21 Pieces Of Personal Canon (Ashes To Ashes)
I suppose this is more or less the first part of my very belated Processing of, you know, everything; it's certainly something I've been chipping away at since the finale.
A lot of it's fairly self-evident, some of it's trivial, at least one point is a last-ditch attempt to retrofit in a fairly well jossed theory. I'm willing to suspend belief in most of it for purposes of Story, but this is where my head lives when I've got no compelling reason to believe otherwise.
1. Shaz was at least halfway in love with Alex, and had been since about five minutes after they met. This was never allowed to interfere with any aspect of either of their lives, and Alex in fact never quite consciously realized it, but it was there.
2. Ray was the only person to have doubts -- of the non-supernatural kind -- about the official story of Sam's death before Keats started sniffing around it. He never, ever shared them, ever.
3. Everything you need to know about Gene's life post-Sam and pre-Alex can be extrapolated from the fact that, despite not remembering anything about the night in question, he was willing to believe that he could very well have gotten Jackie pregnant.
4. Ray went through a very brief period of being really unreasonably attracted to Shaz right around the time she and Chris started going out. He got over it pretty quickly, but he never quite forgot that it happened. (And about the Ray Question: "homoromantic, but really into breasts" is about as close as I can come to sorting that one out.)
5. Gene and Alex were shagging like weasels on meth from the night her parents died up until about the time of Operation Rose. They never directly referred to the fact while both fully clothed, and never while it was going on went on anything that could be described as a date.
6. The "present-day" sequences in 1.01 and 3.01 are both unreliably narrated. The second one never really happened -- Alex never regained consciousness, and died at the moment she woke back up in Gene's world. The first one... isn't the first time Alex has remembered Evan showing up to rescue someone he might not have; there's at least a fifty-percent chance Molly was in the car with her.
7. Speaking of Evan: by the time the present-day timeline kicks in, he is easily the single most mentally unwell person in Alex's personal orbit who isn't actually homicidal or Sam Tyler, herself included. He covers well, and Alex has well-documented difficulties when it comes to seeing things right under her nose, but he's been fundamentally Not Okay for quite some time; this might have something to do with the fact that he's been sort of in love with her for a really eyebrow-raising while. (There's totally a story in there, and I've been trying to overcome my soul-deep terror of it ever since 1.08 dropped.)
8. The pictures of Evan and Caroline from 1.04 weren't taken for blackmail purposes. Tim Price paid for them.
9. Caroline was going away for a year with her daughter and without her husband as the very very cautious and stringently deniable first step along the way to filing for divorce. She never quite articulated this even to herself.
10. Mrs Hunt did actually exist at one point, despite rumors to the contrary. She wasn't very real to Gene ever, which wasn't all to do with her being a construct: he didn't have a very good mental model for that kind of relationship. But she did fall into the type -- skinny, leggy, and outspoken -- and she did, in fact, leave him for a woman, as alluded to in a draft of the pilot script that I can't find anymore, but that I believe with all my soul.
11. Keats and Alex slept together almost immediately following 3.05, and at least once after that. It seemed like a perfectly good idea to her the first time.
12. Gene is functionally indestructible until such time as his people have chosen against him and he's been made aware of what he is.This is fundamentally tied in with his propensity for stupid risks: he's gotten used to being very, very lucky.
13. Gene's attitude problem throughout Season 3 had, of course, absolutely everything to do with the fact that while he was slowly becoming aware of exactly what was going on, he couldn't integrate the knowledge until Alex showed him what he was; for one thing, he remembered Sam being dead right up until 3.02. What he said to Bevan was "We're all bloody dead," but he wasn't quite sure yet why he'd said it. For most of the season he was convinced he was going insane.
14. There was a real Jim Keats once, and he was not entirely unlike what we've seen of him. That one, though, isn't it: it's Something Else wearing the real man's appearance and personality as an interface with the rest of the world. Whatever the nature of that entity, it really profoundly believes, deep in what passes for its soul, that it's basically the good guy here.
15. Sam and Alex were extreme outliers: most people really don't keep one foot in the real world for anything like that long. You could chalk that up to just about any possible contributing factor and be right: being a tiny bit alive still has a lot to do with it; so does the kind of massive unresolved trauma they'd both suffered; so does the plain desire to go home. (By way of comparison: Ray forgot absolutely everything in just about a subjective month. Despite being unusually motivated, he was probably more typical than not.)
16. Martin Summers was another one like Sam, who'd come back from Gene's world once before after nearly dying, and who went to 1982 for the second time when he died for real. I'm also going to go on a wild limb here and say that his near-death experience happened when he was a wee babycopper in the real 1982, and my very strong instinct is that he may very well have been permanently disabled by it, badly enough to have to leave the force. When he shot his younger self he was both re-staging the incident and literally ending his life at the point he thought of as its ending.
17. Most of the people and situations in Gene's world actually are imaginary constructs. Alex gets betrayal and obsession and dead little girls; Sam gets the cases he couldn't solve and a world that was lost to history when he was born into it; Gene gets Harry Woolf and Supermack and everyone who ever let him down. (And Jackie Queen, who was heavily based on the girl he lost his virginity to, but that's a different story.)
18. The New Arrival is just the frothy bit on the tip of what's about to be a whole new wave of "transfers." I'd tend to believe he's not going to end up Gene's next DI, but I will cheerfully admit to basing that entirely on my own feeling of Too Soon. (And thinking otherwise gives me awful feelings about what was going on with Gene right before Sam turned up.)
19. I don't know who or what's inside the Railway Arms when it's not just being a pub. No one does until they're inside; that's the point. But if people couldn't be together properly there, there'd be no real point in going.
20. GENE <3 SAM means just about exactly what you think it does. Whether or not you believe the sex was there -- and I really really do -- the love entirely was. So was it with Alex, but in a different register.
21. Gene remembers and forgets what he is every single time. He has to. It's a condition of that world's existence that he believe in it absolutely and entirely; the day he chooses not to forget will be the day it all ends.
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