A few words in your shell-like, pal, about Gene Hunt

The Tainted Archive's TV Cops weekend are running my article on Gene Hunt.

Ashes to Ashes, Final Episode

And so the series ended by providing a definitive answer to the question of what the heck it has all been about while also giving the characters closure. But it also provided a dash of ambiguity and a hint of continuity that said the series could go on if they chose to do so. Despite my doubts beforehand, the ending worked for me.

In my previous article in which I tried to predict what the final episode would reveal I said that: The implications are probably that Gene is the dead copper. He's lain buried for forty years, his story unknown and untold. Now that Nelson's babbling and Keats' vendetta is drawing everyone back to Manchester he's about to be dug up, so he's restless and with Alex and Sam being close to death, they've seen him leading the life he would have led if he'd not been killed, his ghostly form oblivious to the fact his earthly form died. His last sight before being buried was the stars above and that is what everyone will see when his body is uncovered and his bones are finally put to rest with his story now known. So in the end it wasn't Sam's world or Alex's, but Gene's, and this was his story of his life that never was and his death that should never have been, all played out in a world that others can visit to replay their own deaths, seek redemption from their perceived failings, find affirmation of their worth, and resist the evil temptations of Keats prior to moving on to the great unknown...

In the end that was it, but I can’t be too pleased with myself as I did suggest about five different potential endings with that one being the one I thought the makers were leading us towards. The fact that the show was leading us there was pleasing and it means the final series made more sense than I feared it would.

I had three hopes for the conclusion: that it wouldn't have a barking mad twist such as they were on a spaceship, that it wouldn't change the ending to Life on Mars, and that it would provide the Wow factor with something new I hadn't expected. I got two out of three, and as Meat Loaf once sang, that's not bad.

The first of these hopes was delivered by the series doing the one thing its never done before: revealing the plot in an unhurried way. I've been unhappy with the usual format of two minutes of plot development and 58 minutes devoted to the weak story of the week. The ending reversed that trend by dashing off the cop story in the blink of an eye and devoting the rest of the time to the explanation. And it goes something like this (and I've only seen this episode once and there was a lot of detail so I may have got some aspects wrong):

Gene Hunt was a copper in the 1950s. He joined the force because of his love of westerns and his aim to be a sheriff like Will Kane from High Noon. On the day of the coronation (hence the picture of the queen in his office) he went charging into a room full of bad guys alone with all guns blazing under the naïve belief that the good guys always win. But sadly the bad guys hadn't watched any westerns. They killed and buried him, and his body was left unfound until the present day. But Gene's spirit lived on and he created for himself a fantasy world in which he lived out the life he had wanted to live, a life that was so appealing he gradually forgot he was dead. It was a life where he drove fast cars, kicked down doors, said 'shut it' a lot and he always banged the blaggers to rights. There was none of that time-wasting nonsense like form-filling or worrying about the criminal's human rights because this was a copper's fantasy of the way it never was but should have been. This fantasy was so powerful it attracted other coppers who had died before their time. Sam got run over accidentally, Alex got shot by nutter Layton, Ray hung himself in a fit of remorse after killing someone, Chris got shot up in the line of duty and Shaz got stabbed over something trivial. These people then experienced the life they could have led, made sense of their deaths, and had fun before moving on to whatever lies beyond.

As an explanation it works well enough and ensures that the alternate but very unrealistic past world is bulletproof because in the end it was a fiction within a fiction. And as a retro-fitted idea it just about joins both series together. Although I wish it'd been the ending they'd been working towards from the beginning as there were many aspects that don’t fit in but which could have done with more effort. Why did Sam and Alex go into the apparent past? Why didn't Sam and Alex get to re-live their deaths...? There are dozens of such unanswerable questions, but that doesn't matter. Not every loose end has to be tied up and the explanation made as much sense as a tv series needs to do.

My only minor complaint is that it alters the Life on Mars ending (at least I think it does as this was an ambiguous area) by stating that Sam died before he returned to a present day fantasy that he then went on to reject. Alex's path also matched his experience. Unlike Ray, Chris, Shaz and possibly Annie, who died immediately and immediately forgot their deaths, she and Sam clung on to life for a while and so they had a more troubled journey to acceptance that involved a false return home. So she probably died at the end of series 2 and rejected the false present day at the start of the final series. Her adventures in series 3 then followed the path Sam would have taken after Mars ended of forgetting about real life and becoming resigned to death prior to moving on. I can accept that as a valid change to Mars because the ambiguity is there as to whether the present day was a fantasy or not, and because it's brave of the makers to avoid the trappings of the easy happy ending. In the end Alex was dead, her body lying in the hospital and she'd never return to Molly. In fact everyone died, including the Quattro, and in any popular genre that is a hard ending to make work. And yet it did. So it goes.

The ambiguity also extended to Keats and the question of what he represented. Keats was the best thing about series 3. His bizarre off-note acting performance and fourth-wall breaking speeches managed to find a new angle on evil and creepy, giving his character an other-worldly quality. The final episode used that groundwork to present something that was genuinely disturbing. Keats cringed, crawled, leapt around, barked, squealed, hissed like a creature from the dark side. It was a good move to give him freedom to do whatever he wanted to do however bizarre as it made everyone else's restrained reactions more believable. Although I guess it's hard to know how anyone ought to react to the news that they're dead and have been for some time. Gene also deserves praise for doing something different with his performance. This series I've thought the actor was fed up with the show and was phoning in his lines, but he worked hard to sell us a different Gene, one who'd lost his swagger. The sight of a broken Gene reduced to being the young copper who died in the 1950s was saddening, making his inevitable return to being the old Gene who gave Keats a thumping all the more cheering.

Despite this there was one bum note in the episode. I've said before that the makers sometimes do bad things deliberately and this always turns out to be a bad idea, and it was the same here. The implication was that Keats was the Devil, which is fine as an implication, but when Alex tells him to go to hell and he agrees, the episode lurched in a direction that made me groan. The scene in which Keats tries to get everyone to join him in a red lift that only goes down, a long way down, was a scene that would have looked awful in a 60s Twilight Zone episode. Thankfully the show then moved away from that to leave Keats as being an evil, doubting thing, perhaps even a man like Gene who wanted to create his own fantasy rather than him being the ultimate soul destroyer, or at least I hope so as that would mean Viv is now in hell.

The final aspect of the ending that worked for me was the Wow factor, in fact three Wow factors. The first was the appearance of Sam Tyler, surely top of any fan's list of things to happen in the final episode, while also probably being top of any fan's list of things that shouldn't happen in the final episode. Frankly John Simm was never going to appear and if he had it wouldn’t have worked, but they got round it well with the glimpse of a fuzzy ghostly Sam in Gene's office. The second Wow was the appearance of the one character from Mars that I really did want to see: Nelson, who appears to welcome everyone to the afterlife, depicted as the pub The Railway Arms in which the song Life on Mars is always playing. As this is Gene's fantasy, a pub is the only place where dead people should go for eternity and who better to serve them than the enigmatic Nelson, especially as the fact he now serves wine hints he was Luigi too?

The final Wow provided the one thing I'd never envisaged as being the final scene. It was corny, daft, clearly not the end they had in mind at the start, but it didn’t matter because it was the right way to end the show. Fans have often pondered about the possibility of there being a third show in the franchise, and the makers have been right to refuse to do a Gene moving on to the 90s series. But in a good move they did actually make it, it's just that it lasted for only two minutes and it said everything it needed to in that time.

With Alex and the rest heading into the Railway Arms for eternity and with Keats slinking off to the underworld, Gene found himself alone in his fantasy world. He returns to his office to find all the bit part actors and extras are still around, and they all suddenly get a line of a dialogue and hints of personalities. So Gene pours himself a whiskey and reads up on Mercedes-Benz after the death of his Quattro. Gradually the lonely man gathers his authority while in the main office a new team forms as the shadowy characters step forward to take their turn in presumably reliving their deaths, making sense of their lives, and having fun. Then a new man arrives. He's just been assigned to Gene's team, except everything looks different, he doesn’t know what year it is, and his I-phone's gone. Gene smiles, then emerges from his office to have a word in his shell-like. And so the last line in the series was Gene's first line and the show is bookended, completed, but it also carries on.

Next week I'll have to find something else to bang on about.

Ashes to Ashes: wave goodbye to the 80s

With the conclusion to the time-travel cop show Ashes to Ashes imminent I guess now is the time for me to do what many people are doing and put in writing my guess on how the franchise's many mysteries will be resolved, all done with the full acceptance I'll be completely wrong.


But before I get it wrong, I'll go back in time myself to look at the evolution of the 5-part series, which has been something of a mixed bag. Life on Mars started strongly with a superb and consistent first series that did everything right. It had interesting stories, great characters, a seemingly effortless mixture of comedy and drama, a dash of sci-fi, and most importantly it had charm. Series 2 repeated the formula and it got most things right, but some of the charm had worn off, and the series devoted too much time to unsubtle comedy and a drawn-out set-up to the conclusion.

Then Ashes came along and the franchise fell down a big hole in the ground. The first few episodes presented some of the most dire sights I've ever willingly sat through and even the makers' later claim that they were being bad deliberately to send-up 80s cop shows didn't help to dull the pain of seeing Gene Hunt shooting up half of London without hitting anything from the back of a slow speedboat to the tune of No More Heroes. If nothing else this proved that being bad deliberately is a bad idea, although they then had to make Bonekickers to confirm it.

