Directed by Robert McKillop and Jill Robertson, Ludwig, the 6-episode BBC crime thriller, is the kind of series that keeps you hooked even till the very end. It is the story of a shy and timid but brilliant man who absolutely despised the idea of socializing with people and ended up battling his fears to find his missing twin brother. So let’s find out what happened in the Ludwig series and if John was able to find out what exactly happened to his brother.
Spoiler Alert
Why did Lucy call John for help?
In order to understand why it was so difficult for our protagonist, John Taylor, a genius puzzle solver, to step out of his home and go to his sister-in-law’s house, it is important to know the kind of man he was. John and James Taylor were twin brothers, and though they both were extremely talented and intelligent, they had contrasting behavioral traits. For the past 3 decades, John had stayed by himself, met a handful of people, and rarely left his house. He spent most of his time creating puzzles and getting them published. John’s puzzle books were published under the pseudonym “Ludwig,” and that told us how much the man hated being in the spotlight. I believe John suffered from some kind of psychological disorder, as he was petrified by the idea of stepping out of his house, mingling with people and doing things that people normally do on a regular basis. He had a fixed routine, from the food he ate to each and every minute thing that happened in his day. He didn’t like breaking that pattern, and so when Lucy called and told him that a cab was waiting outside his house to bring him to hers, John was petrified. He went into a state of panic as he didn’t know how he would just leave his house and do something that he hadn’t done in 30 years. But Lucy was first John’s best friend and then his sister-in-law. John knew that Lucy was in trouble, so he took a deep breath and agreed to do something that was excruciatingly difficult for him to do.
John met Lucy, and that’s when he got to know that James had left a note for Lucy and gone missing. James had left an unsigned resignation letter, and he’d asked Lucy to post it the very next day. He told Lucy to not trust anybody, especially his colleagues in the police department. Lucy knew that he was in some sort of trouble, which was why he had left without informing her. Lucy told John that James had a notebook, and she believed that it could contain some important information that could lead them to him. But the problem was that the notebook was kept in James’ office, and Lucy knew that she couldn’t just waltz into the Cambridge police station and take the notebook without getting noticed. James and John were identical twins, and Lucy wanted to take advantage of that fact. She asked John to do something that she knew would be the toughest thing for him; she told him to go into James’ office and bring back the notebook. Lucy told John that she had a fair idea about who he could encounter, and she could give him basic information about them so that, if the need arose, he could make small talk. But John was the kind of man who was extremely awkward when talking to anybody, and here Lucy was asking him to go out and mingle with complete strangers. John, surprisingly, agreed to Lucy’s plan, though he had no clue how it was going to change his life forever.
How did John become an expert detective?
John went to the Cambridge Police Department pretending to be his brother, hoping that nobody would recognize him and that he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. But John’s worst nightmare came true after his brother DCI James Taylor’s subordinate, DI Russell Carter, asked him to come to a crime scene in order to investigate a murder. John was a mess, and there were times when Carter and DS Alice Finch, another subordinate, just couldn’t understand what had happened to him. John, when Carter was interrogating the suspects, felt so uneasy that he ran away from the place. He went down the building and sat in a car, and something clicked inside his mind. He had heard the statements of all the witnesses, and he realized that he could actually solve the murder using his puzzle-solving tactics. For the next 15 odd minutes, John tried to make others understand the rationale behind his conclusion, but whatever he told them was so completely incomprehensible that nobody grasped a word of what he said or drew on the board. John, in the most humble way, declared that, according to his hypothesis, a woman named Sarah Gilmarsh was behind the murder of the man named Allan Howells. John couldn’t explain the motive, but just based on their testimonies, he figured out that Sarah was the one who was lying. Before anybody could say a word, Sarah confessed, and Carter and Finch were awestruck at what they witnessed.
For the next two weeks, John ended up solving a bunch of cases, and he set a new record. The newspapers and magazines gushed about the newfound enthusiasm of the police officers and their high rate of solving cases and, moreover, the speed at which they did it with precision. Also, these cases that John solved were quite complicated, but the way John approached them like a puzzle was just marvelous. In a case where an American tour guide named Meghan Rowlands had been killed, John figured out that she was not the killer’s target, but had become collateral damage. John figured out that, while Meghan was taking pictures of the tourists, she had accidentally clicked a photograph of a man named Adrian Tate, who had killed Jordan Halshaw, who belonged to a rich and influential family. Now Tate understood that he needed to take Meghan’s phone, as he was scared that he’d been captured in the act. But things didn’t end up as he would have expected, and there was a scuffle between him and Meghan, where the latter suffered severe injuries and died on the spot. Similarly, in a case where a construction worker named Martin Symes had been killed, John figured out that the killer loved puzzles just like him. It was probably the toughest case where he encountered somebody who could psychologically predict what the other person’s behavior could be, based on which he created a trap for the victim. I believe that, out of all the cases, the one that John relished the most was where he got to meet his former math teacher, someone who he greatly admired, Mr. Todd. Nobody in the entire police station was able to figure out that it was John pretending to be James, but it took Mr. Todd, an avid puzzle solver, only a couple of days to realize that. Mr. Durose, the principal of a school, had taken his own life, but John believed that it was a case of murder. The problem was that the door to Mr. Durose’s office was locked from the inside, which was why John was not able to figure out how the accused would have escaped.
