Ashes to Ashes, Eighties to Eighties...

Feeling a bit nostalgic? The beeb certainly is and their 80s Season is in full swing (it's like they knew the Tories were going to be in power...) which means adaptations of classic 80s literature such as Martin Amis' 'Money' starring the terrific Nick Frost, 80s films like Terry Gilliam's masterpiece 'Brazil' and the finale of Ashes to Ashes. George Osborne's doing his bit too by trying to get the levels of unemployment back up to their 1983 levels in celebration (satire *pumps fist*)...

Anyway, Friday saw 'the end of an era'. A complex, mythos shattering goodbye to Gene Hunt et al. So what did we all make of it? (This is a genuine question - I know a fair few of you followers did watch it, so leave some comments and we can brainstorm everything). Also, if you haven't seen it and intend to do so, this will ruin everything for you, so, you know, SPOILERS and all that.

Ever since the arrival of the wonderfully original 'Life on Mars', fans have agonised over the truth. Mixing nostalgia, surrealism, humour and action, Life on Mars went on to achieve both critical acclaim and enormous popularity (in no small part down to Phillip Glenister's marvellously un-PC DCI Gene Hunt), but despite all this it left the fans mulling over exactly what was happening. Both Life on Mars' Sam Tyler and Ashes to Ashes' Alex Drake wondered after their separate accidents if they were "mad, in a coma or back in time" and as it would happens they weren't really any of these things. In the finale of Life on Mars, Tyler found his way back to the 'real world' only to find that the bureaucracy and boredom of modern life made him hunger for his new (or rather really old) friends and colleagues, leading him to leap from the roof of the police headquarters and arrive back in 1973 in time to save the day. A hugely satisfying ending, but not one that cracked the secrets of the show's lore.

In Ashes to Ashes we followed Alex Drake frantically search for a way back to her daughter Molly, all the while creating preposterous sexual chemistry and tension with Hunt and scoffing at his uncouthness and approach to policing. The end of the second series saw her inadvertently shot by Hunt during an operation and at the beginning of the third she finds herself in a hospital bed still very much in the 80s and now haunted by a mysterious young police officer with half a face. Series 3 also saw the arrival of Jim Keats from Discipline and Complaints (well it was bound to happen to Hunt at some point). From the moment of his arrival a wee voice in my head piped up "there's a wrong'un, if ever I saw one" and, as it would happen I would be vindicated in my assertion.

There were a number of elements over which us fans had been attemption to fathom the significance of. The number 6620 was revealed to be the number on the epaulets of the copper with half a face, but what was the strange house about? Why were Chris, Ray and Shaz seeing stars? What's the significance of the time 9.06? Did Gene kill Sam Tyler? Hunt maintained that his last words to Tyler involved taking him to the pub. Drake decided that she would have to go to the spooky house in Lancashire and approached the scarecrow on the hill which happened to be wearing a jacket with the number 6620 on the shoulder. She began to dig under the scarecrow and Hunt begged her not to. She found the shallow grave of the copper with half a face and reached into the journal buried with him. Opening it she was greeted with "6620, Gene Hunt".

Cue an excellent, excellent revelation that changed the face of all 5 series. Gene Hunt had had half of his face blown off by a shotgun toting farmer on Coronation Day, his first day on the beat. Keats emerged from the shadows of the house and began taunting him. Not only was Hunt dead, but so were Chris, Ray and Shaz. Chris, a uniform copper, gunned down; Ray, distraught at his father's disproval and failure in the Army (referenced earlier in the series) hanged himself and Shaz was stabbed by a would-be car thief. It was all beginning to come together. Keats returned to Fenchurch East with a dejected Hunt and Drake in tow and proceeded to smash up the office, revealing that the entire world is a lie, effectively breaking apart Hunt's universe.

Keats, in full Satan mode (the only bit that I actually worked out before the final episode) proceeds to take Chris, Ray and Shaz to his hedonistice, oh so tempting division of CID and, in a brilliant twist on the usual image of Hell, asks them to take the lift down. Meanwhile, Alex convinces Hunt to get his act together and stop the Dutch gang that they had been attempting to foil before the revelations started coming thick and fast. Hunt dragged Shaz from the jaws of Hell with the aid of a walkie talkie but Chris and Ray were apparently left to their doom. At the raid, things went a bit awry. An undercover Shaz was found out and Hunt and Alex were left pinned down behind a decidely sorry-looking, bullet-ridden Quattro. As the 'Hollandaise' (as Chris called them earlier, before being corrected) gang made their escape, their car was t-boned by Ray's and Skelton and Carling gunned down the criminals as Vangelis' triumphant Chariots of Fire theme played. It was a beautiful moment. I was practically welling up by now. "He's killed the Quattro." Gene lamented. "He's killed my car!"

Lovely. Where to go from there then, well, as referenced earlier, the only place to go after a successful operation is 'the pub'. But this wasn't any pub, this was The Railway Arms from Life on Mars, complete with Nelson the barman. As Tyler had done it would seem that 'going to the pub' was a way of passing on from this 'Policeman's Purgatory'. Ray, Chris and Shaz walked in but Alex stopped, making a horrible realisation. That she couldn't go back to the real world, she couldn't see her Molly again. Hunt comforted her as a serpentine Keats, who had been lurking behind the pair, chose his moment to strike. Drake asked him the time, but he was reluctant to show her his watch. As it happened the time was, yep, you guessed it, 9.06, the time when Alex Drake died in her hospital bed, with her daughter at her side. Hunt punched out Keats and left Drake to enter the pub after an embrace and a kiss. But Keats wasn't done yet, he launched a maniacal tirade at a lonesome Hunt, who ignored him as he slithered away.

Back in Fenchurch, Hunt poured himself a well-earned glass of Scotch and leafed through a Mercedes 190D catalogue, when a man burst through the office doors yelling about iPhones and demanding to know what had happened to his office. A wry smile crept onto Hunt's face as he rose from his chair to the door and addressed him in the manner that we have all come to love and will no doubt miss greatly. "A word in you shell-like, pal?"

And there we have it. Enought revelations to wrap up the plot with enough left open for the fans to discuss. For the creators of the show this is the culmination of a work started in 1998 and an ending kept underwraps since the writing of Life on Mars. Just terrific. We learnt that Hunt had been a skinny, young rookie "head swimming with machismo", bursting into the farmhouse like John Wayne only to have his life cruelly snatched from him and had in purgatory been able to become everything he had wanted to be. He was John Wayne, he was Gary Cooper, he was Gene Hunt and he was a hero, herding the lost souls of troubled policemen to a better place. It was Paradise Lost with New Romantics, 'Paradise Lost in the Eighties', perhaps. Hunt wasn't so much a God as a man making up for lost potential and battling the demonic Keats.

Of course, we don't know everything. There are still a few boxes left unchecked. What about the other coppers? Viv and the rest, are they all dead too? Was Annie dead in Life on Mars? Gene maintained that he had forgotten what the truth of the world was exactly, so he knew at some point? Did Chris, Ray and Shaz have the Sam/Alex experience? Did Sam Tyler forget the 'real world' before he went to 'the pub'? Was DCI Lytton dead or a figure from Hunt's mind - the Jack Palance to his Alan Ladd? We may never know for sure, but what we do know, is that Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes' place in the pantheon of great drama is now assured.


Things that also ended this week...

Lost - From what I can tell, the ending was basically the same as Ashes to Ashes, except that Ashes to Ashes didn't fuck around with Polar Bears (Noah's Island rip-off much?) and ridiculous Black Smoke creatures. Yeah, I gave up when the Polar Bear turned up in the first series, didn't really get Lost... just a quick vent there...