ASHES TO ASHES 3.8

WRITER: Matthew Graham
DIRECTOR: David Drury
GUEST CAST: Thomas Lockyer, David Thomas, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Jon House & Stuart Hall (voice)

[SPOILERS] I'll say this about the Ashes To Ashes grand finale; it answered every question you've probably ever had about the series, and its predecessor Life On Mars. It's just a shame the answers were a combination of what we'd already gleamed from Life On Mars' swansong (that everything's a "limbo" plane of existence), while confirming one of the oldest fan-theories that Gene Hunt's (Philip Glenister) been the "dreamer" all along...

Is it even worth recounting the crime-of-the-week storyline? It's really not worth the effort, as everyone's attention was understandably on the bigger mysteries the show has been toying with these past few years. Or at least these last eight episodes, as almost everything in series 1 and 2 now appears to have been tethered to a mythology the show has chosen to quietly distance itself from, in some respects. So now we know that Ashes To Ashes and Life On Mars were never about comatose modern-day cops fantasizing about the good ol' days of British policing (less red-tape and paperwork), it was really all about a fresh-faced young constable called Gene Hunt who was killed on the day of the Queen's Coronation (2 June 1953) and buried in a shallow grave beside a hilltop scarecrow, whose spirit found a way to create a purgatory in which to fulfil his career ambitions, later joined by other dead lawmen who could participate in a kind of "group therapy."

Sam Tyler and Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) were just oddities who could remember their lives before death, unlike the others: Ray (Dean Andrews), who was such a disappointment to his soldier father that he hanged himself; Chris (Marshall Lancaster), a naïve beat cop who blindly followed orders and was shot dead; and Shaz (Montserrat Lombard), a policewoman fatally stabbed in the stomach by a carjacker. Gene had become so accustomed to the "limbo" he created that over time he forgot the truth of his own existence and the nature of everything around him.

Quite how a young PC killed in the '50s could have mentally construed an accurate world of the mid-'70s and early-'80s is one of those questions that destroys the finale's explanation in one swoop, but it's probably not wise to mention it for fear of being considered a nitpicking killjoy. What mattered is that the finale worked well emotionally, and it certainly wasn't the disappointment I was prepared for, although the decision to focus so much on Gene continued to bug me. Series 3 as a whole moved away from Alex as its heroine, in a way that almost felt like defeat from the writers because they were struggling to keep her homesickness compelling.

Everyone knows Gene Hunt's been the pop-culture success of both shows, and the common link for a unifying explanation of the mystery, but one thing Ashes' finale lacked was a feeling that Alex's story, as the protagonist, wasn't of particular significance. She's barely mentioned her daughter Molly this year, and the usual undercurrent of Alex's desperation to return home faded away. Alex is just one of many dead cops that are taken under Gene's wing in his metaphysical wonderland (indeed, she gets directly "replaced" in the final scene), and her only unusual quality is that she was a "faulty" spirit who knew of her past, like Sam.

Still, there was enough to enjoy in terms of answers being delivered that covered the important bases, the emotion of the main players discovering they're amnesiac ghosts acting in someone's fantasy was fine (if slightly awkward when unpretentious characters in a "cop show" are suddenly aware they're in a high concept "fantasy show"), and seeing Gene slumped on the floor of CID after receiving a blow to the stomach from Jim Keats (Daniels Mays) was a powerful image. Keats himself was revealed to be an impish "Devil" who, having exposed Gene as a charlatan to his closest friends, marched Chris, Ray and Shaz to elevators that were clearly only going in one direction: down. But in case we missed the subtlety, Mays was allowed to hiss and spit his dialogue towards the end. I'm surprised they resisted gluing red horns onto his temples.

Overall, this series finale was entertaining throughout and actually rather good in places, but I still think the overall mystery could have been fed to us better. Chris only started hearing that freaky police whistle last week, Shaz was creeped out by the screwdriver that killed her in this episode, and most of the other significant clues to this episode's answers were products of series 3 (the ghost policeman, the 6-6-20 numbers, Jim Keats, the stars, etc), which suggest to me that the goal of Ashes To Ashes wasn't decided on until this final year. I know creators Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah deny this and claim they knew the ending from day one, but if that's true then I can't fathom why they wouldn't have woven more pertinent clues into the series from the very start.

So what did you think? Was this a worthy finale for the series, or were you disappointed they went for the clichéd "they're all dead" answer? Did it matter that the answers were rather predictable, as long as it all made sense? And was it acceptable that Alex (along with Ray, Chris and Shaz) never made it home to her daughter and instead went straight to Heaven via a glowing pub door? Should the series have found a way to keep Alex more central to the mystery's reveal, instead of a cog in Gene's machine?

21 MAY 2010: BBC1/HD, 9PM