alien from the planet Rocksalot. I thought he was going to live forever.

(Photo source: cosmicbreadcrum)

Thanks to cancer, Bowie wasn't able to live as long as Jareth the Goblin King, whom I've always assumed is hundreds of years old. I also always assumed that Labyrinth was inessential, watered-down Bowie, both music-wise and acting-wise, which was why I never watched the film until shortly before Netflix streaming removed it from its library in December (watching Labyrinth for the first time after marathoning Netflix's Jessica Jones resulted in Jones and Labyrinth turning into a fascinating double-header about women who triumph over sexual predators who are basically spoiled man-children, and that's exactly how Bowie approached Jareth, as "a big kid"). I'm glad to admit I was so wrong about Labyrinth.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week: Rick and Morty, "Mortynight Run"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week is no longer a weekly feature, but sometimes, I'll catch a really good piece of animated TV one week or a few weeks after its original airdate, and I'll feel like devoting some paragraphs to it despite my lateness to the party. Hence the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of Last Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

In a Rolling Stone profile about the creative challenges Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have faced while trying to equal the brilliant first season of their irreverent and renewed-this-week-for-a-third-season Adult Swim hit Rick and Morty, Harmon said, "Most second albums suck." Uh, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, De La Soul Is Dead, A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, OutKast's ATLiens, D'Angelo's Voodoo and Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d. city would like a word with you, Harmon.

But yeah, otherwise, I see Harmon's point as he and Roiland admitted "A Rickle in Time"--Rick and Morty's complicatedly written second-season premiere about the side effects Rick and his grandkids Morty and Summer experience due to Rick's time-freezing device from "Ricksy Business"--is not as satisfying as they wish it could be. Harmon said, "It went off the deep end conceptually and got really over-complicated." I actually like "A Rickle in Time" a little more than Roiland and Harmon do, but the new season's second episode, "Mortynight Run," is where the season really starts cooking.



"Mortynight Run" taps into the thing that surprised me the most about Rick and Morty's first season and made the show stand out from other Adult Swim fare, outside of The Venture Bros.: its downbeat side (and more of that downbeat side surfaces in this week's Rick and Morty episode, "Auto Erotic Assimilation"). I hate to refer to a line from a movie I despise, but Gandalf's line to Bilbo about returning home a different person in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey really applies to Morty. His adventures with his scientist grandpa have made him a better person, and those adventures have allowed the learning disability-afflicted kid to prove to Rick that he's not as dumb as Rick thinks he is. But those adventures have also made Morty better understand his grandpa's misanthropic and nihilistic worldview, and like in "Meeseeks and Destroy" and "Rick Potion #9," we see how much Morty's gradual understanding of why Rick has that worldview wrecks Morty inside in "Mortynight Run." In only less than a half-hour, the episode ends up doing a better job than those interminable Hobbit movies of showing how these exhausting adventures affect the traveler who won't be the same.

Sure, "Mortynight Run" is hilarious. Special guest star Jemaine Clement gets to both sing and make fun of his own association with musical numbers. "Goodbye Moonmen," written by Harmon and credited "Mortynight Run" writer David Phillips and composed by series composer Ryan Elder, is the cleverest David Bowie parody since, well, Clement's Bowie tribute on Flight of the Conchords. Special guest star Andy Daly takes a stock hitman character and imbues him with amusingly incongruous chipperness in the mold of his Forrest MacNeil character from Comedy Central's Review. The Jerryboree--a day care center where the Ricks from various universes drop off the Jerrys of their universes when they don't have time to put up with the Jerrys' shit--is great "let's beat up on Jerry again" material, but it's also an intriguing subplot about Jerry's realization that his ordinariness isn't as awful as others think. I especially love how a maudlin VR game called Roy--the player determines the decisions of an ordinary guy in scenarios that are like a cross between a David Anspaugh sports movie and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light"--is the biggest arcade sensation in outer space instead of a first-person shooter ("You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Boo!").

