"Icky" is a 4-Letter Word
One of my favorite people was talking about the phenomenon "girls are icky" showing up in certain corners of fandom, which is always guaranteed to get my righteous rage up. And there's nothing like righteous rage to bring on a MEME
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Yeah, that's Detective Inspector Drake to you.
DI Alexandra "Alex" Drake is made of awesome. Alex was a psychological profiler for CID in London in 2008 when she got sent to work with a fellow cop who was having some psychological trauma: DI Sam Tyler. A little while later, she gets involved in a hostage situation where not only is her life threatened, but her daughter's as well. She doesn't scream and cry - she does her job and tries to talk Leyton down. It doesn't work, because she gets shot - and wakes up in 1981.
She's really not happy about it.
Does Alex freak out? Yes. But does she give up? No. Alex is smart and so, so tenacious. She tries to figure out the rules of this world again and again. She's a fighter, as she says - "fight to live, fight to see my daughter again, fight to get home" - and she is tough as nails.
She can stand up to Gene Hunt and shout right back at him.
I love Alex's reaction to Gene, and the development of their relationship. This is a woman who completely owns the fact that she's gorgeous and she's aware that her boss both wants her bad and thinks she's a slut. This is a woman who arrived in 1981 dressed as a prostitute and has never once found it "beneath" her to pose as one for case-solving purposes (including a stint as Catwoman for a costume party). This is a woman who has sex with various people and never once apologizes for it. This is a woman who refuses to let Gene Hunt steamroller over her the way he does over everyone else, and takes him to task time and again. She will tell him off for being a sexist or for beating up suspects, but it doesn't mean she doesn't think he's worth the effort.
Also, she's a good mom.
Her relationship with Molly gets overlooked a lot - not to mention, hard to quantify, since most of what we see of Molly is Alex's hallucinations of her. But it's clear from the little we do see that Alex is a great mom. She teases Molly and gets teased in return, but deeply loves Molly and (possibly) lost it when Molly was taken from her. Molly is her driving force in season one, Alex's reason of reasons to fight through wherever she is to "get home".
I love Alex because she's so strong. She gets thrown back and forth between the "real world" and the eighties, and while she would be perfectly justified in having a screaming breakdown, the only time she actually DOES is when she sees her parents murdered for the second time.
I love Alex because she's a good copper. She trusts her instincts, her experience as a profiler, and most of the time, she's right (but when she's wrong, BOY is she wrong, and she deals with that, too). She's developed true friendships with Ray, Chris, and Shaz. She's the one prompting them all to be better, be smarter, work harder, than they are.
Because that's what Team Moms do.
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(Also also, hey! I knew she looked familiar so I looked her up on imdb and she was in the first season of Spooks - which is the only one I saw. Totally totally gorgeous.)
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You REALLY need to watch A2A. It's one of the best examples I can think of of a show that gets its genre and audience - it's got a mytharc, yes, and you can absolutely watch it as a sci-fi/fantasy/thriller show. But you can also watch it for the awesome 80's music, fashion, and references.
(Marshall Lancaster is about 5'7. Keeley Hawes is 5'10, without the heels. Yes, she is that tall, but in that picture, he's kind of ducking down to run around the Quattro and chase a suspect. It's a weird pic, but it's the only one I could find at the moment.)
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