At heart, it's all about the fracturing of the CID "family" this week. The opening scene finds everything in harmony, staking out a building site to foil a drug deal, with Gene (Philip Glenister), Ray (Dean Andrews), Chris (Marshall Lancaster) and Alex (Keeley Hawes) codenaming themselves after the Three Bears fable, with "Mummy Bear" Alex saving "Daddy Bear" Gene from their knife-wielding leader. The situation leads to them discovering a dead body in a concrete pit, kicking off a murder investigation with site manager Lafferty (Dorian Lough) the prime suspect. Gene also has help from informant PC Martin Summers (Gwilym Lee), the younger version of Alex's rose-obsessed stalker -- meaning the helpful copper is someone Alex refuses to trust, despite his apparent good intentions.
In one of the episode's more intriguing scenes, the middle-aged Summers (Adrian Dunbar) manipulates his '80 self and Alex to the building site at night, and proves to Alex that the past can be rewritten by callously shooting his younger self dead, framing Alex as the killer, and thus forcing her to hide Summers' body in another concrete pit. The paradox of Summers killing himself triggers feelings in Alex that she could perhaps have saved her mother (Amelia Bullmore) from the fateful car bomb that killed her in this dreamworld, despite the fact she's come to believe imagined-'82 is a place to exorcise personal demons and find closure by reliving trauma from a different perspective.
Usually, Ashes To Ashes struggles to turn its weekly investigation into truly compelling drama, but that's definitely not the case this week. It helped that the plot eventually encompassed the police corruption storyline prematurely wrapped-up (or so we thought) in episode 4. Gene realizes that there could be a mole in CID; someone who's been operating on behalf of the late DS Supermac and Lafferty, so he sets a clever trap by telling each member of his staff the whereabouts of vital evidence in the Lafferty case (a safety-deposit box, a different number of which he entrusts to each confidante.)
When the information is passed to Lafferty by the mole, all they need to do is see which deposit box was tampered with to realize which cop has been passing on secrets. Interestingly, the deposit box room's floor had a checkerboard pattern (associated with the ceiling of the CID office), symbolizing the world turning upside down for Gene, as he discovers which of his team has dishonoured the service.
And, despite having very few options regarding who the culprit might be (Ray, Chris, Shaz, Viv), I must confess I opted for Ray... and was proven wrong. No, it was nice-guy Chris -- persuaded to tamper with evidence, "lose" files, and pass on information for money he used to but an engagement ring for fiancé Shaz (Montserrat Lombard). It worked brilliantly as a reveal because of how plausible everything felt, and Lancaster gave a superb performance once he was exposed. You could see the sorrow etched on the face of "Baby Bear" and as viewers his actions made us feel the same sense of disappointment Alex and Gene had. Usually just the goofy comic-relief of the series, Lancaster grabbed this dramatic opportunity and nailed it. Great stuff.
So, where does all this leave us? Gene decides to punish Chris by refusing his resignation and forcing him to work with stunned colleagues that can't stand to be in the same room as him, and his engagement to Shaz is now on shaky ground. For Alex, she knows from Summer's paradoxical shooting that she can influence this "dreamworld" in ways she didn't think possible, and in the final scene discovers Summers' hideout -- filled with the clichéd "villain's wall" of newspaper cuttings and photographs of Alex and her friends.
What is Summers' deal? Is he a constant inhabitant of this '82 with Alex, or does he just drift in and out from his own hospital bed in '08? That must be the case if he knows she's had her bullet removed by doctors, surely. But why does he need Alex to embrace police corruption? Is that a way to keep her in '82 permanently -- as it equals brain-death in the real world? Can't he exist in '82 without her, maybe because he's only a visitor in HER fantasy and perhaps paralyzed in '08? And what exactly is Operation Rose?
I'm still doubtful we'll get good, logical reasons to most of the questions posed, but we'll see how things conclude next week. Regardless, this episode was a well-crafted, heartrending, involving work from Mark Grieg, with a great performance from Lancaster, nice scenes with Glenister (loved his reactions to Alex's skimpy outfit at a party and his silent disappointment over Chris), and featured unexpected surprises that landed their punches.
1 June 2009
BBC1, 9pm
written by: Mark Grieg directed by: Catherine Morshead starring: Philip Glenister (Gene), Keeley Hawes (Alex), Dean Andrews (Ray), Marshall Lancaster (Chris), Montserrat Lombard (Shaz), Adrian Dunbar (Martin Summers), Gwilym Lee (Young Summers), Amelia Bullmore (Caroline), Joseph Long (Luigi), Geff Francis (Viv), Grace Vance (Molly), Dorian Lough (Lafferty), Dragon Micanovic (Tomasz) & Peter Cadwell (Brendan)