But what makes "Mortynight Run" especially stand out is the way it treats the moment when Morty--after defying Rick and protecting the life of Clement's character, a benevolent and frequently singing gaseous being, from assassins and cops because he believes all life forms are precious no matter what their flaws are--discovers the being (Rick calls him "Fart") intends to wipe out all life, so Morty makes a difficult decision that was foreshadowed by the scene of him playing Roy at the Dave & Busters-ish Blips and Chitz. "Mortynight Run" doesn't play Morty's moment of anguish for laughs.



On Community, Harmon couldn't have characters actually kill people--hence all those bloodless paintball episodes--but on the much more fantastical and bleak Rick and Morty, Harmon can. Through Morty's dilemma regarding Fart, Phillips, Harmon and Roiland treat the consequences of causing many lives to end because of foolishly sticking to a belief that it's all for the best--and the first time Morty kills somebody in front of him--with the proper weight they deserve. "Mortynight Run" is a good example of what Vox describes as Rick and Morty's "exploration of morality that manages to avoid simplistic fables with pat lessons," as well as the implication during that exploration that "Rick's cynicism is well-founded--and that following Morty's well-intentioned instincts can lead to calamity."

While Bob's Burgers channeled the ambience of Midnight Run in its tribute to that 1988 film (for example, that episode's score music paid tribute to Danny Elfman's score from the film), "Mortynight Run" chooses to pay tribute to the non-comedic side of Midnight Run--one of Harmon's favorite films--without ever quoting a single line from it (the only blatant references to Midnight Run are the scene where all the Jerrys are enjoying a copy of Midnight Run with director's commentary, an extra that, sadly, by the way, doesn't exist in real life, and the moments of Rick, Morty and Fart evading the cops like De Niro and Grodin). Midnight Run is one of my favorite films too. On some days, it skyrockets to being my absolute favorite. GoodFellas may be a more challenging and brutal crime comedy, and Do the Right Thing may be more meaningful because it has something important and complex to say about community and injustice, but at the end of the day, I just want to be entertained by a well-made escapist work that doesn't make me say, "Well, that plot point was dumb"--or "Great, another Asian Stepin Fetchit with a cartoonish accent who helps make it fucking difficult for so many of us to get dates or actual jobs." And Midnight Run is exactly that.

Midnight Run also pulls off shifts in tone from comedic to dramatic more seamlessly than most big-screen comedies--and almost every small-screen comedy from the '80s--where the cast and crew attempt to do the same kind of tonal shifts. Harmon seems to have absorbed Midnight Run's lessons on how to skillfully juggle humor and seriousness during his work on both Community and Rick and Morty, and the De Niro/Grodin film's skillful juggling act receives a proper tribute in "Mortynight Run." The quality of episodes like "Mortynight Run" is why Rick and Morty is now receiving slightly similar tributes from the Internet as well. The Internet's way of paying tribute to Rick and Morty is to recut the dialogue of alcoholic Rick to the rhythm of unapologetic teetotaler Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta." It makes no damn sense. But it's also brilliant, much like Rick and Morty itself.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "All This and Gargantua-2"

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

A year and a half after the airing of its fifth-season finale, The Venture Bros. returns to Adult Swim with the one-hour special "All This and Gargantua-2." Just like "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," the fifth-season premiere, did after a similarly long gap between seasons, the consistently funny one-hour special proves that The Venture Bros. hasn't lost a step despite its long absence.

I didn't become an instant Venture Bros. fan when the show, which Comedy Central turned down (brilliant move, Comedy Central), premiered on Adult Swim in 2004. The show's character designs failed to hook me at first because I was never a Jonny Quest fan and I didn't think a Jonny Quest parody could be sustainable as a TV series. Also, the Warner Bros. Animation superhero spoof Freakazoid! had already come up with the Jonny Quest parody to end all Jonny Quest parodies, a hysterically funny fake '60s cartoon called Toby Danger. I caught up with The Venture Bros. much later, via DVD rentals of the first two seasons from Netflix, and that's when I fell in love with the show.

