WRITER: Ashley Pharoah[SPOILERS] It can be frustrating being a dissenting voice, but I haven't found series 3 as enthralling as the majority of critics appear to have. I think I just dislike how it's chosen to unravel its mystery, by throwing up lots of new clues in the last eight episodes of its existence (cosmic starfields, Jim Keats, the scarred policeman.) Imagine if Lost had introduced Jacob a dozen episodes before its finale, there would be mass uproar. But for some reason fans are happy for Ashes To Ashes to do approximately that, making me wonder how much better this series would have been if Keats had been a prominent character from day one, the deformed copper had replaced The Clown in series 1, and the stars had been a motif stretching back to Life On Mars...
DIRECTOR: David Drury
GUEST CAST: Lucian Msamati, Estella Daniels, Joseph Long, Simon Kunz, Charlie Roe & Gabriel Fleary
This week, there was another crime storyline that often felt more like a distraction to the bigger mystery of the show people actually care about. A murder at an illegal drinking establishment frequented by members of the African National Congress (an outlawed organisation back in '83), where suspicion fell on a black man called Tobias (Lucian Msamati.) Of more pressing concern was that Keats (Daniel Mays) is about to complete his audit of CID and preparing curious VHS tapes for Ray (Dean Andrews), Chris (Marshall Lancaster) and Shaz (Montserrat Lombard), while simultaneously pressuring Alex (Keeley Hawes) to get Gene (Philip Glenister) to confess to the murder of Sam Tyler. No change there, then.
Ray and Shaz also heard mysterious voices talking from behind a closed door and witnessed another vista of stars along with Chris towards the end. Chris himself earned the apparent "reward" of a blackout with David Bowie singing, having achieved some much-needed independence by refusing to blindly follow "the guv's" orders and release Tobias from his cell. Generally then, a lot of stuff happened that has been happening nearly every week in different guises, although there were a few welcome breakthroughs: Gene admitted to Alex over dinner at Luigi's (the only London restaurant in the '80s) that he helped Sam fake his own death, lots of portentous dialogue ("do you ever have the feeling that things are falling apart and nothing as you know it will ever be the same?"), and Alex discovering the location of Sam's supposed grave. The scene's set for what will apparently be a low-key finale next week, although I'm certainly interested in seeing what the creators have come up with.
Overall, I just don't find a mystery particularly engrossing if it amounts to recycling the same handful of spooky goings-on every single week, and the overarching storyline hasn't hinged on Alex very well. She's still just standing back and having clues come to her -- ghostly apparitions, desk-scratched numbers, dream imagery, etc. There's been very little sense that she's the one unravelling this mystery -- rather, like the audience, she's sitting back and asking the same questions every week, and only now getting answers because Gene's presumably sick of her whingeing (or thought he stood a chance of getting into bolly's knickers if he 'fessed up.)
14 MAY 2010: BBC1/HD, 9PM