Thankfully series 1 improved as it went along and strangely it had enough rough and ready charm to be entertaining, which I guess is all you can ask for. Series 2 improved massively by addressing most of the things that were wrong with series 1. It wasn't as strong as either Mars series, but it could have been with a better conclusion to the mysteries of Summers and Operation Rose, something that doesn't bode well for the end to the inconsistent series 3. Several episodes this series have been even worse than the early Ashes episodes by committing the worst sin of all, being boring. But also several episodes, most notably the Litton one, have been as good as anything Mars managed.

So, how will this inconsistent but entertaining show end? The short answer is I don’t care. I did once, but not any more. I don’t mean that in a bad way as it's not stopping me speculating. It's just that the show has changed direction so many times I'm just going along for the ride now. In fact I'd suggest that the 5-part series has actually worked its way towards five different endings, and that's about four too many for me. Worse, we've been promised that the ending is so 'bonkers' nobody will have figured it out, and if that turns out to be the case, I think the point of the show has been lost somewhere along the way.

When Sam Tyler got run over ten minutes into episode 1 of Life on Mars and woke up in 1973 it was clear where the show was going. He was in a coma in the present day and his unconscious mind had created a dream world to keep his brain active and help him wake up. That was it, no mystery, no complexity. In every episode doctors talked to him through the radio and tv, and it was clear they would get him to wake up when the show had run its course. But then the writers started reading what viewers thought about the story. To their surprise, fans were debating what it all meant. It was never supposed to be a mystery and yet many viewers thought there was one. So series 2 tried to make more of a mystery out of the question of whether Sam was in a coma, back in time, or gone mad. The franchise format of minuscule plot development in the opening and closing minute was born as it tried to work towards something more mysterious and meaningful than just Sam waking up.

This ultimately worked because it directed the show to what was for me the best finale to any tv series. Sam woke up, found that real life wasn't as much fun as being dead, and so he killed himself to snog Annie and suffer one last bit of abuse from Gene. That was emotional, daring, and it didn't stand up to even a moment's thought, but it was perfect. Later I found out that many people viewed the ending differently: Sam hadn't woken up at all. When he found that he couldn’t feel pain he realized he was still in a coma and so he returned to the more exciting coma dream. That wasn't so emotional, but it didn’t matter. The final shot of the series had the Test Card Girl switching off the screen from the other side and so telling us not to fret about what it meant, it was only a tv series and we hope you enjoyed it. And I had.

Sadly though Life on Mars had only the two series. It's always assumed John Simm didn’t want to do any more and so with show ending too quickly Ashes was born, created on the unlikely premise that Sam's psychologist Alex Drake also falls into a coma and she recreates Sam's world. This required a change of focus with Alex creating versions of Gene, Ray and Chris from a female viewpoint and by making explicit the minor Mars theme that the dream world provided a form of past-life regression therapy. In a coma and hovering between life and death, the mind recreates a key past incident to resolve any outstanding issues and so make sense of the individual's existence prior to moving on. Freed from external stimuli the brain can rediscover forgotten memories and make connections it could never have formed when awake, and so like Sam and his troubling issues with his father, Alex resolves her parental issues.

This was still a clear and interesting idea, but then, with Ashes getting an extension beyond one series and with this theme being exhausted, for series two the show looked around for another direction. Rather than opting to be just a simple, fun, nostalgic cop show, the makers decided that the fans enjoyed the mystery aspect of the format more than the cop show aspect. So they chose to go down the same route as Lost had and pile mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery, which would have been fine if made to work, but I don't think this decision played to the makers' strengths. Ashes' muddled, slow, confusing complexity wasn't as much fun as the simple, controlled purity of the Mars concept, and accordingly the arrival of Summers, another coma victim, shifted the emphasis from the dream world being something Sam and then Alex had created to it being real. By the end of the series, Summers could still have been a character Alex had dreamed up, but it felt as if the dream world had been reshaped into an alternate reality that people in comas visit. Series 3 has shifted the focus again to this alternate world not just being real, but to Gene Hunt being the reality's crucial element, perhaps even its very reason for existing.

As this is at odds with how the show started, I'm no longer obsessed with finding out the latest explanation of the who, what, why and how, other than for it to leave the ending to Life on Mars intact that Sam chose death over life because it was more fun. But clearly there is an ending to come that is being worked towards very slowly with liberal red herrings, massive plot holes, and much misdirection. And the ending has to be a simple one to work within the confines of a popular tv series. The implications are probably that Gene is the dead copper. He's lain buried for forty years, his story unknown and untold. Now that Nelson's babbling and Keats' vendetta is drawing everyone back to Manchester he's about to be dug up, so he's restless and with Alex and Sam being close to death, they've seen him leading the life he would have led if he'd not been killed, his ghostly form oblivious to the fact his earthly form died. His last sight before being buried was the stars above and that is what everyone will see when his body is uncovered and his bones are finally put to rest with his story now known. So in the end it wasn't Sam's world or Alex's, but Gene's, and this was his story of his life that never was and his death that should never have been, all played out in a world that others can visit to replay their own deaths, seek redemption from their perceived failings, find affirmation of their worth, and resist the evil temptations of Keats prior to moving on to the great unknown... or something equally silly. And that's the problem.

We've been promised bonkers and as we're being led towards variations on those themes, it has to be something different and bizarre such as the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Blade Runner references meaning something along the lines of them all being replicants on a generational starship who are the victims of secret government experiments, or as some fans have suggested: variations of the Jacob's Ladder solution of a dying dream within a dream. But then again the claim that the ending is bonkers should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt because every twist in the series so far has turned out to be less interesting than expected. On that basis it could be the most mundane solution possible that Gene accidentally killed the copper when he set fire to Sam's car while feigning his death and on discovering his guilty secret Alex will then wake up to find out that everything that's happened for the last five years, even getting badly hurt and going into a coma, was just a dream.

Having said that I reckon the writers are better than that and so I'm drawn towards thinking that Ashes has shown one consistent clever element to the plotting of displaying huge plot holes in full view but then later filling them, such as desk sergeant Viv leading the riot squad in episode 6, but then later showing that he did that because he was corrupt. Ashes started with an illogical plot hole of Alex visiting Sam's world, so the answer could be to fill that hole. The Alex we saw for about five seconds in episode 1 was in a coma, but she was in a completely different coma to her main coma and to the other coma to which she possibly awoke at the end of series 2. So that comatose Alex could be the only real character in the whole show. The dead copper is the real Sam Tyler and she's been uncovering the truth about his death in a car accident by dreaming both Life on Mars and Ashes, and Sam and Gene and everyone else exist only in a dream within a dream within a... oh, why am I bothering? If there's no way you can work it out, why try?

I'll cut to the chase. If I have to guess not what the makers will provide as an ending, but the ending I want, then I'll stick with the ending I've always thought the show required from the very start, the most simple one, the one where we take everything we've seen at face value and there's no twists, no surprise revelations, no lessening of the emotional impact through clever reveals: Alex fell into a coma after an unfortunate accident. And so did Sam. She's dreaming everything and making connections and solving crimes with her half-dead mind based on Sam's file, the files she's read in the police archives and the news reports she overhears on the tv. She'll solve the crime that led to the copper, who could be the real Gene, getting his face blown away then buried and it'll turn out that the Gene we've seen is like the clown from series 1, a manifestation she's created to guide her to the truth about his real death. It'll end with her giving bad clown Keats a good kicking, the bit part characters a thank you for their help in piecing together the truth, and Gene's bones eternal peace, probably by doing the cradling at the point of dying thing. And then she'll properly wake up in the real world. Molly is waiting, all spookily grown-up. She'll walk out of the hospital, happier and wiser and knowing she's a damn fine detective for solving a real crime while comatose, and then something needlessly goofy and cryptic will happen like Gene's face appearing on a tv screen... And just when we're all boggling about what it means some flaming twonk of a BBC continuity announcer will drown out the last words, an animated ident for the nonsense on next week will dance around the screen, and the plug for the last sing-along-a-Gene 80s special will scrunch the screen up. Or maybe that only happens on Doctor Who.

But I won’t mind how nonsensical or cryptic or mundane the ending is. Series 1 of Life on Mars is already sitting beside the tv and next week I'll be watching it from the start, again.

Ashes to Ashes, Series 3, Episode 7

The penultimate episode was reasonably entertaining, although with this being the first of a two-parter, most of the story was a set-up for the conclusion to the franchise. So, with this being Ashes, that set-up involved repetition and not telling us much beyond what we'd already learnt in the opening ten minutes of episode one. Luckily, with this being Ashes, a sense of the series coming to an end was provided by the characters talking about 'final chapters', 'it's all coming to an end' and 'don't you ever get the feeling that everything is about to fall apart?'


That final comment came in Chris's effective fourth-wall breaking speech and it was appropriate he got the best summation of the imminent end of the franchise as this was effectively his episode. In the earlier part of the series I was scornful of the secondary characters taking the lead to the extent I almost stopped watching, but I'm glad I didn't because after several false starts it was finally made to work. What I hadn't liked was the rigid format in which in each episode one character goes through their personal hell, works out their differences with Gene, and then gets a spooky, dark close-up with 'that black bloke from the pub' gibbering in the background. Afterwards they see stars.

