All of a sudden, Ashes to Ashes is getting a bit like C4's Red Riding; why does the Police force of the eighties seem to be coming in for such stick these days?
This week, the culture clash central to the whole '21st-century-copper-back-in-time' thing brings our favourite CID team into contact with a gypsy camp, and a dead drug dealer. The dealer doesn't start off dead, but he gets that way pretty quickly, thanks to some imaginative driving by DCI Gene Hunt (Glenister). So – rather like the Life on Mars episode when he was investigated for murder – Hunt is in trouble pretty early on. Luckily for him, his mate Detective Superintendent 'Super Mac' Mackintosh (Roger Allam) is on hand to smooth everything over.
This series is getting more and more layers piled up on top of each other, and it's getting better and better to watch. The camera work is – once again – lovely (especially the scene when Hunt phones his predecessor). We're seeing a more human side of the grizzly beast we call Hunt in this series, and it's very welcome. This week he's a genuinely warm and pleasant man – at times. Some of the time he's a violent, priggish brute of a man, but that's what's so good about Gene Hunt. But most importantly, he gets involved with that corruption that's rotting the Met from the inside. It's a rot that goes deep, very deep, much deeper into the CID than might have been expected. The difference with Red Riding is that Ashes to Ashes gets to show much more of the corruption from the inside, not from the angle of outsider investigating officers or journalists.
Ashes to Ashes is very good at dropping clues that get picked up later, and this week it was good to see some clues from last week fleshed out; there's definitely a cult thing going on with Super Mac and the 'all square' blokes he keeps releasing from Hunt's Interview Room. The mystery man following Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) crops up briefly again, but we're no clearer on exactly what he wants. Fun can also be had playing 'Spot the Diana References' in this episode. I lost count of the number of times the word 'Princess' was used in connection to a car veering off the road and killing someone inside.
This week, the culture clash central to the whole '21st-century-copper-back-in-time' thing brings our favourite CID team into contact with a gypsy camp, and a dead drug dealer. The dealer doesn't start off dead, but he gets that way pretty quickly, thanks to some imaginative driving by DCI Gene Hunt (Glenister). So – rather like the Life on Mars episode when he was investigated for murder – Hunt is in trouble pretty early on. Luckily for him, his mate Detective Superintendent 'Super Mac' Mackintosh (Roger Allam) is on hand to smooth everything over.
This series is getting more and more layers piled up on top of each other, and it's getting better and better to watch. The camera work is – once again – lovely (especially the scene when Hunt phones his predecessor). We're seeing a more human side of the grizzly beast we call Hunt in this series, and it's very welcome. This week he's a genuinely warm and pleasant man – at times. Some of the time he's a violent, priggish brute of a man, but that's what's so good about Gene Hunt. But most importantly, he gets involved with that corruption that's rotting the Met from the inside. It's a rot that goes deep, very deep, much deeper into the CID than might have been expected. The difference with Red Riding is that Ashes to Ashes gets to show much more of the corruption from the inside, not from the angle of outsider investigating officers or journalists.
Ashes to Ashes is very good at dropping clues that get picked up later, and this week it was good to see some clues from last week fleshed out; there's definitely a cult thing going on with Super Mac and the 'all square' blokes he keeps releasing from Hunt's Interview Room. The mystery man following Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) crops up briefly again, but we're no clearer on exactly what he wants. Fun can also be had playing 'Spot the Diana References' in this episode. I lost count of the number of times the word 'Princess' was used in connection to a car veering off the road and killing someone inside.
Drake is banging her head against a brick wall this week, trying to get to the bottom of last week's armed showdown and handle the death at the gypsy camp. On the bright side, the real world crash team are only two minutes away by the end of this week's episode – hopefully, they'll arrive before Drake goes completely potty in 1982. It'd be a shame to see her leave, in a way, because she's getting closer to Hunt and they finally seem to have a mission together this week.
But will they, or won't they? That's the question left over from Series One that still needs resolving.
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