Now that we have a comm for matters pertaining to both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, I thought I’d post some thoughts on the differing team dynamics in the two series.
Specifically, I’m looking at the different ways in which Sam and Alex go about working with the team and sharing their more modern knowledge and attitudes. This work concentrates on characters, not plot. There are no plot spoilers for Ashes to Ashes.
I apologise in advance for any tense-fail. I haven’t written this kind of thing before, and I started off talking about Sam in past tense and Alex in present, but then I thought perhaps that doesn’t make much sense. Anyway...
I first started to consider the different approaches of the two “time travellers” when I realised, guiltily, that Alex was doing a far better job with Ray Carling than Sam had ever done - Alex was actually teaching Ray instead of ignoring him or treating him with contempt. So then I had a think about the relationships the two DIs have with the various members of the team, and I came to the conclusion that while Alex has in some ways better working relationships with the team, and has possibly done more for the team’s overall effectiveness, she couldn’t have had those relationships or effected those improvements without Sam having been there first, preparing the ground and laying firm foundations.
By way of disclaimer, I accept that there may be occasions across the various series where people act differently from the view I have laid out here, but this is a summary - my overall impression of the characters and their relationships.
Please note that I am not looking at romantic attachments! I am 100% a Gene/Sam shipper, and it’s entirely possible that this is part of the reason I’m not so keen on Alex, but for now I’m looking at professional relationships and platonic friendship.
Beginnings
On arriving in Gene’s world, Sam and Alex are similar in their initial shock and amazement, but they start to differ immediately. For Sam, the situation is utterly gobsmacking, but his first assumption is that someone is playing a massive trick on him, and I do wonder if his humourless 2006 persona made people to relate to him in a way that led him to expect that kind of treatment. However, from the moment Gene drags him into his office and puts him in his place up against the filing cabinet, we see Sam totally disoriented and frightened but desperately trying to cover up and get on with the job.
Alex, on the other hand, has the advantage that she “knows” she is in a coma from a bullet to the head, and she assumes she has constructed this world based on Sam’s notes. This leads to some horrible scenes in the first few episodes - which I admit I have never rewatched, so I’m relying on distant memory here - in which Alex behaves totally inappropriately, laughing while Gene mistreats people, calling everybody “constructs” and completely failing to maintain the dignity of a senior officer in front of the junior members of the team. On the plus side, in stark contrast to Sam, she is cheerful and confident and appears to be greatly enjoying herself much of the time.
Gene
When Sam first meets Gene, my favourite character of all time is to all appearances the original unreconstructed neanderthal. He has no concept of formulating hyphotheses and gathering evidence, of forensic science and preservation of the crime scene; his tools are violence, his in-depth knowledge of his city and its people, his strong sense of honour and justice, and his much-prized gut instinct.
Sam teaches Gene a more modern way of working. He teaches him to respect a wider range of types of people, to collect evidence and build a solid case. He even introduces him to the idea of keeping the paperwork in order. It’s my opinion that Gene would never have survived five minutes policing a strange city without the lessons Sam taught him.
Sam concentrates his efforts on Gene the man and police officer. He does not challenge the command structure, but settles with what could easily be seen as relief into the second-in-command role. For a man accustomed to manage his own team, he surprisingly does almost nothing to challenge the way Gene runs his team, and seems content to function as a side-kick most of the time. He spends his days at Gene’s side, going where Gene goes and doing what Gene says. He doesn’t seem to act like a modern-day DI at all.
On the few occasions where Sam does challenge Gene and goes off to do his own thing, he is very aware that it is a challenge. For example, when Sam is looking around Miller’s (?) office on the building site, he is worried that Gene will stop him, and in general his attitude is “I know you’re going to disagree and start blustering, but I’m a clever, educated guy with strong principles and future knowledge and I know the job must be done this way.”
Alex has a different starting point with Gene. Unlike Sam, she hasn’t taken a demotion. She is a DI in 2008, with a job that takes her out and about independently. She is accustomed to autonomy, and when she tells Gene she’s going to do something of her own, go somewhere without him, her attitude is quite different to Sam’s. She faces Gene with “This is what I’m going to do. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem not mine. I’m a DI and this is what DIs do. Deal with it.”
Alex also differs from Sam in that she does question the command structure. Sam has done all the important work in opening Gene’s eyes to a more modern way of working: Gene, Ray and Chris all talk about “evidence” as if they take the concept completely for granted, and that is entirely Sam’s doing. Alex is therefore more able to concentrate on Gene’s leadership role. She tells Gene on several occasions that he must allow his team more independence of thought and action and they will then perform better. She does more than Sam did in working with other members of the team, going off with them and without Gene so that they learn different ways of working.
Alex also puts the finishing touches to Gene’s personal education (put those filthy minds away, we’re dealing with professional matters only) by constantly explaining her own thought processes, thus exposing him to concepts of psychology and understanding people’s motivations.
Looking now at Sam and Alex and their relationships with the rest of Gene’s team:
Ray
Sam has significantly poorer people skills than Alex, and he never stood a chance with Ray Carling. This was exacerbated by the fact that in 1973 Gene was still running the team with a “pack of wolves” mentality and he seems to have taken the view that if Sam wanted to be number two in the team he would have to face down any challengers himself. I can’t at the moment think of any occasions when Gene defends Sam against Ray, apart from the scene in LOM 1.07 where Ray is totally insubordinate and Gene, standing in his office watching, coughs to let them both know he’s there and watching.