Chris didn’t get a spooky moment in episode 4, and we now find out that that was because the episode was a red herring. In reality episode 7 was Chris's episode, and his finest hour has been a long-time coming. For 39 episodes Chris has been the idiot who dribbles egg-butty juice on dead bodies, but finally he grows up and looks Gene in the eye as an equal. Pleasingly his big moment mirrors other missed opportunities. Episode 7 of series 2 was the moment when we learnt that Chris was the traitor in the office. In this series his episode 7 crisis took place in a cell with a prisoner, and unlike the scene in episode 4 in which he beat up the thug who was twice his size, this time he did the right thing and let the suspected terrorist go. The sudden realization that he can think for himself was a good way to bring his character's story to an end and so he got his Nelson moment after which he could join Shaz and Ray in starry, spooky wonderment.

With plenty of Chris stuff to get through this meant that thankfully there wasn't much time left for the story, something that again showed why episodes 3 and 4 didn't work. The more time that's devoted to the main story, the more it makes you realize they're rubbish. This one was no exception as Gene yet again tackles inept terrorists, this time ANC exiles, leading to the struggle against one of the most evil political systems of the 20th century being reduced to police officers with umbrellas running around the corridors playing being Zulus. But at least Alex got to call a member of the South African police force a 'racist git' so it wasn't all a waste of time.

Aside from the Chris and the freedom-fighter scenes, the remainder of the episode was devoted to giving Alene closure. Alene has been the one character in the series who hasn't interested me, so the realization that this is where the episode was going didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. In fact I hadn't even realized Alene was a key character until I googled Ashes last year and discovered just how popular this person is. Apparently there's a rule that when two people have a relationship, the shorthand summary of their partnership comes from taking letters from both their names and joining them up. So as Alex is a girl and Gene is a bloke, they are deemed to have a relationship and it becomes Alene, or then again it might be Drunt or Hake, I forget.

Anyhow, as I have no interest in this relationship I've avoided discussing it so far, but as I'll have nothing more to say about this episode if I don't mention it, here goes. For me Alene has been the weakest part of the show, even more so than the formulaic main plots. Series 1 got a lot of things wrong, but Alene made me groan and start twitching for the remote from the moment Gene first clapped eyes on Alex's legs and quipped, 'Blimey, if that skirt was hitched any higher I could see what you had for breakfast.' The rest of series 1 continued with this crude Dempsey and Makepeace type formula of the two leads spouting bad, flirty dialogue at each other and the stories finding contrived reasons for them to be trapped and sweaty together.

I hoped back then that for series 2 the makers would forget Alene, but sadly I then discovered that lots of viewers loved this stuff and the writers knew it. So series 2 upped the quota of Alene moments and lowered my interest. For me series 2 was easily the strongest and most consistent of the three, and the only element that didn't work was the bits where Alex and Gene tried to convey that they had womanly and manly urges for each other. I don’t know why those scenes didn’t work. It's not just that I'm a bloke. I can enjoy a good Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie (or Dork flick I suppose), but Alene was plain embarrassing. It could have been the bad writing, the bad acting, or a bit of both, but every time Alex and Gene got up close and stared into each other's eyes while desperately searching for a believable 'kiss me, you fool' look, it just made them look vaguely constipated.

The actors couldn't sell it to me that a smelly alcoholic and an arrogant posh bird would have an interest in each other, and so I was left to hope that the makers would forget about it and it'd go away. And it did. And strangely I was disappointed because for series 3 not only did they get rid of Alene, they also threw away all the interaction between Alex and Gene that did work. But Episode 7 reversed that policy and gave Alene a full romantic work-out, and even more strangely it actually worked and made me wish they'd done it like that from the start.

The scenes where Alene decide to have a date, get ready for it, have the date, then are stuck in will we/won’t we limbo were perfectly judged. The episode let the scenes play out in character with no plot contrivances, with plenty of believable dialogue, and with clever, subtle humour. The actors didn't even look embarrassed, which helped a lot too. I liked the intercut sequence of them getting dressed up with Alex drinking herself into a stupor to get up the courage and Gene seemingly using whisky as an aftershave. And when Alex finally tells Gene, 'get your goat, you've pulled.' I was genuinely pleased for them (actually that line might have been on the previous night's 'You have been watching'). And I especially like Alex saying to Gene 'Let's Dance' even though the Bowie song didn't start playing. Of course having left Alene to the penultimate episode it was inevitable that it wouldn’t work out and Keatus interruptus prevailed when Keats arrived with pictures of dead coppers and weather vanes.

This brought us back to the main story arc that was resolutely failing to move forward on its own, as somewhere in their ill-fated romantic interlude, Alex had asked Gene if he'd killed Sam and irritatingly he had told her he hadn't but he had helped him feign his death. As I predicted last week, this mundane conclusion did annoy me as Gene could have flaming well told us that in episode 1 and not wasted so much time over pointless intrigue. Even Keats was bored with this answer and he quickly moved on to suggesting the ghost copper is the reason Gene left Manchester, and so presumably resolving whether or not Gene killed him along with the truth about the copper's identity will be the point of the final episode. And, as this review is already a long one, I'll stick my neck on the block in a separate article later and for better or worse say what I think that conclusion will be.

Next week, the Starman will stop waiting for Major Tom to ask him if there's Life on Mars and reveal that the truth is to do with a Laughing Gnome... or something like that.

Ashes to Ashes, Series 3, Episode 6

Episode 6 completes the process of the series morphing into Life on Mars with the return of Sam Tyler... well, sort of.


After a couple of poor episodes in mid-season the series has now returned to top form, although I wasn't enthused about the choice of plot this week in which a tense hostage crisis develops at a prison. Every cop series will eventually have a hostage crisis episode and that familiarity with the clichés means they struggle to hold my interest no matter how tense and dramatic things get. As Ashes is at heart a routine cop show, it was no surprise that it delivered all those clichés in the expected manner, but as it's also a show with an original format, I was hoping it would provide something extra. In the main it succeeded.

Having said that the one element that didn’t work for me was its big dramatic twist. The show has a poor record as regards twists and the killing off of a main character (which is also something of a hostage crisis cliché) was a letdown. If Gene or Alex had been shot up, I'd have been thrilled by the makers' bravery. If it had been Chris or Ray, I'd have been suitably saddened. If it had been Keats or Shaz, I'd have been unaffected. But the bloke from Desmond's! Casual viewers probably haven’t even realized he's in the show as he gets less screentime than Luigi. The death of the extra with weird facial hair who never gets a line would have been more traumatic. Frankly as regards memorable moments of tv, the Desmond's episode where the actor's unrequited 'Niles and Daphne style' romance with his secretary finally became requited was far more emotionally packed than the demise of desk sergeant Viv.

Thankfully the rest worked. The episode continued the season's good work with its stylish art direction. I was in two minds earlier in the season about the darker style, but it worked excellently here with several well-framed sequences. The opening was particularly memorable with cops cowering behind riot shields as bricks rain down, Sunday, Bloody Sunday plays, and Gene Hunt strides out at the front in full 'you don’t negotiate with scum' mode. Season 1 of Ashes repeatedly tried to create mythic Hunt moments and it always failed. The series back then thought that all it had to do to work was to have Hunt look mean and moody, but finally it's succeeded in showing he's a man like no other, a man who takes on the bad guys armed only with the power of his stare. The episode also did well to tie the crisis into the arc story, in which the successful ending of the hostage drama was but a means to resolve the growing battle between Keats and Hunt for the hearts, minds and possibly souls of Hunt's team. And in that Keats appeared to be winning as his steady diet of doubt and bile, slightly improbably, started to convince Alex that Hunt was a bad guy.

This ultimately came to a head in another stylish, memorable scene in which Keats repeated the cradling a dying person act. Unlike the previous time he did it, this was effective and creepy as Keats stalked the abandoned, trashed prison whistling Viv's favourite song while watching Viv die with utter indifference. The fact that Hunt also wanted to cradle Viv perhaps makes explicit the idea that these two are battling for the souls of the dying, but it also reminded me oddly of Leone's spaghetti westerns. Leone believed his principle characters were mythic gods from a by-gone age whose personal battles were beyond the understanding of mere mortals. If the makers were going for that, then maybe Hunt is the Good, Keats is the Bad, and Alex is, well, the Ugly... I guess that doesn't work, but it might explain her terrible choice of make-up and hairstyle this season.

Either way, the question of whether Hunt is the Good was the main thrust of the episode as the plot again tried to convince us that Hunt has skeletons locked away in his filing cabinet. This could be leading to several possible conclusions. The first possibility is that it's all a red herring. Twists are inevitable in Ashes and if the show is trying to convince us that Hunt has killed Sam Tyler and possibly the ghost copper, then surely he hasn't. And if this turns out to be the case, I'll be disappointed that so much time has been wasted when Hunt could have just revealed the truth ten minutes into episode one and saved us all a lot of bother. The second alternative is that Hunt really is the Bad. This is possible as the theme for the season is that the good guys are bad, a theme that has been hammered into us so often that now even the characters are saying it several times an episode in case we hadn't realized that that's the theme. I'll applaud the makers if they have the courage to do this, but somehow I can’t see them risking alienating the show's fanbase.

