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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Ashes to Ashes

  
  

Page: 12(3)4

 
 
Feverfew
19:14 / 15.02.08
I found a lot to like in last night's episode.

I like the fact that Alex is portrayed as assuming she knows that she's in a hallucination - there's no uncertainty, as Sam had, over which reality was the hallucination, as Alex is determined that 1981 is completely unreal. I think that her referring to her colleagues to their faces as constructs is mitigated by the fact that Gene, Ray and Chris already had to go through the patented Sam Tyler It's Not Real treatment, so they may be assuming she'll get it out of her system at some point soon and settle down.

I also liked how understated her putting up the calendar was; there's a wide streak of fatalism there, in that for her it's already happened, but she may have the chance to change it - but it was such a quiet moment, albeit interrupted by mooning.

The whole 80s' cultural lens is showing itself in interesting ways, also - as mentioned, the sex was rather predictable, but it was comedy, prime-time pre-watershed (albeit shown at a post watershed time) fully-clothed excessively-noisy television sex, and the lift doors added the extra comedy touch, compared to, for instance, the honey trap in Life on Mars.

The subtle shift to focussing on Gene more was also interesting, as it began in the last episode, as I don't recall any times in Mars when the focus shifted significantly away from Sam.

Anyway... I could be making big somethings out of little nothings, but the subtle and not-so-subtle changes are what I like about the direction, if not always the execution, of Ashes. Granted, maybe there's too much Coulrophobia, but this is, after all, still only the second episode.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
09:55 / 18.02.08
'Bagpuss is going to sleep'

'What did I tell you? All right lads, beat the crap out of him.'

No fucking way could Gene and co get the better of the inscrutable cosmic menace of Bagpuss so easily. The instant that the pack of armed bastards set foot through the door of the junk shop, Bagpuss would simply yawn, and they would be frozen in creepy sepia tone and pulled forever into Bagpuss's twilight world - placed in the window along with all of the other brick-a-brack and broken things for an eternity. It would take an intervention from Sapphire and Steel to get them out again.

Some 80s TV realities are infinitely stranger more menacing places to be trapped than the Geneverse, and not to be trifled with by amateurs.

"Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss
Old Fat Furry Catpuss
Wake up and look at this thing that I bring
Wake up, be bright, be golden and light
Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing"
 
 
Rev. Orr
11:51 / 18.02.08
Are you saying that Gene is a virgin and was intended to be the sacrifice all along?
 
 
Whisky Priestess
12:49 / 18.02.08
Are you saying he isn't and wasn't?
 
 
Whisky Priestess
09:28 / 22.02.08
So what did people think of last night's episode? I'm pretty sure I've seen the blonde prostitute somewhere before and I felt some of the narrative was a bit unnecessarily convoluted (why did they take Nina in in the first place and why did they let her hang around the station for so long?) but basically it was quite an interesting one in terms of character development.

I liked Ray's softening towards Nina, and the fact that you got to see a softer, more caring "good cop" side of him (ah those bright blue eyes, all full of compassion!) - and then couldn't work out whether I loved or hated the fact that this was pretty much instantly undermined by his planting drugs on her rapist in order to punish him for a crime he didn't commit because he'd nebver be convicted for the one he did. I thought this denouement was morally problematic, at the very least.

On the other hand, I am getting quite sick of the obligatory "Alex gets drunk and gets off with someone inappropriate" scene. Must we have one *every single episode*? God knows Keeley's drunk acting isn't of such a shining standard that they have to wheel it out every week ...

Also, I know she's a strong Noughties woman in charge of her sexuality and blah blah fishcakes, but I think they're undermining the character by hammering it home (repeatedly) that all her sleeping around, far from being empowering, is actually born of desperation and (apparently) a displaced desire to bang Hunt. We've got the point now: I really think they could lay off the Rioja and the one-night stands for a show or two.
 
 
■
09:47 / 22.02.08
I'm pretty sure I've seen the blonde prostitute somewhere before

It's Claire Rushbrook, and she's been in tons of stuff. Carrie and Barry and The Satan Pit ep of Doctor Who spring to mind.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
10:55 / 22.02.08
Satan Pit, must be. Thanks.
 
