the man who sold the world.
Yes, it really did take this long to do this. Apropos today, yeah? British LOST.
Occam's razor: because they're all already dead, stupid.
Here is what separates Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes from LOST: LOST would feel compelled to explain what precisely Jim Keats was. Like, it wouldn't be enough to just make him the enemy or bad - no! He would have to be that for a REASON. (When Gene finally steps between Keats and Alex to say, simply, "No"? ajksfhjkashfa) There is something so wonderfully awesome in the fact that by the end, Keats was still neither defeated nor completely defined. Is he just The Hope of Being Alive? Was he one of the first souls Gene saved, and in his bitterness has now turned on his savior so he will do LITERALLY ANYTHING to get his revenge*? Was he a manifestation of pure evil? Was he simply an alternative to "going to the pub" (i.e., "GO TO HELL"/"gladly!")? Was he - was he even real at all, the Dream Master to the Eleventh Doctor sort of real. Was he Gene's pure id? Was he Alex's anger? Is he the ~spiritual manifestation of all the anger of every dead soul being told "surprise! actually you are dead"? Do all DCIs in this place hate each other the way Keats hated Gene, or is there a specific reason in Keats' case? How and why was Gene Hunt a DCI anyway - was he always like that (Sam got demoted when he showed up, so)? Do you have to be promoted, or is it just a sort of lottery? Are these your pure selves? Your dream selves, the people you've always fantasized about becoming? What would happen if a DCI "went to the pub" - what's the procedure for releasing that level of a soul?
You never find out. Keats is just the bad guy that you have to defeat long enough so you can go to the pub, end of. You are the law, end of.
* I love this theory, by the way, and hope for a second spinoff.
Clearly, I was always going to rewatch Ashes to Ashes as a whole (a- ...again) once it finished, but now I think I'm going to be starting back further and watching ALL OF IT from the beginning. Like - how much of these two universes is just pure, old-fashioned wish fulfillment? How obvious is that? DID GENE HUNT REALLY SAVE YOUNG ALEX DRAKE FROM THE SITE OF HER PARENTS' BURNED OUT CAR IN 1x08, or was that just her dying mind gasping for the hope that someone like you would have been there at a time like that (because I am dying, and cannot be there for my little girl), and therefore inserting him into that memory? How much of Sam's S1 mystery was actually just a crazy rationalization/interpretation of existing facts? Hell, you can still even make a proper and plausible argument that Sam's mind =/= Alex's mind, that she's just internalized everything from Sam's monologue tape into this HUGE EPIC PROJECTION OF THE AFTERLIFE, and it would make sense.
(I will say, though: WHO WAS ARTHUR LAYTON CALLING IN 1X01. I'VE WANTED TO KNOW FOR SURE FOR, LIKE, EVER, IT WAS THE ONLY "ANSWER" I REALLY SORTA CLUNG TO, AND I DIDN'T GET IT. Ugh. cry moar)
Things:
- Phil Glenister didn't get a BAFTA nom this year... really, British people? REALLY? Really?! I JUST WATCHED HIS FACE FOR 55 MINUTES DO ALL THESE AMAZING THINGS SO I AM GENERALLY CONFUSED BY THIS DEVELOPMENT. The bit at the scarecrow as Alex is working out who he is was enough, but then in the house? Gene is talking about himself in the third-person - and there is still a part of me that believes Gene has NEVER forgotten who he once was, not really, he is just so far gone from talking about it that he can't even use personal pronouns for that man - his face.
- Seriously now: my heart, how she breaks for Signor Hunt. A man whose sole job these days is basically take all these souls and ease them through the transition of death? But instead he took so much a liking to a bunch of them back in 70s Manchester ("70s Manchester") that it dragged him through LITERAL SHIT, and at the end of the day he still has to watch them leave? Dear Gene Hunt, call up my friend The Doctor. I FEEL YOU WILL HAVE SOME COMMON ANGST TO DISCUSS HERE. Gene Hunt: Time Lord, amirite.
- Speaking of horrendous BAFTA oversights: Daniel Mays. ALL THE PRIZES. Keats was flat out batshit insane in this episode - the bits of him twirling around CID, destroying anything and everything, almost like a child throwing the biggest temper tantrums known to heaven and earth (heh)? Allllllllll the prizes. Now I see why I cast you the way I did in my British Bones SPOILERS
- No really, him jumping up on the desk when the ceiling turns into stars, and being UTTERLY DISGUSTED that no one was impressed by the revelation that it wasn't a real police station? a) LOL ALL I COULD THINK OF WAS LOST AND ITS OBSESSION WITH ~ANSWERS + THE WEIRD HOLLOWNESS YOU FEEL ONCE YOU GET THEM; b) holy balls, you could scare infants with that face.
