Okay, so we don't know if the eighties world of Ashes to Ashes is in DI Drake's head (Keeley Hawes) or if it's actually the past, but she really ought to have learnt her lesson from Sam Tyler's exploits (John Simm). Why has she not yet learnt that going round people's houses and acting as though she's known them for years – despite their persistent failure to have the foggiest clue who she might be – is a sure-fire way to creep those people out? In fact, I'm increasingly going off the idea that Ashes to Ashes is inside anyone's head at all, because there's no way Drake would know what her in-laws were like this early in her (strictly speaking 'future', yet also 'estranged') husband's life.
Remember that fantastically ambivalent opening sequence to Life on Mars? The parent show was founded on the question of whether Tyler was mad, in a coma or back in time, but Ashes to Ashes is looking more and more like some kind of Purgatory and not any of those three. Unless it's Limbo. For the first time this week, I found myself comparing it to Lost, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that.
Discomfort is a theme of Episode Five, actually – and I don't just mean the lads' reaction to a transsexual cockney gangster. No, what's discomforting (apart from the slightly creepy opening with Orville the Duck: Ashes to Ashes making kids' TV disturbing again (like Life on Mars did)) is the latent, ever-so-slight paedophilia floating about and Drake's unfair attacks on a boy who hasn't committed a crime nor done anything to Drake herself (yet). The fourteen-year old lad (Perry Millward) is her future husband, and the mystical, long-gone father of Molly (amusingly, the name of his cat). I've often wondered where M
olly's dad was, and now we know: he left when she was six months old, and is apparently a two-timing good-for-nothing. Mind you, Drake doesn't exactly get the most out of her attempt to improve his character before he meets his future wife. When she should really just leave him alone, she ends up creeping him out with an uncanny 'female intuition' (read: knowledge about him that a Police officer of the eighties wouldn't know) and setting him up to be intimidated by (and freaked out by) any Alex-like woman he meets in the future...like Alex, for example. The first thing she says to him is the rant she has probably been saving since he left her, which utterly bewilders the poor kid. Get a grip, Drake – no wonder he left you, if he was traumatised by you when he was barely a teenager. Yes, it might not be the real past, but who knows? She could have shot herself in the foot, just with a very slow bullet.If it is Purgatory – not the real eighties – this week we finally meet the man in charge. Mr. 'I can help you, Alex'. The man who's been sending the roses and creepy phone calls. He knows stuff. Like the fact that he and Drake are the only ones from the 'real world', and that she has just arrived in hospital in 2008. In such a plot-thick episode, his warning about the oncoming Operation Rose is kept on the quiet, but it's there. Watch for it.
More important is Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) being brilliant. More gruffness, more human heart, more violence, more tender moments with Drake, more verbal filth and more perfect resolution to a tricky problem. Damn you, Gene Hunt.
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