 
Sax
11:08 / 22.02.08
Coronation Street as well. Which is surely where you know her from, Whisk.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
12:35 / 22.02.08
Alas, I've never in my life watched Corrie.

Who wants to touch me?
 
 
Paralis
14:28 / 22.02.08
I think this episode was considerably less problematic than the last one. The hurried need to integrate Drake's family into the plot in clean, episodic pieces remains the biggest clunker for me, and nearly ruined episode two's best moment, conflating 80s TV and bad dreams with the my-mum's-finally-come-to-see-me-at-my-new-job-and-oh!-my-ass-is-in-the-air spot. With episode three being semi-dedicated to Evan, the condensed histrionics of last week's dialog makes a bit more sense (particularly the brief scene at Luigi's), but doesn't sit much better.

Also, the "let's all go undercover at a costume party on a yacht" was pretty swell. Giving Ray more to do than have awesome hair is lovely, but I'm left wondering what's happening with Skelton, who's left with basically nothing to do. He's not even the nervous one anymore, and where in LoM, his admiration for Sam distinguished him from the rest of the officers, now he's just little Ray without the comic flair.

The conclusion was silly, but not worse than last week's (although in fairness, I'm not sure anything could be sillier than the suicide bomber walking off a safe distance before detonating), and I wonder how much of the urge to cue everything in advance is homage to old TV I never watched, and how much of it is just crap writing, only ironically so. See: the gnomes, presumably filled with cocaine, left all over the officers' desks.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
14:36 / 22.02.08
Poor old Shaz and her lovely hair were pretty much wasted this week, too. I think Chris's role is now to be one half of an explicitly romantic subplot (yet to be properly exploited) with Shaz, as opposed to the old-married-couple/Laurel and Hardy sparring he enjoyed with Ray in LoM.
 
 
Paralis
15:08 / 22.02.08
Shaz has always been wasted, though--so much promise in that lovely hair and smile, untapped. It's natural that she'd pair off with Chris because it leaves the Ray/Gene axis intact as well the Alex/any-stuffed-shirt thing they're running with. But otherwise they're not giving it the time to make sense, since so far his courtship has basically been getting Shaz kidnapped, slagging off her friends, and either contributing or assenting to Ray's congenial misogyny. Perhaps this is leading up to some great show of independence in the later episodes, but right now it just feels like they've chucked the idea that he's grown up in the eight years between series.

But there's so much less clown this time, and that can't be praised enough.
 
 
Feverfew
19:57 / 22.02.08
(although in fairness, I'm not sure anything could be sillier than the suicide bomber walking off a safe distance before detonating)

I interpreted this differently; I saw it that Alex had planted the allegorical idea of a suicide bomber as someone wanting to kill themselves to make a point, rather than necessarily for civilian casualties. I also thought that it was his father's pub that he was blowing up; in that with his father in jail and his world crumbling around him, he had nothing to live for and clung to the idea of martyrdom as an ideological statement to make blowing himself up somehow worthwhile. Alternatively, this could be entirely wrong.

See: the gnomes, presumably filled with cocaine, left all over the officers' desks.

Again, I saw this differently; I made the immediate assumption that the cocaine had been removed and that the gnomes were now simply a sight gag for Chris to be phoning up people who'd reported theirs stolen.

Alas, I've never in my life watched Corrie.

Who wants to touch me?

Oh well la-di-da, Bolly.

Apart from these, for what it's worth I agree with both of you on your assessment of the episode - Costume party = win, binge drinking = fail, etc. Again, the idea that Hunt has someone - and now someone else - above him comes back in the Higher Up Whose Name Escapes me who owned the yacht and was Masonic - and it's this that intrigues me more than anything else; why Gene made the conscious decision to go from being the biggest fish in a smaller pond to being a smaller fish in a larger pond probably won't be explored, but is interesting, to me.
 
 
Paralis
21:21 / 22.02.08
I interpreted this differently; I saw it that Alex had planted the allegorical idea of a suicide bomber as someone wanting to kill themselves to make a point, rather than necessarily for civilian casualties. I also thought that it was his father's pub that he was blowing up; in that with his father in jail and his world crumbling around him, he had nothing to live for and clung to the idea of martyrdom as an ideological statement to make blowing himself up somehow worthwhile.

