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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9844302" data-attributes="member: 78087">Mostly watching Ashes to Ashes at the moment - I only saw the last season mostly when it was on TV back in 2008-10 so it’s been fun to watch what I missed.For those who don’t know, AtA is the sequel and finale series to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_on_Mars_(British_TV_series)" target="_blank">Life on Mars,</a> a 2006 UK TV series about Sam Tyler, a modern detective (DCI - detective chief inspector) in Manchester who is KO’d on the job and wakes up in 1973 as sidekick to DCI Gene Hunt, who is as chauvinistic and lawless as any 70s TV police detective you could hope for (he’s mainly a reference to TV detectives from The Sweeney at the time). Sam befriends Hunt, hangs around in 1973 for a while, then wakes up back in 2006 long enough to tell his story to a police psychologist before going back.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashes_to_Ashes_(British_TV_series)" target="_blank">Ashes to Ashes</a> is about DI Alex Drake, the aforementioned psychologist, who is shot in 2007 and wakes up in London in 1981, finding herself Hunt’s sidekick since he’s moved there. She has a lot of mystery to explore - what happened to Sam Tyler? How real is this? Can she save her parents from being killed when she was a kid? WTF is going on anyway? - and she does her best, and it’s pretty fun to watch. There’s a lot of 2000s nostalgia about it for me, remembering when the world and the UK made a lot more sense. Before Brexit, before Covid, before the dark times. OTOH it means there’s a certain amount of end-of-history smugness about Alex.One thing that’s interesting on this sort of rewatch is that I’ve seen the ending (which is fantastic) and so I know what’s going on, and I know Gene’s secret. And it makes a lot of sense in retrospect - it explains his obvious idealism (never more than a millimetre beneath his cynicism), his instinctive respect for authority, and his incredibly solid moral core and infallible sense of duty. Hunt is a good choice for his role.It’s also fun to see actors in roles that echo future roles for which they might be a bit more famous. Shaun Evans plays a DC, echoing his future role as young Morse in Endeavour, and Roger Allam plays his boss. Keeley Hawes (Alex), Adrian Dunbar, and Daniel Mays will soon be in Line of Duty.</blockquote>

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