Luckily a more interesting and believable option started to come through again in this episode: that Hunt is the Ugly. When the franchise started and Sam first waltzed into Hunt's kingdom to find he was about to have 'oops and then got a thumping, Hunt wasn't meant to be a hero. He was the antagonist that Sam had to defeat or at best an anti-hero, an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding. Of course back then Hunt was only worried about why Sam thought that was a bad thing, but the viewers took to him as a hero and so a hero he became. But he's not perfect, and that's the point of his character. He does good but in a bad way, he demands fierce loyalty beyond all logical reason, and he's the ultimate personification of the ends justifying the means. Or to put it another way, he voted for Maggie Thatcher but that doesn't make him all bad. So when he discovers that a man on his team was the mastermind behind the prison riot and that he betrayed everything the force stands for, his reaction is to put aside his disgust, declare Viv a hero and cover up his crimes. That to me is the character of Hunt: a corrupt, flawed man or a loyal, moral man, depending on whether you’re in his team or not.

Despite all this the series also inched its way towards revealing the alternate explanation of Hunt's character that addresses the issue of none of these characters necessarily being real people. Whether this reality is Alex's dream world, an alternate reality, or an after-life reality, Hunt's role is clearly key. As is usual all of the elements that are supposed to be explaining this role remained static. Alex's tv is still silent, Molly is still missing presumed forgotten about, Ray and Shaz discussed their visions of stars only briefly, and the ghost copper had his usual blink and you'll miss it spooking. But thankfully Alex did find a picture of the copper in Hunt's drawer and the hint through clever composition grew that the copper may in fact be Hunt. The episode also shockingly revealed that the oft-repeated clue 6-6-20 was the copper's pc number, a revelation that no-doubt failed to excite a single Ashes fan as the Internet community who examine every frame of the show with a scanning electron microscope in search of wild theories had figured that one out within two minutes of the copper first appearing in episode 1.

Better still though was the new elements. We had a bizarre dream sequence that somehow managed to be even weirder than the usual weird dream sequences and we had the welcome return of Sam Tyler. The Sam in question was a con-man prisoner who tries to convince Alex that he's really Sam inhabiting a different body, and pleasingly the episode didn't confirm whether he was just trying to fool her into freeing him or whether he really was Sam. The actor had a John Simm quality to his acting style and facial features which combined to provide just the right amount of ambiguity. And it was fun to have someone ask again whether they'd gone mad, were back in time, or in a coma, especially as Alt-Sam appeared to have gone mad. It also turned out that Alt-Sam was the real Sam's last arrest before he died and so it was possible that Sam had told him the truth that this reality absorbs you and you forget your past life. Then, when you figure out the full truth about this reality, it fragments into nothingness and you move on to something else. Alt-Sam's explanation was compelling because for the first time I started to think that when the show does explain itself, it might do so in a way that doesn’t contradict the ending to Life on Mars, an ending that I like.

Next week is the penultimate episode in which Hunt and Alex go on a date and Alex finally asks Hunt for a straight answer to the straight question of: did you kill Sam Tyler? My money is on his answer being that he'll tell her next week.

Ashes to Ashes, Series 3, Episode 5

After two poor episodes the series returns to top form with an enjoyable romp. The previous episodes featured dreary stories that struggled to last for the hour, but this time round there was enough material to fill three episodes leading to a non-stop frantic mixture of comedy, drama and character.


The promise that the series would morph into Life on Mars was fulfilled with the arrival of Litton, Hunt's sparing partner from the first year of the franchise. Litton is a glorious creation, being preposterous, funny and weird while somehow also making a serious point about the behaviour of the police. Ashes usually goes to great lengths to show us that Hunt's team are dinosaurs from a bygone age, often by letting them rub up against more mature and forward thinking people. Litton turned all that on its head by taking the opposite route of saying what we've all been thinking that since Hunt went south he's gone soft. Anything that Hunt can do in being non-PC, fitting up villains, and generally riding roughshod over every rule in the book, Litton can be twice as bad. So Litton and his equally moustached partner Bevan swaggered around Hunt's patch beating up bad guys, violating several isms in every sentence, and treating all southerners with equal contempt.

Litton's macho nonsense brought out the best in Hunt as a race to solve a crime for a barrel of beer gathered pace. Better still Hunt's and Ray's realization that these days they act like a couple of great, soft, sissy, girlie, nancy, french, bender, Man United supporting poofs perfectly captured the twisted morality of Life on Mars. The cops may be corrupt under today's rules when they beat confessions out of the blaggers, fit up whomever they fancy for the crime, and take the line that evidence can always be found to please a sympathetic judge. But these cops know best what the line is between good and evil, and evil is the scumbags on the street and good is the copper who keeps decent folk safe while never taking bribes. The last element was perhaps a little strained as Litton was around in Manchester when Hunt was still taking bribes, but he still brought the basics of the old Manchester approach to crime solving down south.

I've poured a lot of scorn on the recent episodes' weak stories, and this week the main story was again slight and it again included the twist that the bad guy was decent and the good guy was bad, but with the characters interacting again that didn't matter. So Alex tried to get into the head of a northern comedian, played by the always worthwhile Roy Hudd, while Hunt thumped anyone who got in his way. The other characters also interacted with Chris being his usual awkward sensitive self and Ray struggling to work out how a bloke should behave to prove he's a bloke. I wish they'd made this episode Ray's episode instead of the dire episode 3 as we learnt more about what makes Ray tick in a few short entertaining scenes than we did during the whole of that angst filled dirge. Ray is happy to dance on stage with Chris at the police ball, but the moment the macho Litton arrives he has to show he's a real man by not dancing. As the episode progresses Ray first devolves to a Neanderthal then is reborn as a new man when he gets on stage to sing Danny Boy badly. The singing was less dramatic than the petrol can scene from episode 3, but more effective and real.

The comedic and nostalgic elements also returned to top form with Chris's terrible 80s dancing and a bizarre interlude where the bad guys shoot-up Ben Elton. I couldn’t tell if that was an affectionate joke or a cruel one as yes, as Alex said, that spared us the Queen musical, but I'd hate to think Alex's past world would never get to enjoy Blackadder.

The best element for me though was that for the first time this series the show made the lack of movement in the bigger picture work. Absolutely nothing happened that explains with any more clarity what's going on, but for once we got to see everyone's reaction to the weirdness. So the ghost copper, who was probably a bit tired after spooking Alex twice last episode, never appeared and if the weather vane shadow appeared I missed it, but that was more effective and tension-filled than the usual half-second spooky moment. What we got instead was about a hundred mentions of Sam Tyler, none of which told us anything, but they all provoked reactions or in Gene's case a stony-faced refusal to react. Later Gene sneakily destroyed all the evidence on Sam's mysterious death as he tried to convince us he was up to no good, but that only went to prove to me that he's got a good reason. It's a bit like watching Captain Kirk being accused of killing Spock. The more the evidence piles up that he did it the more you know for sure that he didn't. For what it's worth I'll stick to my theory that what Gene is covering up is the fact that he saw Sam disappear. I’d guess when Sam died in the real world he stopped existing in the fantasy world and Gene witnessed that, and it's the realization that he's not real that worried him.

Ray also faced questions about existence when like Shaz and Alex he found himself on the edge of the world confronted by stars. This was a short but effective scene as from that moment Ray's attitude changes and he gets closer to Shaz as they share their worries that reality is under threat. The strangest sequence though was Alex having flashbacks of Life on Mars with Sam modelling his leather jacket. I had the unfortunate experience of opening the Daily Telegraph newspaper this week and amidst the ranting the reviewer of this episode perfectly summed up the Sam Tyler scene as being so bizarre it'd have confused David Lynch. I therefore won’t try to read anything into that because as with everything else we again learnt nothing new, but with the characters now reacting to the odd sequences it at long last feels like the series is heading somewhere.

Next week there's a prison riot and Hunt's team goes in disguised as undercover cops. The only article I've read about the episode said avoid the spoiler and as I didn't I'd suggest you do.

Ashes to Ashes - Series 3, Episode 4

As this review is late I'll keep it short. Episode 4 completes a loose trilogy centring on the three secondary characters. Of the three, Shaz's episode was excellent, letting her take centre stage at long last and showing us her fears and strengths, all of which were believable and well scripted. Ray's episode was a mess. Ray's a bloke, a dependable bloke who does blokey things in a blokey way. I didn't need to be told about his inner angst. Blokes don’t have inner angst, other than worrying about if they have enough beer and fags. Chris's episode was better than Ray's, but not by much.


The good thing was that Chris was used sparingly. In fact the episode revolved around the guest character of a troubled undercover cop. And, unlike with Ray, Chris's problems were believable. He found it hard to express his feelings for the undercover cop and then over-reacted when he thought she'd been hurt, which led to him beating up a poor, defenceless thug. Putting aside the fact that the thug could have torn Chris into little pieces with one hand tied behind his back, this was consistent with the character we've seen before and his story came out in strong scenes rather than with tedious monologues. In addition the story didn't do what I was dreading of repeating the previous two weeks' plot structure. Keats didn’t drip bile in Chris's ear and instead he acted sneakily with the undercover cop. Neither did Chris think about betraying Gene before having a Life on Mars moment. This change of direction was interesting and improved my opinion of last week's episode slightly. But there endeth the good news.

The problem with this week's episode is something that has been increasingly annoying me about the format: the lead stories are just too routine and predictable. Ever since the first episode of Life on Mars when Sam had to catch a serial killer who left so many clues he struggled to avoid catching him until the end of the episode, the main stories have been weak, but it didn’t used to matter.

