Ashes to Ashes, the finale – do not read unless you’ve seen it already – BIG SPOILERS
Oh that was good, so good. As a lot of tweets were saying last night (I love how Twitter can turn TV watching into a national experience), that was TV at the best, something BBC can do, our licence fee paying for something with a bit of nerve and Sky can’t.
I’m not going to review the whole storyline because if you haven’t watched this yet, go away and watch it, but to talk about the end, wow. There were some bits I’d guessed, I’d guessed the policeman with the missing face was Gene Hunt but I’d assumed that whoever was Gene Hunt now had murdered the real Gene Hunt. I’d also guessed the fairly obvious that heaven was a pub and Keats was some sort of devil, but the whole twist of everyone being dead, I did not see that coming. Yet it was so obvious and worked so well, thinking back logically, of course Drake was going to die, she had a bullet slap bang in the middle of her forehead and if Drake was in a coma and then dead, like Alex Tyler, it makes sense that everyone else was to.
Philip Glenister played Gene Hunt beautifully in this, in all of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes really but in this final episode, absolutely superb, if he doesn’t get awards for this, heck the whole team should, it’d be unfair. The scenes on the farm where Hunt finally reveals who he is, brilliant. Daniel Mays (Keats) was fantastic to, that scene where he’s trying to convince Drake how bad Hunt is and he’s got his hands all over her and I just wanted to yell at the screen “Get your hands off her you creep!”, the way how he pawed the video tapes, I almost imagined his eyes to start glowing and later when it becomes more and more obvious what / who he is, letting his ‘civilised’ persona slip, it was as effective as suddenly whipping out the CGI and turning him into a real devil.
I thought the final scenes were lovely and very sweet, if complete lump in the throat time, it is a lovely thought that heaven is a pub and Gene Hunt is still out there shepherding lost departed policemen. I like endings like that, ones that suggest that even though the telling of the story has finished, it’s still going on out there, still ‘real’.
