Ashes To Ashes - First Episode - Deja Vue

So, before Life On Mars ended, DCI Sam Tyler sent a recording of his experiences to “this officer, she’s collecting stuff from colleagues who’ve suffered trauma”. Before pitching himself off a roof in order to prolong the coma that transported him to 1973.

It turns out this officer is DI Alex Drake, a psychological profiling expert in London’s Metropolitan Police. The first episode of Ashes To Ashes opens with her daughter reading Sam’s words from a transcript.

Unfortunately, Alex Drake’s time in 2008 is about to end. She is called to a crime scene, where a desperate criminal is holding a gun to a busker’s head. During the fracas, Drake attempts to calm the situation down, but the man points the gun at her instead. Drake’s daughter, who was in the car, witnesses this and jumps out to protect her mother. The gunman, Arthur Layton, grabs the girl and takes her down a flight of steps. A gunshot is heard and Drake runs down in pursuit - her daughter is fine, but the gunman has disappeared.

Later, Layton abducts Drake from her car and takes her into a tunnel. He seems to know her, rambling about how she’s going to be his “ticket out of this mess”, and how he’s going to tell her the truth about how her parents died. As she tries to reason with him, he shoots her.

Guess what happens next…

Drake wakes up on a pleasure boat called The Lady Di, dressed as a hooker. She runs off the boat as police storm it. She seems to pass out and when she regains consciousness, she’s at a derelict building with a guy in a sharp suit who’s screaming at her for calling the police. Suddenly, a red Audi Quattro arrives -with Gene Hunt and his team inside. Hunt’s first words in the episode are: “Today, my friend, your diary entry will read ‘Took a prossie hostage and was shot by three armed bastards’.”

It soon turns out that Drake is in 1981, and that Hunt, Carling and Skelton are now working in London Metro. Drake discovers that she has an identity in this time and is a DI in the same department as Hunt. However, given her knowledge of Sam Tyler, she believes the whole thing is a figment of her imagination.

As a result, her behaviour seems irrational to everyone else as she tries to approach the situation as if she was fully conscious.

In her first episode, Drake establishes that Sam returned to his imaginary world, and worked with Hunt until his death a year previously - where he apparently died in a bust. In her 2008 life, Tyler died a year previously.

Anyway, the episode centers around a drug ring in London. Drake discovers that Layton, the man who shot her in 2008 is involved. She vows to take him down, but does he really exist in 1981, or is this a manifestation she created herself?

Opinion

I watched the final episode of Life On Mars on BBC4 just after this and noticed that bit of continuity where Tyler mentions an officer who’s collecting trauma reports. Kudos to the writers on that one.

Despite the fact that we know Tyler was comatose, there are enough gray areas in the plot to make you wonder if there’s more to the story. There must be. Tyler has a backstory that follows on from his brief period of consciousness in 2007 - did Drake create this, or is it real?

Also, no account was made for the disappearance of Annie Cartwright. If Carling, Skelton and Hunt were in place, why no mention of Cartwright? Drake surmises that the characters have some significance, but why?

The only evidence that Drake is inside her own head is that she experiences similar visions to Sam - where he saw the girl from the TV test card, she sees the clown that used to be on the TV test card. She also experiences a couple of communications from her daughter that imply her presence in a hospital.

So, plenty of question marks over this series too, although we’re promised an explanation about Gene Hunt in the end…

..and will we be speculating about a possible romance between Drake and Hunt for the rest of the series, won’t we?

Notable Quotes:

• “Scum is scum wherever you go.” - Hunt explains his decisions to move from Manchester to London.
• “Just look at me. I am trained to get inside the criminal mind, but now I’m stuck here in mine…WITH YOU!” - Drake notes the irony of her situation…
• “That’s crap…and some of it was in Klingon.” - Ray Carling doesn’t quite understand all of Drake’s phychobabble.
• “And stop wiggling your bloody fingers every time you say my name.” - Hunt objects to being treated as a fictional character.