- Clearly I had a small fit when "In the Air Tonight" came up again.
- Speaking of, the beat I loved the most was the show using a musical cue via "Wonderwall" to show that Shaz died not before this time, but in the mid-90s.
- Gene and Alex in CID, Alex basically forcing him to not give up until he makes an "oh woman, move over and let me do this": hearts and rainbows, all around it.
- I thought I was going to hate Alex essentially losing all of her agency as a character because, surprise, she is in fact already dead (so thus going home is futile) - BUT I DO NOT. I even like that after she rages against it for a couple seconds, she just sort of... succumbs. GUYS. THIS IS HOW BADLY THE DEATH OF DONNA NOBLE SCARRED ME, AND YEAH, YEAH, WE ARE STILL CALLING IT A DEATH ALL RIGHT. It wouldn't have made sense if in that moment she suddenly regressed back to S1 of noooooooooo because she is still at her heart a chracter who has lived this life, in this place, as this person, for three years now. We are the world, Alex. She'll be fine. So one day you know that eventually Molly shows up in Gene's CID, and it's like the worst day of his entire life.
CAN GENE HUNT AND THE DOCTOR HANG OUT? IT WOULD BE SO GREAT. A SPINOFF. A SERIES AS BICKERING CO-PILOTS OF THE TARDIS.
ALSO.
ONE OF YOU JOKERS BETTER GIMME BACK MY IPHONE NOW.
edit: So this entire interview is brilliant, but mostly there is this:
So when you created Life On Mars did you have a long-term gameplan in mind? And is this the ending you always had planned?
“Bits of it are. When we got to the end of Mars we planned to do a third series, as you know. In the third series of Mars we would see Sam realising that he was dead - he knows he’s dead at the end of series two, but in series three he would start to believe that he could cheat a final death. He thinks that’s Heaven, and gradually it would dawn on him that this wasn’t Heaven. So it was going to be all the back story that we have in Ashes, of Sam saying ‘I don’t want to leave here’, and we would learn more about Gene, that Gene was actually this young copper. Because we were never able to do that third series, when we came to Ashes we thought let’s start again, let’s not rush to get to that conclusion. Obviously the BBC didn’t want just one series of Ashes, so we said right upfront to the Beeb we’d like to do three series - we’d like to start frivolous, and get darker as we go. And, amazingly, they said ok, let’s give it a go. And luckily the first series did well enough to get a second series and so on, so we were able to do that.
“The only thing that came in completely brand new was Keats - I created Jim Keats just for episode one, just to tie up the whole idea that Gene could shoot someone, go on the run and then just walk back in and say ‘Right, I’m picking up where I left off.’ And I thought it would be quite fun to do a story-of-the-week with a Guy Pearce LA Confidential type character who Gene runs rings around. Maybe tie that up as a little sub-story at the end of episode two. And I wrote the script like that. But then we talked about the problem of what we felt was missing in series three that made it different. And we all agreed that we missed the motor of a Supermac [the corrupt copper in series two], we missed a character who was an on-site regular nemesis, who wasn’t part of the gang but who added something. So I came up with the idea of what if Jim Keats says ‘I’m going to stick around’? Then we started talking more about Jim and we thought oh, let’s just do it. Let’s just make him the Anti-Christ or the Devil and make him evil. And he’s going to try and take Ray, Chris and Shaz and even Alex away from Gene. So that suddenly gave the series a massive engine that it needed. And it gave us the shape of the series, so it meant we could start focusing on the other characters and get to know them more.”
When the characters saw stars you did seem to be teasing us that they were going to be in space, on a ‘gene hunt’, just like the American show. Was that just you being completely evil?
“[laughs] There was a line in episode five where Ray sees the stars and he says ‘It’s like we’re some kind of astronauts’ - and I remember telling you that there’s a line coming up that will send your blood cold! And I knew there would be a group of people out there going ‘Oh no, f-! Please don’t do that!’ And so when that line went in it was very much a cheeky ‘let’s worry people’ bit!”
First of all: I LOVE THE FACT THAT THEY THINK THE AMERICAN VERSION WAS TOTAL SHIT.