John, with Mr. Todd’s guidance, was able to figure out that the accused in that case, Mr. Bishop, the PE teacher, who had killed Mr. Durose, hid in the victim’s office after killing him. The locked door gave Mr. Bishop the strongest alibi, but John was able to procure counter-evidence that proved his guilt. John felt extremely happy after meeting Mr. Todd, but at the same time, it worried him to see him in that state. Mr. Todd was a genius, and as John said, there was no puzzle in the world that he couldn’t solve. But Todd had never found love, and at that age, he was just too lonely, without even a single person whom he could call his family. John felt scared of meeting a similar fate in the next 20 years. As much as he admired his teacher, John didn’t want to end up like him.
What did Holly Pinder know about the Sinclair case?
Though John got involved in different cases, he was able to find out certain things about his brother’s disappearance that gave him an idea of what could have possibly happened to him. So when James disappeared, he was in charge of a case where a man, Roger Sinclair, had been murdered. Now, according to the reports, a small-time burglar, Rhys Bowen, had broken into his house, stolen certain things, killed him, and left the place. But then John figured out that the crime scene report had been altered, as in the original one, James had stated that there were no signs of forced entry and nothing had been stolen from the house. As stated earlier, James was in charge of the case, but he was then removed, and Chief Constable Ziegler took over. From the beginning, John saw that Ziegler didn’t talk to him properly, meaning that the man wasn’t fond of James. It was said that Sinclair, who was a conspiracy theorist, had some really important information based on which he was going to publish a report. After Sinclair was killed, all his research material was brought to the police station, and it was decided that it would be handed over to Scotland Yard. But another surprising thing happened, as a truck full of documents went missing, and nobody was able to explain how it happened.
John, at this moment in Ludwig, believed that it was the doing of certain people who didn’t want to be exposed. Apart from that, John wasn’t able to find out anything about James’ disappearance. Holly Pinder, whom John referred to as the computer lady, and who worked in the Cambridge police station’s IT department, knew what James had been up to. She had hacked into his devices and found out what he was searching for. Holly used to sell information for money, and her plan was to blackmail James using the information she had on him. But then James vanished, and the next day, his brother John came in pretending to be him. It didn’t take Holly long to figure out that John was not who he was pretending to be. To make sure that her speculation was right, she set a trap for John, and he walked right into it. She told John that avoiding the conversation about both of them getting intimate at a party back in the day was the reason why she wasn’t talking to him properly. Now, John trusted his brother, and he knew he wouldn’t cheat on Lucy, but in that situation, he didn’t know what to do other than to play along. John did not deny that he hadn’t gotten intimate, and Holly got her answer that he was not James.
Holly, in Ludwig episode 5, gave a call to Lucy and told her that she wanted to tell her something about James, face to face. Maybe Holly’s plan would have been to blackmail Lucy, but before she could do that, she was killed by a man named Adam Newsum, who worked for her. Newsum took advantage of the fact that Lucy arrived at the crime scene just moments after he had murdered Holly, and so he framed her for the murder. Lucy was in custody, and John didn’t have an option but to tell Carter and DCS Carol Shaw that he was not James. Lucy was totally against it, as James had clearly stated in his letter that she shouldn’t trust anybody from the police department, but John didn’t have much of an option. He needed to trust somebody and take that leap of faith.
Were Lucy And John Able To Find James?
In Ludwig’s ending, something unprecedented happened that, for a moment, even had John doubting everything. So after John resigned from his post and proved Lucy’s innocence, he got a voice message from James. In that voice message, James told John that he had escaped because he no longer wished to be with his wife. He said that he was like his father, who had also abandoned the family when they were kids. James said that he had made up all those excuses; at least that’s what John thought, because he just wanted to start over, and he didn’t have the courage to confront and tell the truth to his wife. John was disappointed as he’d never expected his brother to be like that. John went and told everything to Lucy, and that’s where it struck him that his brother never talked in metaphors, but in the message, he said that he was a bowerbird, symbolizing that, just like that bird, he’d left his nest, never to return again. John realized that the bowerbird could be the source code that he had been trying to find since the beginning. So, the notebook that James had left behind had puzzles in it, but John wasn’t able to crack them until the very end. He needed a source code, which was like a central piece essential for solving the puzzle. When he heard the word bowerbird, he knew that that could be it. John realized that James knew that there could be people out there who had tapped John’s phone, so he’d tried to be as cryptic as he could. After using the source code, i.e., Bowerbird, and using it to decrypt the first page of James’ notebook, John got to know about an address, Unit Seven Stoneway, and he went there to figure out why his brother had mentioned it. The biggest revelation was made when John, Lucy, and Henry reached the storage facility and found Sinclair’s entire research work, which had gone missing from that truck headed to Scotland Yard, kept here. It was James who had somehow managed to steal all the documents and arranged to keep that fact hidden. John knew that, somewhere amidst all the conspiracy theories, there was some information that could lead them to exposing certain powerful and influential people. John, at the moment, didn’t know how they were and what they had done. While John and Lucy were busy loading the documents in their car, there was a man standing in the shadows with a look of satisfaction and relief in his eyes. It was James, who was watching his family do everything in order to find him and bring him back home safely. James didn’t go and meet them, as he knew that he would have to stay in hiding until the perpetrators were exposed.
As we saw, the Cambridge Police Authority wanted to keep John on a retainer, which meant that he would be solving many more complicated cases in the future. I believe with time and constant effort, Lucy and John will be able to figure out who those powerful people were who got Sinclair killed and who from the police department was helping them out.