Life on Mars detailed the battles between Sam and Gene over how they should solve the obvious crime of the week. Sam solved crimes with his head and Gene with his heart, and they both got there in the end. The tension between them made the stories fun and it was the same with Alex and Gene, with Alex being even more analytical than Sam was. For no good reason I can see that tension has been abandoned. No longer does Alex get inside the bad guys' heads while Gene bangs their heads against the wall. They just accept each others' methods and don’t interact. The same goes for the other characters who stand back to let whoever is this week's designated main character take control. Also the nostalgic elements are now purely the pounding 80s music along with some moments such as Hunt accidentally trashing the Blue Peter garden, which aren’t as funny as they think they are. With the weird time-travel bits relegated to about 10 seconds a week, this all leaves more time for the central story. Big mistake. The standard Ashes story struggled to fill half the episode, but with the other elements that made the show work pared back so that the main story fills about 90% of the episode, it emphasises how uninteresting those stories are. In many ways this year the series has been more like a generic cop show, and that's not a good thing.

Worse, this time the brave undercover cop took up more screen time than any other character, which would be fine if she was an interesting character, but she wasn't. Last week's completely unsurprising revelation that the brave fireman was the bad guy provided some hope that things might be different this week. I kept watching hoping that she'd be for real and that for once the series would pull out a twist by not having a twist, but no. She was a bad guy too and so everything she said and did was a lie and so a waste of screen time, meaning that like last week I don’t think I'll bother watching this one again.

As for the rest: same old, same old. The intriguing possibilities about the stars in the centre of town was limited to Shaz mumbling, 'I dunno really'. The all-important Sam Tyler investigation moved backwards a micron or two when Alex rummaged around for a missing file. The ghost copper realized that only appearing for a half-second spooking wasn't good enough so this week he appeared twice, both times for half a second. The weather vane shadow had its weekly flitter on the ground when Alex imagined she was being buried alive, at least suggesting she might be the buried body in the future. Alex's tv came on, but provided static and it seems Molly has been consigned to the unresolved plot hole that swallowed up Summers, Evan, and Layton. And Keats delivered his usual narrative to the viewers, but he did cradle the undercover cop as she died like Hunt usually does, meaning something interesting I assume but frankly I find it hard to care any more. It seems likely now that there will be no plot development on the central mystery other than maintaining the status quo set up in the opening ten minutes of episode 1. And we'll just have to wait until the last ten minutes of the final episode when the clever reveal will be revealed. Based on the painfully poor reveals we get to the main stories every week I'm currently not holding out any hope it'll be surprising, interesting, or well thought out. Perhaps in the end it will be a triumph and show that all the clues really have been cleverly hidden in plain sight, but if we get a third dreary episode in a row I won’t be around to see it.

Luckily, next week looks like it might re-kindle my enthusiasm for the franchise when the bristling 'taches from Manchester arrive to bristle their 'taches and make fun of Hunt's smooth upper lip.

Ashes to Ashes, series 3, episode 3

This week's episode follows the same format as last week's in which one character, in this case hard man Ray, is showcased and we learn more about what makes this person tick. Sadly after finding the previous two episodes to be amongst the best the franchise has produced, this will be a grumpy review as the story failed to hold my attention.

My lack of interest is probably my fault as the story featured strong dialogue, good acting, and revolved around my favourite character. If I was writing objective reviews I'd find things to praise, but I write personal reviews detailing my likes and dislikes. And the overwhelming feeling I had is that if I wanted to watch this sort of drama I'd watch The Bill and not Ashes. It reminded me of the only Life on Mars episode I didn’t like featuring the inevitable bottle show hostage crisis that ticked all the right boxes for powerful, emotional, tense drama and which so failed to move me I miss that episode out when I re-watch. I reckon I'll do the same with this one.

The join-the-dots formula cop story was even dottier than usual involving a wave of politically motivated arson attacks on the eve of the general election designed to ensure that Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, doesn't get in, in, in for her disastrous second term. With the tv no longer talking to Alex this was illustrated by lots of uninteresting clips from real tv shows. The possibilities for political satire weren't taken up. Instead the story centred on the attempt to avoid working out who the mystery arsonist was until the end of the episode. In our house the previous record for solving an Ashes mystery was 1 second set in series 2. This week we bettered it by solving it in minus 5 minutes on spotting that the actor playing the heroic fireman who was putting out the fires also played Luke Hanson in New Tricks. What followed was painful and followed every cliché in the standard arson mystery plot in which firemen feature.

But as I often say Ashes isn’t a plot based drama. It's about characters. And this week the arson story gave Ray a chance to shine. Sadly he shone by doing one of the things I hate in episodic drama of suddenly developing a hitherto unmentioned crippling emotional trauma which links in with the story and which will never get mentioned again. Ray's trauma involved his relationship with his military-minded father, and although Ray did think about joining the army last series that didn't link in well with his problems this time. His crisis developed in the same manner as Shaz's did last week (possibly deliberately) in which everyone else acts uselessly and out of character forcing him to put his life in danger at which point he delivers an interminable monologue of the kind that only characters in tv dramas give. The actor who plays Ray is active and approachable on Internet sites, coming over as a decent bloke and so I kept thinking it was nice for him to finally get something meaty to do. But I also kept thinking I wish the episode would just end so I could go to bed.

The previous two episodes had a near-perfect tone of grit enlivened by crackling, fun dialogue that was so fast and clever I knew I'd have to watch them several times to pick up all the nuances. That was missing this time with a dreary tone, lengthy stilted scenes, uninvolving characters, and few one-liners. The only interesting asides were Gene Hunt getting in toy-stamping mood with an annoying brat and the stolen bikes he was storing in Keats' room to provoke him. As it turned out the one element of Ray's problem that did work for me was Keats. The creepy complaints guy is rapidly developing into the best thing about the final series. Last week I thought he wasn't being active enough in bringing down Hunt, but as he did the same things again this week I can now appreciate his sly technique. He hangs around on the sidelines, always creepy and smoking, speaking treachery into people's ears and undermining their confidence while pretending to be their friend. He is genuinely creepy in a way that Summers, the clown and the other creepy characters haven’t been because he's believable. He personifies the bureaucratic 'I was only following orders' evil that can lurk at the heart of any big organisation.

So as with Shaz he takes advantage of Ray's emotional crisis to encourage him to defy Gene and solve the crime using his own instincts. This dilemma would have had considerable tension if the crime hadn't have been so obvious even the ghost copper could have solved it during his half second appearance. In the end Ray does the same as Shaz did and he almost turns his back on Gene before deciding to follow Gene's orders, and that puts his life in danger. But he survives and so Keats loses and Gene wins again, and so Gene buys Ray a drink... and Ray has his Life on Mars moment.

I'd been dreading that happening since last week and now that it has I have mixed feelings as to whether or not I like it. I'll have to see where they take it but for now I'm not happy. Last week was eerily effective when out of nowhere the picture darkens and zooms in on Shaz, a few lines of Life on Mars are heard coming from far away, and a sample of Nelson the bartender plays. In fact I'd say it was the single best moment in the whole franchise and if left at that it'd have remained memorable, but with it happening again this week it's lost its impact for me. It suggests that every week a main character will have an emotional crisis, Keats will drip bile into their ear, they'll ignore him in favour of the Guv, and then they'll have their Life on Mars moment. Presumably by episode 8 the bloke at the back of the office with interesting facial hair will have his Life on Mars moment when he has an emotional crisis brought on by being in a series for 5 years and never getting a line of dialogue.

As regards the bigger picture, the only plot movement this week was the confirmation that Keats is the key to resolving the bigger picture. We learnt this because Alex told him that she solves crimes and he deals with the bigger picture. Ashes has always worked well with its self-referential, ironic, post-modern, fourth wall, meta-fiction or whatever the right term is for knowing asides to the viewers. But there's a thin line between being clever and being smug, and that line, along with several other recent nods to the fans, makes me pleased that the show is ending this year and the temptation to make a Hunt in the 90s series is being resisted.

As for the rest, the complete lack of movement was even more static than usual. The ghost copper appeared for his usual doing bog all spooky moment. Movement on the Sam Tyler investigation consisted of Alex locking the drawer that contains his coat and giving Shaz the key. At that pace it'll be 2010 in the past world before she works out why Sam's car was standing upside down in Manchester's shallowest river. And the unsettling idea of Alex finding a part of town that doesn't exist got the interesting addition that Shaz has seen it too. Shaz was so shocked she doodled a star, but then as this is a show that thrives on never moving forward, it was promptly forgotten about, just like Molly, Alex's treasured daughter.

Anyhow, sorry for my grumpy attitude, but I hope the show returns to the style of the first two episodes or I'll rapidly lose interest. Next week, I'm getting a new sister-in-law so I don’t know when or if a review will appear, but I'm guessing the story will involve Chris having his Life on Mars moment when he suffers emotional trauma about being a complete and utter twonk. I hope I'm wrong.

Ashes to Ashes, series 3, episode 2

After a frantically paced first episode, episode 2 probably sets up the formula for how the rest of the series will play out. With this being the final series all the main characters will get a moment in the spotlight, the arc storyline will not so much inch forward as remain static, and the central story will be weak. The last point is not meant as a criticism. This is a character based series and not a plot based one, and in this episode the character in centre stage is Shaz.

