The second season of the BBC crime drama, Ludwig, is back, following the quirky puzzler (David Mitchell) as he assists the Police to solve crimes.
The reclusive, obsessive puzzler, Ludwig, who treats each crime as a puzzle to be solved, makes for a highly entertaining watch. In the first season, we were asked to believe that he could successfully impersonate his identical twin brother at the Police station in each case without anyone noticing. In this season, his brother is still mysteriously missing, but his case-solving has earned him a place on the team to assist the local force. There is an enhanced role for always brilliant Anna Maxwell Martin as his sister-in-law, Lucy, who decides to be more active in the search for her husband and secures a journalist at a local paper to provide credentials for her own investigations.
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The narrative is driven by Ludwig’s unusual methods, which look at the facts from an unusual angle to throw light on the case that the police are struggling to solve. The opening episode is set in the Theatre Royal Cambridge (actually the one at Windsor, with the outside shots carefully avoiding the Castle walls which it faces). It is a nice idea: two sisters both claim to have killed their mother in a box seat at the Theatre so that it is not a whodunnit but a “who did not do it”! Sadly, that is hardly enough to sustain an hour of TV, so the focus is on Lucy pursuing her own investigations and Ludwig’s relationship with the Chief Constable. It is very much an episode to set up the series, but it needed a stronger core case for Ludwig to solve.
It works best when we see him using the technique from a crossword puzzle or codeword or logic problem which he is said to design for a paper, to solve this mystery. In this episode, the reveal frustratingly had more the feel of the Poirot denouement scene with suspects gathered together. Still, David Mitchell is very watchable, and the show is absolutely worth giving a chance to develop.