I wasn't sure if it was the father's pub or not, and I didn't want to commit because I hadn't rewatched the episode. Having gone back and checked, it is. Which is all the more silly, I think: you're trying to protest a man who wants to redevelop the land your father's pub is built on, and the best way to do that is by... blowing it up? Oi. Way to make your mum homeless, champ.

But there was some buildup to the suicide bombing with his tete-a-tete with Alex in the interrogation room, and there weren't many other ways a show as lighthearted as Ashes to Ashes is could really deal with something like a suicide bomber.

More generally, I don't think there's a lot of traction to be gained thinking about the politics and processes of a show that is so determinedly silly. It's strange that LoM managed to have so much more sentimental resonance using so many of the same tricks; I'm not sure whether it's because they'd used a more ambiguous premise or whether Sam offered a more concrete contrast between the past an the present than Alex's "you're not real and look at how drunk I am" play or what, but this just isn't very satisfying. There's ten minutes of gorgeous fun in each episode and the rest I can't be bothered to understand because it's not built in a way that encourages the viewer to try.

But those ten minutes are really fantastic and will make for a great youtube montage once it's all said and done.
 
 
■
21:57 / 04.03.08
This might sound a bit rich coming from me, but as the bloody football has meant BBC2 Scotland will not be showing this week's ep until Sunday, can we hold off on it until then, please?
 
 
Whisky Priestess
08:36 / 07.03.08
Can we talk about last week's episode with the female revolutionary front and the sweaty lock-in then please?
 
 
Paralis
03:32 / 08.03.08
We could, but wasn't this episode much better? Last week was trapped in that "what's the reverse of dramatic irony?" thing they've got going where Alex wonders things she, by the premise of the series, already knows, and we the viewers are left in the dark because it bubbles up drama. This week was nearly all fun! fun! fun!

I think the request to leave off talking about episode five is a bit silly, but I don't have the patience to write anything of length or depth about it tonight anyway. So, erm, yeh.


[+] [-] Spoiler
 
 
sleazenation
08:12 / 08.03.08
This might sound a bit rich coming from me, but as the bloody football has meant BBC2 Scotland will not be showing this week's ep until Sunday, can we hold off on it until then, please?

Erm - you do know that if you are in the UK you can watch this at any time you like via the BBC's iPlayer right? It's what I did.
 
 
Ava Banana
13:48 / 08.03.08
Paralis, [+] [-] Spoiler (in a rather clunky and shoe-horned in way) and also had mixed feelings
 
 
Ava Banana
13:58 / 08.03.08
Bah, I fail at spoiler tags, suffice it to say I felt the same way.
 
 
Paralis
22:49 / 08.03.08
Your tags look fine here, but that may just be mod magic.

Either way, it's more of a strange trend within the show that I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around. There's the bits of senseless fun, there's the bits of strange "right-let's-stick-to-the-premise", and then, more often than not, there's a neat little wrapup at the end containing a pretty explicit if clipped depiction of something so unutterably fucked and tragic about the modern world--the nightmare of proving rape without physical evidence, suicide bombings, AIDS, etc. And with the exception of Nina's bastard getting fit up with the cocaine, there's this cutesy right-right-off-you-go bit of love for these people who are victimized, by and large, by a world that isn't prepared to deal with their problems yet.

There was a bit of this in LoM, of course, too, even if all that comes to mind is Sam's ranting about the dangers of football hooliganism. And I'm not sure whether it was the personalization of the reaction that made it not hurt so much, or whether it was just that the issues at stake were more in keeping with the relative portrayed innocence of 1973 (that and an unfamiliarity and inability to connect with whatever came after).

So. Do you think there's something more at work here than with the images of future-Alex on the coroner's table? Are the writers just attempting to convey anything more than the idea that 1981 wasn't as nice a place as all of those shots of the Quattro and Alex's really quite gorgeous white jacket suggest?
 