On DVD, I saw it evolve from a one-joke Jonny Quest parody to an imaginative pastiche of all the non-Jonny Quest things creators/writers/voice actors Jackson Publick (a.k.a. Chris McCulloch) and Doc Hammer are in love with, from spy fiction to old Marvel Comics titles like Strange Tales or Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and forgotten figures from '80s and '90s music videos (for example, the girl from Republica of "Ready to Go" fame). The show is an exploration of adult disappointment and failure, built around a fully realized comedic universe of losers and costumed deviants that rivals Springfield from The Simpsons and Melonville from SCTV (so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros., and I wish McCulloch and Hammer would spin the Order of the Triad off into their own show, but I doubt they'd go for it). "All This and Gargantua-2," which centers on the disastrous opening of the titular space casino resort run by Jonas "J.J." Venture Jr. (James Urbaniak), exemplifies how the show has come a long way from its Jonny Quest riffs and humble Flash-animated roots and taken on epic proportions. The top-notch animation work by Titmouse Inc. has a lot to do with the one-hour special's epic sheen. I'm reluctant to revisit on Netflix Instant the 2004 episode "Careers in Science," the first time Dr. Venture (also Urbaniak) and his sons Dean (Mike Sinterniklaas) and Hank (McCulloch) went up into space (the deceased Jonas Venture Sr.'s Gargantua-1 station, to be exact), simply because the primitiveness of how "Careers in Science" looks would be jarring, in comparison to what Titmouse is able to achieve with The Venture Bros. nowadays.

As is the case with many other animated or live-action sitcoms, The Venture Bros. was trying to find its comedic voice when it started, so early episodes like "Careers in Science" don't have the confidence "All This and Gargantua-2" has in spades. "Gargantua-2" is The Venture Bros. firing on all cylinders comedically, whether it's Dr. Venture's gripes about both J.J.--his more confident and successful brother--and the new casino or the ability of the Sovereign, an adversary more menacing than the Monarch (also McCulloch) will ever be, to somehow find time between Guild of Calamitous Intent meetings to watch Totally Spies, which isn't exactly the kind of entertainment you'd think a criminal mastermind would be aware of. I'm also fond of the fact--which somehow goes unnoticed by the continually dissatisfied and unimpressed Dr. Venture--that J.J. blatantly copied much of Star Trek for the look of Gargantua-2. J.J.'s outfit at the casino opening is Kirk's admiral uniform from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

(Photo source: TrekCore)

(Photo source: TrekCore)

It's especially great to hear Stephen Colbert reprise his role--for what Hammer has confirmed will be one last time before Colbert takes over Late Show on CBS--as Professor Impossible/Incorrigible, the Mr. Fantastic-style jerk Colbert voiced in the show's first two seasons. Bill Hader was a decent substitute for Colbert in the role of Richard Impossible, but Colbert, who can play arrogant characters in his sleep, is preferable to Hader in that role.

McCulloch and Hammer refuse to talk down to the audience, which explains why there's no "Previously on..." recap at the start of the special to reorient viewers after the year-and-a-half-long gap. I love the omission of that. McCulloch and Hammer figure that their viewers must have watched the fifth-season finale either dozens of times already or right before "Gargantua-2," so why bother with the previously? The only thing McCulloch and Hammer do to reorient viewers is to repeat a scene from the end of "The Devil's Grip" where the Monarch, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (Hammer) and Henchman 21 (also Hammer) find a new home after the destruction of their cocoon headquarters.