Second of all: this.
Occam's razor: because they're all already dead, stupid.
Here is what separates Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes from LOST: LOST would feel compelled to explain what precisely Jim Keats was. Like, it wouldn't be enough to just make him the enemy or bad - no! He would have to be that for a REASON. (When Gene finally steps between Keats and Alex to say, simply, "No"? ajksfhjkashfa) There is something so wonderfully awesome in the fact that by the end, Keats was still neither defeated nor completely defined. Is he just The Hope of Being Alive? Was he one of the first souls Gene saved, and in his bitterness has now turned on his savior so he will do LITERALLY ANYTHING to get his revenge*? Was he a manifestation of pure evil? Was he simply an alternative to "going to the pub" (i.e., "GO TO HELL"/"gladly!")? Was he - was he even real at all, the Dream Master to the Eleventh Doctor sort of real. Was he Gene's pure id? Was he Alex's anger? Is he the ~spiritual manifestation of all the anger of every dead soul being told "surprise! actually you are dead"? Do all DCIs in this place hate each other the way Keats hated Gene, or is there a specific reason in Keats' case? How and why was Gene Hunt a DCI anyway - was he always like that (Sam got demoted when he showed up, so)? Do you have to be promoted, or is it just a sort of lottery? Are these your pure selves? Your dream selves, the people you've always fantasized about becoming? What would happen if a DCI "went to the pub" - what's the procedure for releasing that level of a soul?
You never find out. Keats is just the bad guy that you have to defeat long enough so you can go to the pub, end of. You are the law, end of.
* I love this theory, by the way, and hope for a second spinoff.
Clearly, I was always going to rewatch Ashes to Ashes as a whole (a- ...again) once it finished, but now I think I'm going to be starting back further and watching ALL OF IT from the beginning. Like - how much of these two universes is just pure, old-fashioned wish fulfillment? How obvious is that? DID GENE HUNT REALLY SAVE YOUNG ALEX DRAKE FROM THE SITE OF HER PARENTS' BURNED OUT CAR IN 1x08, or was that just her dying mind gasping for the hope that someone like you would have been there at a time like that (because I am dying, and cannot be there for my little girl), and therefore inserting him into that memory? How much of Sam's S1 mystery was actually just a crazy rationalization/interpretation of existing facts? Hell, you can still even make a proper and plausible argument that Sam's mind =/= Alex's mind, that she's just internalized everything from Sam's monologue tape into this HUGE EPIC PROJECTION OF THE AFTERLIFE, and it would make sense.
(I will say, though: WHO WAS ARTHUR LAYTON CALLING IN 1X01. I'VE WANTED TO KNOW FOR SURE FOR, LIKE, EVER, IT WAS THE ONLY "ANSWER" I REALLY SORTA CLUNG TO, AND I DIDN'T GET IT. Ugh. cry moar)
Things:
- Phil Glenister didn't get a BAFTA nom this year... really, British people? REALLY? Really?! I JUST WATCHED HIS FACE FOR 55 MINUTES DO ALL THESE AMAZING THINGS SO I AM GENERALLY CONFUSED BY THIS DEVELOPMENT. The bit at the scarecrow as Alex is working out who he is was enough, but then in the house? Gene is talking about himself in the third-person - and there is still a part of me that believes Gene has NEVER forgotten who he once was, not really, he is just so far gone from talking about it that he can't even use personal pronouns for that man - his face.
- Seriously now: my heart, how she breaks for Signor Hunt. A man whose sole job these days is basically take all these souls and ease them through the transition of death? But instead he took so much a liking to a bunch of them back in 70s Manchester ("70s Manchester") that it dragged him through LITERAL SHIT, and at the end of the day he still has to watch them leave? Dear Gene Hunt, call up my friend The Doctor. I FEEL YOU WILL HAVE SOME COMMON ANGST TO DISCUSS HERE. Gene Hunt: Time Lord, amirite.
- Speaking of horrendous BAFTA oversights: Daniel Mays. ALL THE PRIZES. Keats was flat out batshit insane in this episode - the bits of him twirling around CID, destroying anything and everything, almost like a child throwing the biggest temper tantrums known to heaven and earth (heh)? Allllllllll the prizes. Now I see why I cast you the way I did in my British Bones SPOILERS
- No really, him jumping up on the desk when the ceiling turns into stars, and being UTTERLY DISGUSTED that no one was impressed by the revelation that it wasn't a real police station? a) LOL ALL I COULD THINK OF WAS LOST AND ITS OBSESSION WITH ~ANSWERS + THE WEIRD HOLLOWNESS YOU FEEL ONCE YOU GET THEM; b) holy balls, you could scare infants with that face.