 
Feverfew
07:30 / 09.03.08
I like your reasoning. If I were to venture a hypothesis, it might be that in Life on Mars, 1973 was a good place for Sam Tyler, inspired by a childhood that was only blighted by issues with his father. That, at the end of the series, he consciously chose to go back there, would seem to show that, in some ways, he wants to be there - the initial catalyst being to save the others over saving himself, but he knows the implications of going back there 'permanently' - and '73, for Tyler, is the opportunity to effect real change to people like Hunt rather than the washed-out, corporate-style world he was stuck in in '06 / '07. In a lot of ways, it was like Heaven for him.

For Alex Drake, however, '81 is a lot like hell; she is trapped there, believing she has full knowledge of the situation, and, worse, believing that she can get back, but taunted by the fear that all this is occurring in the seconds or moments before her death, and that however hard she fights to get back to '08 it may end up wasted, because she'll be shot through the head (as opposed to being in a coma in a hospital bed, like Tyler) in a grubby, unknown barge on the Thames.

So 1981 isn't a 'happy place' for Drake as 1973 was for Tyler; he apparently chose somewhere shaped on childhood memories of police shows warped around his own experiences, whereas Drake has - again, apparently - chosen 1981 for much more serious reasons, i.e. the opportunity to save her parents. The problem being that even if she succeeds in all her goals, what if all she's going back to is capital-d-Death?

All of which is why, if I had to guess, Ashes to Ashes has a broader, or more distinct, streak of fatalism than Life on Mars did; for the latter, it was an adventure with the aim of waking up; for the former, it's a quest with a very serious objective and no promise of a reward.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
21:27 / 15.03.08
Ok, Thursday 13th's episode:

I would have been a lot more convinced by the "oooh nooo, she's dying, it's all going to end!!!11!" if this hadn't been episode 6/8. That aside, I quite enjoyed this one - it had a good, proper crime at its centre, it had Alex introducing policing/detection methods that were actually a) novel and b) useful (going through the bins), it had a bit of peril and a nice semi-red herring (suspect couldn't have done it - o wait no, he did - but not alone) and was generally pretty good, I thought.

Shit bits: Alex and her Mum, as ever. Alex and Evan (justifiable, just, if she EVER actually gets off with him rather than him just turning up when she has an emotional moment with Gene burgeoning) and the wonderful screw-up of Gene giving Alex a "heart massage" (hem hem) before he's even tried the kiss of life. Back to St' John's Ambulance training for you, Gene! I know they did it to delay the inevitable kiss moment, but really, tres sloppy, scriptwriters ...

Alex must really seem to be completely barmy to Caroline Price though - and she doesn't seem the type to indulge in outreach work. If I were her, I'd start seriously considering a restraining order of some sort.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
10:46 / 28.03.08
I am officially the last person in Britain left watching this series, aren't I? It's just me and the nicotine-addicted beagles at Huntingdon Research, I guess ...

For an episode, that was bad - very uneven with Alex doing her usual crazy-lady act and everyone else ignoring her, as per. But for a series closer episode, that was utter shit. Alex riding a pink tank? DO me a favour ... what on earth, apart from the great screenshot, was the point of that?

Pretty much the only aspects of this which were new to us, original or at all interesting were the dad/clown moment (though why we had to have the clown at all, except as a homage to Test Card Girl, I have no idea) and the fact that Gene is actually the person who takes little Alex's hand and leads her away from burning parents in the car. While I did like this reveal/change, despite the somewhat literal interpretation of Gene "Genie" it encourages, it makes me despair of our ever getting the long-hinted-at Alex on Gene action which has been the potential elephant in the room for this entire series, seeing as how he's now her spiritual guardian/father figure, or something.

However, I thought her dad deciding to blow them all to kingdom come was, frankly, bollocks. No wonder the poor bastard has hardly been on screen throughout - there's no way they could have established him as a character without hinting, in the name of fairness, at the industrial-sized serving of crazy he's hiding beneath that wig. I'm sure the writers were working under the delusion that anyone watching would actually give a shit, by this stage, about who planted the bomb or whether, indeed, Alex managed to save her parents (you just know she's not going to), but really, they could have pulled something better out of the hat than that. I'd rather have had the police themselves responsible in some way - or, better, the bomb meant for somebody else (e.g. Angus Ashton or Evan or whoever) which blew them up by accident.