Sam therefore ignores Ray as much as he can, and concentrates his efforts where he can make a difference: Chris and Annie.
Alex, on the other hand, is well able for Ray. I think that Ray has changed over the years; he has mellowed as he has got older, and his Guv, who in Ashes 3.03 Ray actually admits to hero-worshipping, has taken on board the Tyler-speak as regards evidence and procedure. Ray will have learned to go along with that, and no doubt Chris talks a lot about the sainted Sam Tyler and his ways, so however reluctantly, Ray is constantly exposed to more modern modes of thought. So in some ways Alex has an easier Ray to deal with than Sam did, and she also has the slight advantage that Gene bluntly tells Ray that he must show her respect as his DI.
But the most important point is that Alex has a far better chance of understanding Ray than Sam does. While Sam sees Ray’s macho posturing as a challenge to be crushed before it can crush Sam, Alex understands the insecurity and dissatisfaction it is built on. As a pyschologist she has no problem in telling Ray what she thinks his issues are, and possibly he has less difficulty admitting it to a female than he would to a man.
Because of all this, Alex sees Ray as educable, whereas Sam dismisses him as a hopeless case, and she spends time on helping him to develop professionally. Like Sam with Chris, she does this partly by giving him facts and methods, but also by improving his personal confidence.
Chris
Unlike Gene and Ray, Sam doesn’t tease Chris for being a div - although you can see him thinking it quite often - and he puts a lot of time and effort into improving Chris’s confidence and teaching him to use his brain rather than just obey without thought. Sam treats Chris as a potentially useful member of the team and so he starts to become one. I was very pleased to hear Chris tell Alex that Sam was “not a friend, exactly - more of a mentor”, because I think that’s exactly how Sam saw things too.
Sam hasn’t left Alex much of a job to do with Chris. It’s difficult to imagine Chris ever having a relationship with an intelligent and rebellious character like Shaz without Sam’s professional mentoring and advice on how to act around women. By the time Alex meets him, Chris has developed a fair amount of professional and personal confidence, as well as a steady relationship with Shaz. All that remains for Alex to do where Chris is concerned is to advise him to be more daring and open in his dealings with Shaz. LOM!Chris would never have done a strip-tease, and Sam would never have advised it!
Annie
I admit that I did slightly ship Sam/Annie during the series, but in terms of character development and team building that is not the most important part of Sam and Annie’s relationship. Obviously Annie is an intelligent woman, but she is very much of her age. She is of the last generation of women who - however frustrating they might have found it - took it more or less for granted that men ran the world and women might as well be grateful for whatever crumbs of success and advancement came their way.
If we assume that Annie is 25 in 1973, she was born in about 1948 and spent her formative years in the 1950s. She will have been brought up to be “a nice young lady.” She was nineteen or twenty in 1967, which will have done wonders for her sexual emancipation but nothing for her professional expectations, which would necessarily have been quite low. At that time, women could be successful and reach high positions, but only the strongest and most focussed tended to make it.
Without Sam to promote her into CID, Annie’s most likely path at the time was to remain a plonk until she married, and then the difficulties of arranging family life around shift work would have meant Annie giving up work as soon as the children started to arrive. Instead, Sam opens Gene’s eyes to the possibility of a woman being an asset to CID; he uses Annie’s psychology training to home in on the suspect in LOM 1.01 and generally takes it for granted that she can be as useful and intelligent as the men. This is very unlikely to be an attitude she had encountered much before Sam came along.
Obviously Alex has never met Annie, but my feeling is that they would be too far apart in upbringing and expectation for them to get along. Perhaps if Alex’s own mother had been a housewife type she might have understood Annie, but being brought up by a rather fierce and spiky lawyer would, I believe, make Alex very impatient with what she would have seen as Annie’s submissive attitude and lack of ambition. Possibly Alex’s psychology training - and the fact that Annie has the same - could overcome what I see as a fundamental difference in personality and upbringing, but I believe that the distance between them might, in a slightly different way, have been as great as that between Sam and Ray.
Shaz
Sam obviously hasn’t met Shaz, but if he had, I think he might have ignored her on a personal level, and been neutrally polite to her on the professional side. He would have used her skills if he saw them, but I don’t think she would have felt encouraged to speak out in front of him.
Alex’s role with Shaz seems to be to validate her. Shaz doesn’t need much from Alex in the way of self-confidence or knowledge - in her political attitudes and free thinking she’s way ahead of her time - but one thing she probably shares with Annie is the reluctant understanding that most of her personal qualities, her education and ideas and optimism, will remain unused in her job. Alex changes that. Alex openly agrees with much of what Shaz says, and makes Gene see Shaz as useful to the team.
Shaz’s outspokenness and attitude to authority would have got her sacked by many men in the 1980s. Gene is far more tolerant than most non-fandom commentators give him credit for, but I don’t believe he’d have thought of taking Shaz into CID without Alex leading the way in taking her seriously, and the precedent of Sam bringing Annie into the department.
In summary, I think that Sam has prepared the ground and been a vital part of developing the characters we see in Ashes to Ashes. Alex is now building on the work Sam has done with the team, using her own particular skills and knowledge to fill the gaps.
I’d be very interested to hear what other people think - either of the central premise, or the individual relationships involved.