Until now Sharon has been used sparingly and often for comic relief with her doomed relationship with idiot Chris. Now though the pressure of making all those teas for the blokes has eroded her confidence and she's ready to quit. Not surprisingly the answer to her professional crisis turns out to be a murder mystery with a tailored-made Shaz-shaped role that'll let her show what she can do. Accordingly Gene gives her a massive confidence boost. Then he and the lads hide in a van while he sends her off on her own, without back-up, in the dark, unarmed on to a vast piece of waste land to apprehend a rabid nutter who has a thing for murdering 5 foot nothing young women. I enjoyed seeing Shaz do something for once, but this is Gene Hunt, a bloke whose search warrant is a crowbar and whose catchphrase was once 'you are surrounded by armed bastards'. Not any more it'd seem, but with the blokes running around in the dark helplessly, Shaz fights back with a convenient screwdriver and saves the day, and her career.

Luckily despite this contrived story Shaz shines playing the role of a cheesed-off person to perfection. Although I felt that her decision to stay was the wrong one as everything she did only appeared to prove that she's in the wrong job and that Gene press-ganged her into staying. Perhaps that was the point.

The rest all get good moments too as they investigate a dating agency, run by the real-life Mrs Hunt, and Alex invents speed dating. We get to see everyone's attitude to romance and there's plenty of fun to be had. Alex dreams up a video of Uptown Girl with Gene Hunt lip-synching, to the actor's obvious annoyance, Billy Joel. Gene gives us insight into his romance technique involving steak, chips, beer and a love of westerns. Not surprisingly there are no takers, but I loved that while speed dating Gene sports the name Will Kane, Cooper's character in High Noon. Most shows would feel obliged to tell us who Kane was, but I had to squint at his name tag to read it. It's the small touches like that that make the show work for me. Chris gets to lose at strip poker and Ray gets more ambiguity about his womanising ways. Ray's personal life has provided an entertaining undercurrent through the series and I don't know whether we will ever find out if his non-stop sexist banter is over-compensating for something, but I've already decided for myself.

As regards the arc story, I could say nothing happened because it didn't, as such. After last week in which Keats vowed to destroy Gene, this week he sets about doing it by lurking ominously in the basement moving pens around his desk. I must say he lurks ominously very well, but if he's going to destroy Hunt he'd better hurry up and do something. The ghost copper continues to follow Summers' slow methodology of very slow spookiness, except he's being even slower. This week his role consisted of the final half-second of the episode in which he looked at the camera spookily. And the Sam Tyler investigation failed to move too with several dozen mentions of Sam's unexplained mysterious fantasy world death, but there were no actual developments other than some unconvincing hints that Gene killed him. As if!

Again though this isn't a plot-based series and so with the plot being static the main movements towards an explanation of what the show is about came in clever and subtle ways. At one stage the shadow of the weather vane, where in the future the body of someone will be dug up, flittered on the floor and we get a new and effective scary development in which while trying to find where Shaz lives Alex comes across a part of town that doesn't exist. It's just stars, and later the stars start to invade her mind. With the episode playing out against a backdrop of the office being torn down by noisy workers, there was a real sense of the world ending. Perhaps this happened to Sam. Perhaps there may be a sci-fi solution to it all. Perhaps we were seeing for the first time what happens to the world when the dreamer stops dreaming. Perhaps the makers have bought the rights to another Bowie classic.

The episode also makes excellent use of its own mythology and rules. The Sam Tyler investigation may look as if it'll drag on interminably, but a simple scene where Alex opens a package and finds Sam's leather jacket showed why this matters. The static on Alex's tv screen is also starting to be worrying. There's only one thing more disconcerting than having the tv talk to you, and that's having the tv stop talking to you. There were also hints that Keats might be from the future when a chat about modern day composers and serial killers doesn't faze him. The best moment though was when the music dies out while the camera is on Shaz and a few lines of Life on Mars are played, this being the first time we've heard that song since Sam took his leap of faith. The evocative lines about 'the girl with the mousy hair' may imply something about Shaz, but I think it means that the shows are now merging. And if the merging is to be this subtle, it'll be effective.

Next week, macho Ray has his moment in the spotlight when his macho bravery leads to him being trapped in a confined space with lots of sweaty macho men. Presumably they'll talk about girls.

Ashes to Ashes - Series 3, Episode 1

The first episode of the final series of time-travelling cop show Ashes to Ashes debuted last night. I can't promise I'll provide lengthy and timely reviews of every episode, but as it's a wet weekend I'll start as I perhaps don't mean to continue.

For the final series we were promised that the show would become darker and feature a radical change of direction. The series will apparently explain not only this show but its predecessor Life on Mars to the extent that the shows will ultimately join up. This explanation has been described by the cast as 'bonkers' and by the writers as being one they didn't originally have in mind but which occurred during the writing of this series. This suggests that whatever theorizing has been going on, based on what we've seen so far, will be invalid.

So episode 1 demonstrated this radical change of direction by being, well, exactly the same as the show has ever been. There was a central cop story that was so lame and predictable it'd have made viewers of The Bill groan 25 years ago. It had plenty of camaraderie between the central cast and there were a few weird bits that as always appeared at first glance to move the plot along massively but which in reality did absolutely nothing. But perhaps that's being a bit unfair. The show did provide one of its promised big changes. It was darker. A lot darker. Sadly the director interpreted the need to be darker as shoot everything darkly. I kept wondering if I'd sat on the remote and changed the contrast. Everyone had highly contrasted faces, sets were stark, and even those warehouses where the bad guys always hang out looked duller. Perhaps it was the HD filming, but whatever the reason it looked dark. Luckily everything else was the same.

The episode started with a great opening line that perfectly summed up why I like the franchise. The previous 2 years have featured Alex's lengthy explanation of the format over the title credits. This time all that's gone to be replaced with, 'My name is Alex Drake, and quite frankly your guess is as good as mine.' That is brilliant on every level. We then carry on from where we left off with Alex in the present day recovering from being shot in the head by dangling a forelock of her dark hair over her wound, wearing dark clothes, and talking soberly in dark rooms with the light off. Her daughter Molly, who presumably has grown another foot since the last season, has been sent to stay with her father, and Alex is finding real life as depressing as Sam Tyler did when he returned. Worse, Alex caught the recent Red Dwarf revival and so is seeing Gene on banks of tv screens and dvd covers. Sadly even a gloriously silly fantasy scene of Gene shooting up gun-toting baddies to the Ride of the Valkyries can't convince Alex that she's happy. So, after meeting this year's mysterious stranger of a ghostly disfigured man who is dead in the present day and who clearly has been picking up stalker tips from the clown from season 1 and Summers from season 2, she returns to the past. She meets a darkly moody Gene in a dark alley with the lights off and after finding that he's spent three miserable months on the Isle of Wight, they agree to see just how dark things have got.

There have been changes. Ray is the new and ineffective boss, Chris and Shaz have split up (although if you missed the line of dialogue you wouldn’t guess it), Viv is getting funny lines, Luigi is getting less lines, and one of the extras got a whole line. And we've got a new main character of Keats to fulfil the role Alex's mum had in season 1 and Mac had in season 2 of shaking things up. Apparently Keats is in charge of complaints and he deems that shooting up a fellow officer and hiding on the Isle of Wight is serious enough to kick Gene off the force. As Alex got kicked off the force twice in season 2 and got away with it Gene ignores him and carries on as normal as they now have a case to solve.

The case involves a kidnapped kid called Dorothy (ooh!) and even if you haven’t seen the episode yet, you could still easily write a review of the surprise twists and revelations for yourself. As always the rubbish central plot is not the point and the fun comes from the characters. Ray makes a mess of being in charge and shows he's not a leader. Gene is in full-on shouting mode. And he gets some good non-PC one-liners that only someone stuck in the 80s could deliver including a 'Billy the Thlid' line and a long and torturous one involving nuts and squirrels which I've had several goes at writing but it doesn’t scan well. Alex looks suitably ill and is so distressed she watches Top Gear, but messages from the future are drying up.

The rest don't get much to do as more time is spent on developing Keats, and this is time well spent as he looks as if he'll be interesting. The actor provides an odd performance that's different to anything anyone else is doing and is one that makes we wonder if he's a terrible actor or a brilliant one. He's creepy, shifty-eyed, unsure of himself, and everything he says and does is off-note and wrong. It reminds me that true evil is often banal. I look forward to seeing where he'll take things as he's convinced Gene did something bad in the past, possibly involving Sam Tyler's mysterious death, and he wants to expose him. As he kicked him off the force about five times during the episode and Gene ignored him every time that threat doesn't sound too worrying. The office may have a gym now, but where's the growly boss to do the kicking off the force properly when you need one?

Then there's the bigger picture and I'm struggling to say much there as again it only inches along in the usual style with something odd happening at the start and then again just before the final credits. We have a ghost. Alex trips over a file and Sam Tyler's picture falls out. And we have Keats being weird. The fact that there'll be a surprising reveal at the end means it's probably not worth discussing and it's best to just go along for the ride. For the record my opinion has always been that Sam Tyler was in a coma. Hovering between life and death his brain constructed a dying dream to keep him mentally active and to help him make sense of his existence before he passed on. So he went back to the time when as a kid his father left him and along the way he learned some lessons about life. But he didn't die and when he came back those lessons didn't help him move on and so he killed himself to continue the dream. Alex knew of this and so when she nearly died she constructed her own dying dream with the same characters to resolve her life, except with a daughter she has more reasons to live than Sam had. Based on what we've seen I think that's a reasonable explanation, but I assume if the final explanation is as suitably bonkers as promised, it'll be a different one entirely.