On the plus side, Glenister's acting during the abortive dinner scene was really nicely understated. Even Keeley managed to tone it down a bit for the occasion.

Oh well. I'll watch the first episode of the next series just to make sure, but I don't really see where they can go from here. I suppose there's the faint promise of Gene and Alex ending up in a clinch, and fucking Molly's birthday cake still hangs in the balance, but surely nobody honestly cares?
 
 
Feverfew
18:35 / 28.03.08
I am officially the last person in Britain left watching this series, aren't I?

No, you're not.

But I disagree with a fair amount of what you're saying.

I agree with Alex riding a pink tank? DO me a favour ... what on earth, apart from the great screenshot, was the point of that? - but then again, surely 'the great screenshot' could be interpreted as a nod towards the excesses of 80s' television? I saw it as a gratuitous throwaway gag that went spectacularly over-the-top, followed by the comedy speedy-reversing-Audi, but I like to think I can see what they were trying to do, even if it didn't come out right.

My take on the episode was that it was intended to throw absolutely everything that Alex took for granted into complete disarray. Things she has believed all her life - that her mother didn't seem to love her, that her dad was perfect, that it was Owen who found her and saved her - are completely overturned; her mother loves her very much, her father has - and I like the phrasing - (an) industrial-sized serving of crazy he's hiding beneath that wig - and Owen, having been built up as the possible antagonist (lent the car, was sleeping with her mother and had been kicked out of the firm) wasn't even the shining knight Alex remembered, and instead was 'just there'.

I found the idea that the entirety of Alex's efforts were thwarted by the system she's stuck in (a) maddeningly sad and (b) maddeningly obvious, but still, I don't think that was 'bad' as a concluding episode, especially as there's a second season to follow, which will, I suspect, attempt to explain why she's still stuck there.

I also thought that a lot of Gene's comments were decidedly and intendedly ambiguous as to his knowledge of just what's going on and whether there's something at work here that he knows about but hasn't been letting on, but irritatingly I can't recall any of them with any precision.

What mainly bugs me is that Drake seems to have had several months to get ahead of the game, and yet we're supposed to think that she's just been so busy with the work that she doesn't get in gear until the night before her Day of Reckoning. Maybe she didn't want to think about it, maybe other things got in the way, but her calendar seemed to indicate that she had an awful lot of time to get things sorted and, for no on-screen reason I can think of, just didn't get round to it.

I'll be watching the first episode of the next season, too, though. In a weird way, this last episode has ended up mirroring the flatness of the somewhat-botched last episode of the first season of Life on Mars, which makes me think they may pull out their A-game for season 2. Now Alex's defining event is out of the way, where next?
 
 
Paralis
23:27 / 29.03.08
All in all, I think I would have far preferred the last episode answer the question that's been on my mind since Life on Mars:

If you slip into a coma in the Genieverse, where does your mind go?

with a glorious hour of Shaz & co fighting robots and zipping through pneumatic tubes in a terrifying vision of 1997 set to Little Wonder.

Because, really, it would have answered about as much as this episode did. Unless they're going to open up the question of whether Alex's 2007 London was in any sense real (which I don't think they can do without reopening the finale of Life on Mars, which would quickly get too complicated to bear), I don't think I like where this is going. The arc of the first series of Life on Mars was largely about Sam's detachment from the present day; we (and he, of course), may not have known quite what was going on, but it was reasonably well-established that Sam was a) safe; and b) without much to return to in the present. Alex doesn't have any of that safety or ambivalence.

Which is why, I guess, they tried to introduce those notes of ambiguity in the finale, particularly the scene at Shaz's bedside and this idea that Alex has some responsibility for the world she's come to inhabit, fiction though it is (strange though it is to see her think of Gene & co as "her" constructs).

The other big portentous characterizing bits were Gene's referring to the party at Luigi's as "the land of the living." Also:

Alex: "How come you were there, taking the little girl's hand? That couldn't have happened. You weren't there. You're not real."
Gene: "I'm everywhere, bolly. I was needed and I was there."

