Hey gang, I finished Ashes to Ashes and by extension I now have the whole Life on Mars Cinematic Universe Experience under my belt.

If you want to know what I thought about LOM & Season 1 of A2A, there's a post for that. This post is, specifically, about Season 2 and another one will be coming soon for Season 3.

If you already read that first post and just need a quick refresher, Life on Mars was about Sam Tyler who in 2006 got hit by a car, fell into a coma, and woke up in 1973. He wakes up and misses 1973 so bad he throws himself off the roof of an office building so that he can go back! Kind of a boneheaded move if you ask me. Ashes to Ashes, it's sequel series, is about Alex Drake, who in 2008 gets shot and wakes up in 1981 in a world that's congruent with what she's read about Sam's experiences in his psych profile, including meeting the characters Gene Hunt, Ray Carling, and Chris Skelton. The previous post takes us through to the end of Season 1, where Alex Drake tries to save her parents from being blown up by a car bomb, but can't, because you can't change the past like that!

So, if we pick up from Season 2, some of my complaints of A2A season 1 are immediately addressed, so I must not have been the only one. The year has been advanced to 1982, Alex Drake seems to stop muttering "you're not real you live in my subconscious" under her breath constantly, and the first season of Ashes to Ashes didn't have too much in the way of outside world interference like LOM did, this is now back in a big way in Season 2. The Mystery Clown is now gone, but that's because the clown was representative of Alex's dad, who we find out in the last episode of season 1 is the one who masterminded the explosion that killed her parents.

Season 2's overarching plot in-coma has two big running threads in it.

The first about Gene's boss, "Supermac" wanting to stamp out corruption but actually being corrupt as fuck. Funnily enough, Gene was corrupt as hell in Life on Mars, and in Ashes to Ashes he's still very prone to police brutality but he seems to have taken a keener interest in how its bad to be paid off. The first episode uses the death of a cop as the catalyst for this, with the dead cop's partner eventually being the culprit, Gene joining a masonic group of cops that "take care of eachother" in episode 2, and then in episode 3, the culprit of the murder gets mysterious murdered in custody because something weird is going on here! This eventually reaches a conclusion in episode 4 when Mac protects a wealthy buisnessman Jarvis, who's been having sex parties with young girls and is suspected of murder. After they confront Mac and Jarvis, and Jarvis gets away once again, Mac goes rogue and kills Jarvis, then himself.

The second thread picks up the next episode, and is about a mysterious man that tells Alex he knows she doesn't belong in this time. Eventually, we learn that he's in a nearby hospital bed and asks Alex to help him with something called "Operation Rose" that smells of corruption. Operation Rose, coincidentally, being Mac's last words in the previous episode.

Episode 7 of 8. We find out the mysterious man is PC Summers, who in addition to existing as himself from the future, also exists as he did in 1982. Well, at least until he kills his younger self and buries him in Concrete in an attempt to get Alex to play ball in Operation Rose. We discover someone in the police department is leaking information to a guy who owns the construction site where some drug deals (and murders) had gone down, so Gene sets up an elaborate trap. "I have a dossier of evidence I can't keep at the station, in case something happens to me it's at this safety deposit box" and gives each officer a different box. Doing this he deduces it's Chris, who up until this point has been one of the more upstanding characters. Alex and Gene grill him, and we learn that Chris had gone to a guy for a "pay when you can loan" to get Shaz an engagement ring. Later, he gets a call about "doing a favor" and Chris explains that he's the one who'd been losing files on purpose, including the one from earlier that could have saved the cop who killed his partner. Because Chris as a character has been consistently honest if a bit dimwitted at times even going all the way back to the start of Life on Mars, this feels like a really deep betrayal. The department's trust in Chris has been shattered, even his best friend of ten years Ray Carling can't look him in the eye.

Episode 8, the season finale. Alex Drake has had an operation to remove the bullet but she's contracted an infection. The doctors can push 50ml of super strong antibiotics through her system to try and clear it.Alex interprets this as a time limit. Gene receives a tape of Alex spitballing theories about why she's here and saying she needs to fight Gene. Gene confronts Alex about it, and she tries to explain that she's from the Future, but of course Gene doesn't believe it and thinks she's corrupt now. Operation Rose is imminent, with Future PC Summers involved. In order to foil it, they rely on whoever's trying to have Chris sabotage investigations. Chris finds out that the job is a gold bouillon truck robbery. And not just any gold bouillon truck robbery, but one Alex studied at the academy. Gene, who's patience has run thin, suspends Alex.

Of course Alex's understanding of the robbery is correct, a bunch of corrupt cops show up to the robbery but so does Gene's department resulting in a scuffle. Chris chases a corrupt cop up a staircase and gets himself into trouble. Shaz saves him while in her wedding dress. Future PC Summers confronts Alex, explains he was involved in the original robbery and resents how being paid off corrupted him. Gene shoots him. In a resulting scuffle the sister of a criminal we've seen throughout the episode takes Alex hostage, Gene tries to shoot her but misses and shoots Alex.

The episode ends with Alex waking up in the hospital and reuniting with her daughter. Or does she? After a few moments, Hunt is on every screen, begging her to wake up. Guess we'll just have to see what happens in Season 3.

I found this season to be much more successful than Season 1, even at times just as good or better than your average Life on Mars episode. Much like Life on Mars I find the idea that mid 2000's cops are uncorruptable a quaintly optimistic and let's be honest here completely unrealistic vision of the police. I have never trusted a cop and probably never will. I really appreciate that we're now getting some additional complexity out of Chris, Ray, and Shaz, and there's more of that to come in Season 3. Chris's betrayal and subsequent redemption work not only for me as a viewer that likes Chris as a character, but for the story- it's not something that happens in service to a single episode's plot and then is never spoken of again, these actions have consequences that build to the final scenes of the season. I could take or leave most the SuperMac stuff in isolation, but ultimately it is necessary for the story to show that the upper ranks are rotten to the core. The way Alex and Gene's relationship fluctuates throughout this season was likewise really important to the overall story, they started out thick as thieves, which probably a bad analogy for police officers. By the middle of the season finale Gene no longer trusts Alex at all. 

There were a few things that stood out to me as strange, one being that we saw Alex's adoptive father(?), Evan, completely vanishes from the show, despite being a lawyer who was almost always at the police station in Season 1. Despite being seen in the 2008 part of the first episode of the show as someone who regularly watches Alex's daughter Molly, he's not even there when Alex wakes up from her coma. We also still don't really know why the guy Alex's dad hired to set the car bomb shot her in 2008 and there's no progress on finding out. I'm all for removing things from your show if they don't seem like they work, but when you set stuff up like that you at least have to provide some closure.

Overall, I was excited to head into season 3, the show had gotten it's hooks in me, even if it took longer than Life on Mars did.