Next week things get even darker and scarier when Gene and Alex recreate the classic 80s video Uptown Girl. I'm getting ready to hide behind the sofa already.

Ashes to ashes : dust to dust

It's been announced that the third and final series of the time-travelling cop show Ashes to Ashes will begin on 2 April.

We are promised that this series will wrap up the franchise while providing answers to what it, along with the previous series of Life on Mars, have been about. I'm not sure I need answers, especially if it involves retro-fitting a different meaning to Life on Mars, but the advance publicity that's come out so far sounds mostly promising. The synopsis for the first episode suggests that the story won’t be spending any time explaining away the season 2 cliffhanger in which Alex appeared to wake up in the present day, or then again did she? So it'd appear that was a red herring. There's apparently some new mysteries added and we're promised that a major character will die early on, although the unsubtle hints as to who it is means that's not as exciting as it sounds.

The most promising development is that the writers say the show will resemble season 5 of Life on Mars and that the two shows will gradually morph into each other. Exactly how that'll be done isn’t clear, but it's known that several bit part characters from the earlier series will re-appear and a major plot strand this year will be Alex attempting to find out how Sam Tyler died. I'm tempted to shout, 'he jumped off a tall building, Alex. That probably did it!', but it seems we're dealing with his mysterious fantasy death in the fantasy world so there's sure to be more to it than that.

The big decision I'll have to make is whether I fancy writing reviews of the episodes again. I banged on for well over ten thousand words on season 2 last year, but I'm not sure if I feel so committed this year and I will be away when some of the episodes air. I'll think about it. For now there's an uninteresting preview clip from episode 1 on youtube, and apparently there was an 'hilarious skit' TM shown on some charityathon tv give-out-of-work-celebrities-something-to-do promotional thingy. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

Ashes to Ashes - Season 2, Episode 8

Season 2 gets the spectacular ending it deserves with a fast-paced tale that brings closure to most of the on-going plot strands while offering a few clues as to where season 3 might go.


This season turned away from the light style of the first year to introduce a darker world, but the format has remained the same. Each week there's a mediocre central cop story which can never withstand even a moment's analysis because it relies on the bad guys acting in illogical ways. This doesn't matter because the entertainment comes from watching the main cast going about their business with style and fun. And all the time there's the extra intrigue added by the bigger mystery which every episode seemingly takes giant leaps forward while not actually moving at all. The final episode perfectly captured the essence of the series but doing all that again, except more so.

The story picks up from last week's underwhelming ending in which Lafferty and his dodgy building site turned out to be a cover to hide a stash of guns. It seems those guns are important. They are to be used for a really big blag, but what is it? Hunt seeks the answer using his usual methods, but after giving an informer a battering in a fish and chip shop the unfortunate man then gets a deep fried battering from some really nasty men. But even these really nasty men are scared of the worst nasty men of all, the police. It seems the police corruption saga is set to reach a climax when raiders will steal a shipment of gold bullion, but then the raiders will get raided by the police in an operation known as Oscar Papa Romeo, Operation Rose.

Sadly the corrupt coppers who are everywhere, know everything, and can achieve anything don’t know Chris has been rumbled. So to speed the story along they tell him their cunning plan despite his role being a minor one as befits his normal level of ineptitude. Chris redeems himself by passing the information on to Hunt, and so the team in a tense conflict with much shouting and shooting bang all the bent coppers to rights. The closure of the main story arc is done with tension and speed, but the main point of this tale is to give the characters closure on their development this season. And so absolutely everyone gets a big moment.

The bloke with interesting hair gets to ride around in a fast car and grin happily. And the other main extra, who I'm sure has been around since the first episode of Life on Mars, finally gets a whole word to utter while whirling around in the Quattro. Viv gets to show off his comic timing with a couple of funny lines and Luigi gets to show he doesn’t have such good comic timing with a rant.

Ray gets an excellent send-off. This season it's been hard to tell where his soul-searching is leading, but finally he is at peace with the world. He supports Alex when others doubt her, applauds her efforts, and is magnanimous in his support for Chris. He also gets to be on the receiving end of a gloriously tasteless gag, which is sure to put me off eating deep fried sausages for life.

Chris and Shaz don’t fare so well. With so much to get through in the final episode, it was inevitable that some elements would happen too quickly. Last week Chris was left in a hopeless situation, shunned by his mates, branded a traitor, and his forthcoming marriage seemingly off. Yet Shaz dismisses Chris's double-crossing, taking bribes and being generally bent as being no more important than a disagreement over flowers for the wedding. And so does everyone else. Still, Shaz gets her best moment this season when she saves Chris's butt while wearing a wedding dress and rather improbably holding a firearm. Chris also gets a good moment looking moody in a car park.

Hunt has a more substantial closure. He gets his big moment when after avoiding uttering his catchphrase all season he encourages the lead bent cop's stunt double to dive head first on to his bonnet so he can have a new catchphrase: 'you've been quattroed.' Better still, after a season in which he has found he can trust nobody, his suspicions finally turn to wondering if can trust Alex. With the answer being he can't he seeks friendship with a bottle blonde who can give him everything that Alex can't, namely a love of western films and analysis as to who is the greatest cowboy hero.

So with Alex not being so hot on her western knowledge, his solution to her being untrustworthy turns out to be a weak one that is out of character and is done purely to make the plot work. He kicks Alex off the force. This is the second time she's been dismissed this season and to my mind that's twice two often for any cop show. Luckily Alex knows that being kicked off the force means nothing and this enables her, again, to solve the crime on her own.

Her solution ultimately involves her confronting Summers and finally uncovering his big secret. Apparently Summers was a young cop who was part of the bullion raid and the shame he felt destroyed his life. Now dying in real life, he's gone into a coma so he can return to his past shame and relive it. This like all the revelations explains everything but adds nothing. We already know that the dream world acts like a sort of elaborate past life regression therapy. Sam Tyler returned to his childhood to find out why his father left home, but he couldn't stop him going and so he didn't return to real life. Alex returned to her childhood to find out why her parents died, but she couldn't stop them dying and so she didn't return to real life.

Summers returned to the scene of his downfall, but this time events turn out differently, even if he did nothing to change them by his own actions, and so he got to die. The last point may be significant, but I don't think so because at no stage in his journey did he behave like a free thinking sentient person. If he was a decent man all along, why didn't he just tell Alex the truth in episode 1 rather than kidnapping her, sending her roses, acting oddly? Why did he act like the standard mystery antagonist who enjoys leaving cryptic clues for the police to solve for no good reason other than it fills up the story in an entertaining way?

The fact he did act in such an unnecessarily mysterious way only makes him appear to be nothing more than a mystery construct in Alex's mind. She did after all solve the clues and work out who he was and what he was doing. And ultimately she is the one who foils the bullion raid. It may be that that's the way the dream world works. You have to make someone else do your bidding to affect a change, but that feels too complex.

So with Summers' unconvincing credentials as being another real person, Alex's role becomes all the more significant. And she gets her strongest scenes yet. On the basis that any tension-packed episode can become even more tension-packed if you add a ticking clock, she learns that today in the real world she will either live or die. She has an infection and when her medication reaches fifty milligrams, she'll die.

This deadline concentrates her mind and after 16 episodes in which her psychological background has been presented as nothing more than a running joke, she uses her skills properly. She reduces a bloke who was so tough even Hunt couldn’t crack him to a gibbering wreck in one minute with a simple word-association test. She also gets her big moment with Hunt when the one obvious scene that has never been done before gets played out.

Summers sends Hunt a tape of Alex's bizarre musings, and so Hunt asks her for the truth. And so she tells him that she's from the future. Hunt is understandably upset. After all he asked for the truth and she lied to him. Sam Tyler spent 16 episodes asking himself if he was mad, back in time, or in a coma. The final episode answered that he was in a coma. Alex knew she was in a coma in episode 1. She's spent 16 episodes trying to wake up. And then when finally someone asks her to explain why she says nonsensical things, she lies and says she's gone back in time. I did not get that. Obviously Hunt would have been unhappy if she'd told him he was a figment of her imagination and she was the only real person in the world, but it'd have made more sense.

But after offering the time-travel solution and being kicked off the force, she still foils the raid. But just as it looks as if everything is over the bottle blonde turns up and attacks her. I don't know why she did this, but Hunt suddenly comes over all rubbish and accidentally shoots Alex instead. Alex closes her eyes and when she awakes she's back in the real world. Her operation was a success, the infection is cured, an older-looking Molly is delighted, and everything is fine. She's basking in happiness when Gene Hunt appears on the hospital tv telling her she's in a coma and to wake up, and he's on all the monitors too...

So what did that mean? Was it the most meaningful scene yet or the most meaningless? To me it was the latter. It was fun, mind, but it came over as being merely a thank you from the makers to all the fans who have spent the last four years analysing every scene searching for hidden meanings. This was a big unsolvable cliff-hanger to keep everyone entertained until the new season.