Raising the question of: if Drake believes that 2007 is REAL, and the Genieverse is FAKE, and Drake is a PSYCHOLOGIST, then why isn't she at least being a little circumspect about the ENORMOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL BAGGAGE of coming to this uncertifiable take on what's happened to her parents?
 
 
Whisky Priestess
12:01 / 30.03.08
Something that's given me a little straw of hope to clutch at is that I've just gone back and re-read the thread around the time of the end of LoM series 1 - and the general reaction was that it was just as crap and inconsistent as most of us seem to think the series 1 ending of Ashes was.

So there's hope! I suppose. Considering how much better the ending to Series 2 of LoM was - although I don't know, the repetition of the central premise is still subject to the law of diminishing returns, and Keeley Hawes still isn't John Simm, alas.
 
 
Chew On Fat
13:10 / 02.04.08
A bit late to the party as I only got around to i-playing the last episode yesterday.

So career cop Alex discovered that she was in denial about the circumstances surrounding her Human Rights Lawyer parents death in a car-bomb?

Can I be Mr Facetious and point out that the only two Human Rights lawyers murdered in the UK in Alex's lifetime were killed possibly by but certainly in collusion with the police? One even died in a car-bomb.

See Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson's wiki entries.

A bit serious for a TV show about 80s nostalgia, but there you have it. When you put murdered defence lawyers, Police frustration with suspects legal rights, car bombs and frequent mentions of the IRA in one 50 minute show you've got one heckuva pachyderm in your front room.

Perhaps Alex's salvation lies in keeping the cover-up going along the lines of Gene's frankly vomit-inducing 'We are unbreakable' speech to Sir Geoffrey Whatsisface? It was a bizarre speech to get the full rousing score and climactic beat treatment.

The writers know Middle-England can live with cops bending the rules a little so long as its not people like us(!)being fitted up.
 
 
Whisky Priestess
13:41 / 02.04.08
'zackly.

I'd rather have had the police themselves responsible [for the bomb] in some way

You read it here first!
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
13:56 / 02.04.08
I liked where they seemed to be going with it in that episode where they both got locked in the secret government facility. I thought they were going to bring in this whole 80s cold war theme of spies and conspiracy, which Alex accidentally stumbles onto by investigating her parent's death - and which Gene, as a washed-up cop from a simpler era, has to help her go up against. After that episode I was hoping they were going to bring that sort of Edge of Darkness element into it, which would send it in a very different and much more interesting direction than just doing "Life on Mars in the 80s". But no.
 
 
penitentvandal
07:05 / 03.04.08
I'm assuming they're saving up the conspiracy jazz for Hallo Spaceboy, the 90s-set iteration of the Genieverse which, thus far, only exists in the minds of people on this site, to give it an X-Files vibe.
 
 
Feverfew
15:38 / 03.04.08
The Gene Genie and his crew, aided by the time-displaced but "sexy, intelligent, DCI" Myfanwy Griffiths, explore the strange goings-on and paranormal happenings of 1998.

They could set it in Cardiff.

John Barrowman could guest-star.
 
 
penitentvandal
21:13 / 03.04.08
Because the twenty-first century is when it all happens...and Torchwood is surrounded by armed bastards!
 
 
Madman in the ruins.
11:07 / 21.04.09
More of a damp sqib than a fanfare but S2 started Last night. I was unsure wether to watch it bt decided to give it a go and TBH was glad I had.
Its getting Deeper and Darker.
So far what we know (and from S1 is)

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Alex had been shot her 2008 body may have just been found and is being cared for by Paramedics.
Gene is not "God" 'You go when I say you can go Bolly' is a bluff, He's working for (&limited) by a higher authority.
Somone "surgeon man" Knows about Alex, it seems his 'mission' is to stop the Death of Diana.
Gene 82 is not blind to the corruption around him, he's playing his game with his hands tied.
SuperMac on the scene, sets my spider senses tingling with "ohh hes nasty don't trust him"
Ray is becoming a usefull Copper, ustlising Technoligy rather than the Bully Boy Tactics of earleir.
Watching it as a Cop show rather than a Sci Fi show made it more enjoyable.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
03:29 / 22.04.09
I imagined not watching it at all would be the ideal experience, so that's the road I went down.
 
  

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