Some viewers were underwhelmed by "The Devil's Grip" as a season finale and didn't find it dramatic enough for their tastes. But I thought there was plenty that was dramatic about it: the Monarch, Dr. Venture and Dean had moments of "What am I doing with my life?," a recurring question on this show. Even Colonel Gentleman--McCulloch's inspired reimagining of both Sean Connery and his Allan Quatermain character from the mediocre movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen as a bisexual author with a penchant for scribbling down pre-listicle fluff like "Colonel Gentleman's Hollywood Actresses Who Need a Smack in the Mouth"--had a "What am I doing with my life?" moment in "The Devil's Grip" too. "Gargantua-2" is a cross between the kind of explosive, death-ridden season finale some viewers expected out of "The Devil's Grip" and a comic book annual. I think an annual would be a better way to describe "Gargantua-2." It's an annual where a few character arcs are wrapped up (unlike Molotov Cocktease, who faked her death at the end of the fourth season, it looks like cancer-stricken J.J., General Treister and the Sovereign will stay dead) and the primary setting is destroyed--the Monarch's theatrics and the ineptitude of Dr. Venture's security systems both cause the Venture Compound to be burnt down--in order to make way for the sixth season's New York backdrop, which is tantalizingly introduced at the end of the epilogue at J.J.'s funeral.



As amusing as all the pop-culture references are during "Gargantua-2"--I'd like to know who did uncredited work voicing Roger Moore at the baccarat table--they're, as usual, just the icing on the cake for what really makes The Venture Bros. stand out: the character writing. McCulloch and Hammer are able to take a premise that was sustainable for only 11 minutes on Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law and was bound to run out of gas beyond that running time--like "What if Shaggy from Scooby-Doo were the Son of Sam?," which Tick creator and current Gotham writer Ben Edlund actually once imagined during The Venture Bros.' second season--and make it work as a half-hour piece of character-driven comedy or, in the case of "Gargantua-2," longer. This show isn't merely "Spot the Reference" humor a la Friedberg/Seltzer in animated form, and the characters on The Venture Bros. aren't simply joke machines. They talk more like either ordinary people--for a guy who's an extraordinary killing machine, Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton) sounds less like a quippy action hero and more like an ordinary and jaded cubicle jockey--or the self-loathing nerds McCulloch and Hammer clearly are.

I've said before that The Venture Bros. mines much of its humor and dramatic moments from how most nerds really are and the ugliness and emptiness of their behavior--the day Dr. Venture stops being so self-centered is the day this show is over--instead of being another nerd fantasy that glorifies what nerds imagine themselves to be. On The Venture Bros., that kind of fantasy gets taken down and skewered with the same kind of precision Dr. Killinger delivers while stabbing or impaling the lightsaber-wielding Investors--his own brothers--with his umbrella towards the end of "Gargantua-2." If there's any kind of message that could be found on this show, which doesn't care for talking down to its audience or delivering any form of speechifying, it would have to be "Life would be easier if you stopped drowning in your own delusions," an idea Dr. Venture is bound to ignore as he and the rest of Team Venture settle into the Venture Industries New York headquarters J.J. bequeathed to Dr. Venture in his will, during a season that will hopefully be as satisfying as "Gargantua-2" is in its 47 epic minutes.

Memorable quotes:
* "Never baccarat. It's a dead giveaway. Nobody but spies play baccarat."

* The Sovereign, attempting to lure Dr. Mrs. and her colleagues into a trap by disguising himself as 21: "The Monarch's waiting, and you guys are acting like Alex, Sam and Clover of Totally Spies!"

* Professor Impossible, after shape-shifting into a black mechanic: "Say, that doesn't count as blackface, does it?"

* Professor Impossible: "You'd have me back?"
Sally Impossible (Mia Barron): "No, idiot. But I'm not about to let our son lose his father because he joined the LARP society."

* Guild Command Dispatch Agent Watch (McCulloch), referring to the Sovereign, who enjoys shape-shifting into the Thin White Duke: "Where did David Bowie go?"
Dr. Mrs: "He's not David Bowie."
Ward (Hammer), Watch's partner: "Aw great, all my signed albums just became worthless."

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.