If there is a solution, to my mind it comes from the unreal nature of both the ending and its set-up. Even before Hunt appeared on screen the scene was unreal. Nurses do not wheel dead people away with a blanket over the head in open view while giving Alex just enough clues to figure out that Summers was under the blanket. People who have just woken up from a coma don’t sit up in bed in a sprightly manner and then wander off, except if the crisis she'd just recovered from was unreal.

We are supposed to trust messages from the real world as being truthful, and yet it felt wrong that a doctor would soothingly whisper in her ear that she has a life-threatening infection. If the drugs don't work, you're dead. Neither did it feel right that Alex would know how many milligrams she's had and so how long she's got to live. This sets up an unreal crisis to pave the way for her waking up in a dream of the real world.

So where does that leave the story if even messages from the real world are untrustworthy? Hopefully the drugs she received to battle her infection warped her senses and so she can still trust real life messages, just not the ones she received this time. More importantly though this offers a clue as to the solution to the bigger mystery, and to consider that we have to go back to Life on Mars and an alternate theory on the ending.

Sam Tyler returned to the real world, but he hated it and killed himself to return to the dream world. I loved that ending, but many people didn’t and so I think Ashes to Ashes will revise it. Although I think it wasn't the original intent, an alternate reading is in many ways more logical, even if it doesn't have emotional resonance. Sam was an intelligent and rational man. It's implausible that he would have killed himself to be with dream-girl Annie. His counselling would have told him that he was depressed and so he would have soldiered on to see if life improved. He might have killed himself eventually, but as there was no reason to suppose he'd return to the dream world, he wouldn't have killed himself to get there.

This leads to the thought that maybe he didn’t return to reality. Maybe reality was an illusion too and he chose to return to a better illusion. If that is the case, then that's what's happened to Alex. She's returned to a real world that is an illusion. Admittedly that makes explaining the opening ten minutes of episode 1 tricky, but as a hint of the bigger mystery that also explains Life on Mars, it could be the way it's going.

And that final solution gets hinted at with Hunt's strange behaviour over Summers' death. He soothed him before he died, as he did for the girl from Hyde eight episodes ago. And so maybe the dream world is, after all, a fantasy that people who are dying construct to put their past lives in order before they move on. Of course, having hinted at that, it'll probably be something completely different!

To keep you going until season 3, someone has now kindly posted up the baffling last 5 minutes on Youtube.

Ashes to Ashes - Season 2, Episode 7

The penultimate episode of season 2 sets out to systematically destroy Alex's world in a tale of the unexpected.

For the most part Alex's fantasy world of the 1980s has been a cosy place full of fun and nostalgia. Season 2 has added a darker dimension, but it is still a comforting place. The feeling of comfort comes from the contented interaction between the main cast and through the inevitably of the stories. It's usually painfully obvious who the guilty parties are, sometimes even before the title credits have finished rolling, so the fun is in seeing how the inevitable plays itself out. All that changed this week.

This episode achieves that transition by throwing out the rule book on how plots develop in this series with several jarring twists that I'm sure nobody saw coming. The usual thing with big plot twists is that they should be unexpected while at the same time also being very much expected. They are usually foreshadowed cleverly beforehand so that when they arrive you can trace back the logic. This episode didn’t do that and the effect was unsettling, and therefore was exactly what the makers were aiming to achieve.

Firstly I'll deal with the one expected plot development. Alex finally tracks down Martin Summers' home and finds to her shock, and nobody else's, that Martin like every other psychokiller in the history of fiction has collected lots of photographs of her and stuck them on the wall. There has to be a less predictable way of telling us this guy is deranged. Thankfully the other main developments were far cleverer.

The story starts off routinely enough when a body is found half-buried in concrete on a building site. Gene and co put together the clues. They realize the site foreman Lafferty must be guilty as no self-respecting builder would get his concrete mix so wrong it still has the consistency of porridge by nightfall so that bodies can be dropped into it.

Before Gene can beat a confession out of anyone, a young PC Martin Summers arrives to help him. This was unexpected and was a nice development as the old Martin was getting tedious. Alex distrusts him and so a meeting is arranged. She, old Martin and young Martin get together on the building site for one of those meetings that make sci-fi so compelling. What would old Martin tell young Martin? Would he give him the benefit of 27 years of accumulated wisdom? Would he tell him to patent the Internet? Or would he just tell him to live long and prosper? Old Martin does none of these things. He shoots his younger self, proclaims that being a bad guy is more fun than being a good guy and wanders off.

I did not see that coming and that one moment of glorious unpredictability set the tone for what was to come. As an aside I'll mention that the appearance of young Martin excited me because I was sure the actor had also been in Life on Mars playing a young cop, but I couldn’t quite place where. IMDB tells me I'm wrong, sadly!

Anyhow, this shooting so disorientates Alex she loses all control and for no logical reason I could see she disposes of the body in Lafferty's porridgey concrete. It would have made more sense for a good cop like Alex to do absolutely anything but that. But then again young Martin being killed by old Martin was so complex a plot idea it would upstage the more important things to come and burying the body was perhaps the best course of action.

With Alex disorientated, the next unexpected development occurs with the discovery that a mole is in the CID office. Evidence is going missing, tip-offs are being passed to Lafferty, backhanders are being accepted. Gene hatches a plan to catch the mole by giving all the characters with speaking roles a bogus piece of evidence they can pass to Lafferty. Then he sits back and awaits developments.

Gene matches Alex in being discomforted, but he does so in his own particular brooding way. This series has given the actor plenty of opportunities to show off his brooding intensity, with mixed results. When Gene was wondering whether to join the masons, the scenes of him being quiet and intense perfectly conveyed his inner angst. Last week when he went all quiet and intense after being beat up he just came over as being a bit sulky. This time it works well as he looks around his beloved team and he no longer trusts any of them.

Is it Ray, known to take backhanders and who has mentioned he's a mason for the first time in 6 episodes? Is it Chris, desperate for money for the forthcoming wedding? Is it Shaz, who gets to look sneaky for the first time? Is it Viv, who after 15 episodes has suddenly been given the nickname of Skip as well as more lines than usual? Or is it that bloke with the interesting facial hair who always gets lines of dialogue when the camera's not on him? The answer was a shock and I'll hold my hand up and say I had five guesses and still got it wrong. Chris is the mole.

This was by far the most unsettling choice. I didn’t believe it for a moment, but then again that was by design. It was like finding that Bambi was a drug-addict. It's too unsettling to think about. Somehow Chris, a cop who went to the Inspector Closeau school of policing, a man who is more likely to trip over his own feet and handcuff himself than arrest anyone, is a master criminal. For months he's been secretly stealing evidence, carefully covering his tracks and being clandestine while all the time presenting the image of being a dipstick. It's so wrong and yet so right.

The point of this episode was to tear down every comforting aspect of this fantasy world. Finding that Chris is a bent cop who's been taking backhanders all along, helping Mac, aiding in the death of the other bent cop from episode 1, achieved that brilliantly. No other choice could have jarred the viewer so effectively, with the possible exception of Viv as Desmond's is one of my all-time favourite sitcoms.

Chris hasn't developed since his first scene in Life on Mars in which he giggled while outlining the evidence found at the place where they found the body. So this gave him a welcome chance to get a character, and the actor seized the opportunity. I guess most actors practice their breaking down in the interview room technique in case they get a chance to star in The Bill. Even so, Chris's breakdown came over as believable. When given the chance to deny the accusations, his barely perceptible headshake was moving, and when by the end he is left alone in the CID room, there's a real feeling that this world has been destroyed.

And being destroyed is what needs to happen. In Life on Mars by the end Sam knew that the danger this fantasy world presented was that it was so cosy there's no reason to wake up. With his body healed Sam's mind invented a way to make the world feel less appealing so that he would awake. This appears to be happening again.

As the series has progressed, the bigger mystery has become smaller and has ever more clearly shown that Alex is just waiting to awake from her coma. Of course this could be misdirection, but for now Alex's fantasy has become less appealing to her. Chris's double-dealing has torn apart the unit from within and from without Martin Summers has fulfilled the Frank Morgan role of sowing disharmony.

It has to be remembered that there was no suggestion that the real surgeon Frank was aware he was in Sam's world. Sam merely sub-consciously interpreted his pleas to wake up in terms that fitted into his fantasy. If Martin Summers has a real life role, it doesn’t have to match the one he has in Alex's world. Everything he has told Alex doesn't have to have come from a man with independent thought; it could just be Alex projecting her need to awake. In fact old Martin's murder of young Martin probably proves he doesn't have freewill. Killing your younger self doesn’t feel like something anyone would freely do, even in a fantasy and even if you're a deranged man with photos on the wall, unless they are only doing what Alex needs them to do, and that is to make her world an uncomfortable place. And in that it succeeded.

Even minor things were unsettling. The music wasn't light and frothy, but dark and brooding. Alex's mum appeared for the first time this season as a ghostly image chiding her for not having saved her. The ultimate solution to what Lafferty had been up to turned out to be uninteresting, which was strangely unsettling. And strangest of all the cryptic message written on the corpse dug out of the porridge, a message that just had to have an ominous warning about Operation Rose, turned out to be instructions to an X marks the spot. This week I got every single guess as to where the story was going wrong, and that unsettled me as much as it unsettled Alex and Gene, and for that I'm grateful.

Next week is the final episode of season 2. Is it the very final episode? I hope not. From the clips, Chris gets a chance at redemption and Alex gets attacked by a nasty anagram.