- Clearly I had a small fit when "In the Air Tonight" came up again.
- Speaking of, the beat I loved the most was the show using a musical cue via "Wonderwall" to show that Shaz died not before this time, but in the mid-90s.
- Gene and Alex in CID, Alex basically forcing him to not give up until he makes an "oh woman, move over and let me do this": hearts and rainbows, all around it.
- I thought I was going to hate Alex essentially losing all of her agency as a character because, surprise, she is in fact already dead (so thus going home is futile) - BUT I DO NOT. I even like that after she rages against it for a couple seconds, she just sort of... succumbs. GUYS. THIS IS HOW BADLY THE DEATH OF DONNA NOBLE SCARRED ME, AND YEAH, YEAH, WE ARE STILL CALLING IT A DEATH ALL RIGHT. It wouldn't have made sense if in that moment she suddenly regressed back to S1 of noooooooooo because she is still at her heart a chracter who has lived this life, in this place, as this person, for three years now. We are the world, Alex. She'll be fine. So one day you know that eventually Molly shows up in Gene's CID, and it's like the worst day of his entire life.
CAN GENE HUNT AND THE DOCTOR HANG OUT? IT WOULD BE SO GREAT. A SPINOFF. A SERIES AS BICKERING CO-PILOTS OF THE TARDIS.
ALSO.
ONE OF YOU JOKERS BETTER GIMME BACK MY IPHONE NOW.
edit: So this entire interview is brilliant, but mostly there is this:
So when you created Life On Mars did you have a long-term gameplan in mind? And is this the ending you always had planned?
“Bits of it are. When we got to the end of Mars we planned to do a third series, as you know. In the third series of Mars we would see Sam realising that he was dead - he knows he’s dead at the end of series two, but in series three he would start to believe that he could cheat a final death. He thinks that’s Heaven, and gradually it would dawn on him that this wasn’t Heaven. So it was going to be all the back story that we have in Ashes, of Sam saying ‘I don’t want to leave here’, and we would learn more about Gene, that Gene was actually this young copper. Because we were never able to do that third series, when we came to Ashes we thought let’s start again, let’s not rush to get to that conclusion. Obviously the BBC didn’t want just one series of Ashes, so we said right upfront to the Beeb we’d like to do three series - we’d like to start frivolous, and get darker as we go. And, amazingly, they said ok, let’s give it a go. And luckily the first series did well enough to get a second series and so on, so we were able to do that.
“The only thing that came in completely brand new was Keats - I created Jim Keats just for episode one, just to tie up the whole idea that Gene could shoot someone, go on the run and then just walk back in and say ‘Right, I’m picking up where I left off.’ And I thought it would be quite fun to do a story-of-the-week with a Guy Pearce LA Confidential type character who Gene runs rings around. Maybe tie that up as a little sub-story at the end of episode two. And I wrote the script like that. But then we talked about the problem of what we felt was missing in series three that made it different. And we all agreed that we missed the motor of a Supermac [the corrupt copper in series two], we missed a character who was an on-site regular nemesis, who wasn’t part of the gang but who added something. So I came up with the idea of what if Jim Keats says ‘I’m going to stick around’? Then we started talking more about Jim and we thought oh, let’s just do it. Let’s just make him the Anti-Christ or the Devil and make him evil. And he’s going to try and take Ray, Chris and Shaz and even Alex away from Gene. So that suddenly gave the series a massive engine that it needed. And it gave us the shape of the series, so it meant we could start focusing on the other characters and get to know them more.”
When the characters saw stars you did seem to be teasing us that they were going to be in space, on a ‘gene hunt’, just like the American show. Was that just you being completely evil?
“[laughs] There was a line in episode five where Ray sees the stars and he says ‘It’s like we’re some kind of astronauts’ - and I remember telling you that there’s a line coming up that will send your blood cold! And I knew there would be a group of people out there going ‘Oh no, f-! Please don’t do that!’ And so when that line went in it was very much a cheeky ‘let’s worry people’ bit!”
First of all: I LOVE THE FACT THAT THEY THINK THE AMERICAN VERSION WAS TOTAL SHIT.
Second of all: this.