Speculating like crazy
Ashes to ashes is driving me crazy. I'm soooo gonna miss it when it's over. And there's only 3 episodes to go!!!!
Bevan's reaction was really intriguing, especially when Alex got close to him just after Gene "told him the truth" and he just freaked. It looked as if he was shocked by the truth but she was the one that triggered the terror.
I don't think that Shaz and Ray are dead (btw they are super cute together!), or at least I think they aren't in Sam's shoes. But there is a link between them and Alex, since the three of them can see the same starry sky.
Perhaps they are just non-existing beings, like Alex herself, and Gene knows the truth because Sam somehow revealed it before he disappeared in 1981, but is protecting "his team" and doesn't want them to understand that they are just figments of Sam's vivid imagination, fantasy symptoms of a comatose state and not real people.
Or the stars are a hint at another of Bowie's songs, Starman?
In the song, the lyrics describe Ziggy Stardust bringing a message of hope to Earth's youth through the radio, salvation by an alien 'Starman'. The story is told from the point of view of one of the youths who hears Ziggy.
Perhaps we have to replace the Starman by Sam Tyler who was indeed an alien in Gene's world and changed them all (hence the differences the episode pointed out between the Manchester cops and the new Gene and the new Ray)? Ziggy being the messenger, I guess that Gene could fit in the role. After all in the opening dream-like sequence he was the voice talking about Sam Tyler as a messiah-like figure!
Does Gene play guitar? ;- )
In the previous episode, Alex was given interesting messages: a homeless drunk told her "you belong here" which seems to go against Alex's belief that the Geneland isn't the place she should be in, and there were writings on the wall ("Molly was there" and "Gene <3 Sam").
BTW I'm sure that "Gene hearts Sam" tag made the day of many slashers! LOL
This week's eppy opened with Alex' daydreaming about Gene's voice praising Sam's merits and not longer after that, she pointed out how the homo-eroticism between Gene and Litton was interesting!
Why did Gene burn Sam's jacket and file? It looked as he erased Sam's last remains and destroyed evidences, but he could be just covering Sam's tracks...
Gene told Alex that whatever she is looking for does not exist which might be a clue.
Yes I'm still sticking to my theory about Alex being Sam, or rather existing in Sam's mind only! ;- )
I really really hope that it won't end as a purgatory/angel thing (unless it's Sam's inner purgatory!), because it will ruin LoM for me.
It isn't only the afterlife side of it and its religious connotations that would bother me but Gene being an angel of death and ruling a purgatory realm wouldn't fit in LoM at all, unless it means that Sam never woke up from his coma at the end of the second series, for he was already dead since the beginning, and therefore never jumped off the roof of the building...In that case the beginning of Ashes to ashes from the moment we saw Alex and Molly with the Sam file in Alex's car to the gun shooting has to be a mere fantasy and Alex is really nothing but a part of Sam's mental construct!
Personally I've always thought that the opening scene with Molly sounded weird, so I have no problem with Alex's journey being just a continuation of Sam's fantasy.
But we can't have at once Alex being real and Sam never waking up from a coma, returning to the present, either being dead since the car accident(Geneland being a purgatory) or still stuck in a coma-Gene-land. It's one or another.
Yet I suppose that it could be a matter of death even though the characters aren't dead yet. The dead copper Alex saw several times (not in the last episode though) is a clue after all, and there are songs like "Oh danny boy" and the title of the series "Ashes to ashes". Except that in Bowie's song, it isn't about death but about Major Tom being actually not the space man from an older song (the ebautiful Space Oddity) but actually a junkie who got high and went delirious. So if Bowie's lyrics are a clue, it doesn't suit the death theory.
But I guess death could be the solution, the simple answer nobody wants to see. In season 1, Alex herself was convinced that she was only a few minutes or seconds away from death.
So perhaps they are all dying characters whose minds meet up in Geneland before passing away.
Let's keep in mind though that the only evidence we have of Sam's death in the real world was Alex' file in the first episode of Ashes to ashes. If the opening scene of the series wasn't "real" it changes everything, Sam could still be alive and still in a coma or high on drugs like Major Tom and keeping the Geneland and Gene himself alive.
Of course if the opening of Ashes to ashes isn't a fantasy and Sam's jump off the roof (or "leap of faith")actually did kill him, it would explain his vanishing from the Geneland in 1981 as well (to make it work let's say that minutes in the Real World streched into years in Geneland hence Sam leaving for good in 1981). I'd really like to know if John Simm is to appear in the finale!
Geneland would be a fantasy world between life and nothingness, created by brains going through a near-death experience, feeding the Gene Genie who rules the place; and Sam eventually left it to die and fade when he disappeared in Geneland. Gene knew it but let him go, but it didn't destroy the Geneland because other brains were still generating it. Brains like Shaz', Ray's...or Alex's. Gene might need them to stay in his world though, otherwise he would vanish, hence his speech to Shaz and Ray and their having a LOM moment. Also their singing "Oh Danny Boy" and seeing the stars would be a way to tell how close to death they are--"ashes to ashes" means that we come from (star)dust and will return to (star)dust--like Alex, even though they were tested (a way out?)but chose to stay with Gene. But what about Chris?
The only problem and flaw with that death theory is that neither Shaz nor Ray believe they actually belong to another place. Alex is the only one who, like Sam, thinks she had another life, including a daughter, in 2007 and recalls being shot then.
But I guess that Keats could represent the part of the mind that wants to leave the Geneland and be at peace, instead of living on, the death wish any Slayer has Spike would say, hence his antagonism with Gene who would represent the stubborn part that refuses to quit, to be turned off, that keeps fighting the fight and will not fade away(Angel and Spike much?)Or it could be the opposite. Gene helps them to pass away hence the angel metaphor when Bevan joked about his having grown wings and a halo, and hence his helping Sam to disappear finally, while Keats is the part of the mind that wants to live, to go back to the real world. Shaz and Ray who chose Gene over Keats would be doomed to die then, but Alex who followed Keats could be saved.
But Keats being pretty creepy, I'd rather see him as the one who gives the end-ticket, and to Louise Gardner in the previous episode he really played a sort of a psychopomp whose responsability, in Greek mythology, was to escort newly deceased to the afterlife.
Anyway, whatever Gene knows now, he didn't back in LoM when most of the time he didn't get what Sam was saying because of the culture clash, so he must have been enlightened about Sam's situation by Sam himself. Making of Gene a true "genie" or "superbeing in the know from the beginning" would ruin LoM and destroy its charm. I can buy that he was pretending with Alex all along, but there is no way he pretended with Sam. He seems to know something, and I guess that it is about Alex and Sam, and perhaps about the world they live in, and he may represent something important and play a pivotal role in terms of "death" but he isn't aware of it, he is just being himself as if he were just a cop in the 80's.