LIFE ON MARS revival mini-series in the planning stages

Matthew Graham, the co-creator and co-writer of the time-travelling metaphysical police drama Life on Mars and its sequel series Ashes to Ashes, has confirmed that he is developing a mini-series revival of the franchise.

Life on Mars starred John Simm as Detective Sam Tyler of the Greater Manchester Police. He is hit by a car and goes into a coma, but when he wakes up it's 1973 and he is working for a considerably less professional, more sexist police force under the leadership of DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Tyler has to solve crimes whilst navigating culture-clash issues, avoiding altering his own past and finding out what has really happened to him and if he can return to his own time.

The show aired two seasons in 2006 and 2007 and was both a critical and commercial success (an American remake starring Harvey Keitel was less accomplished, and axed after a single season). Simm declined to return for a third season, so the concept was rejigged as Ashes to Ashes. A new police officer, Alex Drake, who is obsessed with the strange story of Sam Tyler, finds herself in London in 1981, working for Gene Hunt who has moved down south to help combat a deadly crime wave in the capital. Ashes to Ashes ran for three seasons from 2008 to 2010 and ended on a surprisingly definitive note which fully explained the strangeness and seemed to close the door on any further adventures in this world, although Glenister did reveal that a 1950s or 1960s-set prequel series focusing on a young Gene Hunt had been discussed as a joke, with the title The Laughing Gnome (all of the show titles come from contemporary David Bowie song).

Although Ashes to Ashes was well-received, fans were disappointed that it did not reveal the fate of Sam Tyler and other key characters on-screen, instead relaying news of their fates in dialogue.

Life on Mars: The Final Chapter (working title) will be partially set in the 1970s, partially in the 1980s and mostly in an "alternate now." The series will also involve a TV show-within-a-show called "Tyler: Murder Division." Provisionally, Philip Glenister and John Simm have agreed to return and the writers want to bring back as many characters from both series as possible.

The producers actually let slip the news in a tweet on 30 March, and have confirmed that the news is not an April Fool's (which, in the UK at least, ends at midday anyway). The timescale for the new series will, of course, depend on when the current pandemic crisis eases.

Gratuitous Lists: Top Ten SFF Finales

Welcome to a new feature on the blog, where I list things in a list format because everyone likes lists. However, no-one (well, me) likes the incessant arguing over the placement of things on lists rather than their actual merits, so I'm not doing that.

Here is a list of what I think are the best final episodes of SFF TV series over the years, listed in no particular order but with my favourite one at the end. So, let's do this.

Blake's 7: Blake

Season 4, Episode 13, aired 21 December 1981

"Well, this doesn't look good."

An ending so unexpected that people are still talking about it thirty-three years later. In the closing moments of the final episode of the series, our long-missing idealistic hero, Blake, is revealed to have become a mercenary fighting for money and has betrayed his former comrades to the tyrannical Federation. His morally ambiguous second-in-command-turned-leader Avon guns him down...only for it to be revealed that Blake was still fighting the good fight all along and had a larger plan in mind. Cue Federation soldiers appearing and executing the entire regular cast of the show. The series ends by fading to black as Avon - apparently - is shot dead as well.

Bleak and nihilistic doesn't even begin to cover it, although it was later revealed that the show was never meant to end this way. A planned fifth season would have revealed that most of the characters would be still alive, having been stunned rather than killed. The BBC's announcement that this was final episode took the cast and crew as much by surprise as anyone, but for many years they suggested this had been the plan all along. So, not quite as ballsy as it first appeared, but still a jaw-dropping way to end the series. The rest of the episode is pretty good as well, with its famously cash-strapped effects team doing a reasonable job of depicting the crash-landing of our heroes' ship, Scorpio, on the surface of Gauda Prime.

Chuck: Chuck versus the Goodbye

Season 5, Episode 13, aired 27 January 2012

When in doubt, finish on a beach with an amnesia storyline. Actually, don't, unless your show is as good as Chuck.

For five seasons Chuck trod a careful path between out-and-out comedy, spy hijinks and a romance centred in the gradual development of lead character Chuck Bartowski from a loser working in an electrical store to a convincing secret agent able to woo his team-mate Sarah Walker. That made the decision the showrunners took in its final few episodes, with the erasing of Sarah's memories meaning she had no idea about their relationship, all the braver. Still, trope-savvy fans were expecting her memory to be restored in the final episode and All To Be Well. That didn't happen, with the series ending with Chuck apparently realising he had to win over Sarah from scratch. A surprising ending that didn't take the cop-out route and also featured some fantastic other scenes, such as the main villain being defeated to Jeff and Lester's memorable cover version of "Take on Me" by A-Ha, Morgan finally winning Casey's respect and several callbacks to the very first episode of the series.

Firefly: Objects in Space

Season 1, Episode 14, aired 13 December 2002

"Well, here I am."

Firefly was never meant to end with this episode, of course, but it makes for a surprisingly fitting denouncement and arguably its finest hour. The crew are trapped in deep space as a bounty hunter stalks their ship, trying to capture River Tam and getting embroiled in a battle of wits with her. The episode is moody and intense, tremendously well-written and directed by Joss Whedon (who later said it was the one piece of work he'd use to represent everything he's ever done) and featuring lengthy allusions to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (the DVD commentary is worth a listen on this score) as well as knockout performances from Summer Glau and Richard Brooks as Jubal Early. The episode also features the eventual acceptance of River Tam into the ranks of the crew, ending a thematic storyline begun back in the pilot. But, yeah, this was an ending that came too soon.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: All Good Things...

Season 7, Episode 25, aired 23 May 1994

For a show about exploring deep space in the far future, ending with a poker game and gratuitous cleavage shot is an interesting stylistic choice.

After seven seasons, Star Trek: The Next Generation bowed out with a relentlessly entertaining romp that served as a greatest hits of the show's past. Q returns, keen to finish the trial he began in the pilot episode (and inadvertently hinting that maybe the whole thing was a pointless test, with humanity itself poised to evolve into the Q at some point in the distant future) and Picard has to find a way of allowing humanity to survive. The episode is rammed so full of plot holes that it doesn't even begin to make sense, but it's worth it to kick back and enjoy seeing the likes of Tasha Yar and Romulan Commander Tomalak again, as well as the futuristic, three-nacelled Enterprise cutting through Klingon warships like they're butter. A comprehensively superior way for TNG to bow out than its series of indifferent spin-off movies.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chosen

Season 7, Episode 22, aired 20 May 2003

For the show that once blew up a high school as a form of cathartic release and commentary on growing up, going the whole hog and nuking the entire town was really the only way to top it.

When Buffy started, the title character was trying to avoid her role as the 'chosen one' whose destiny is to save the world. Seven seasons and several world-saving antics later (including at the cost of her own life, twice) the series, ironically, ends by doing exactly what Buffy wanted back in the beginning: by taking her status as the chosen one away by gifting the powers of the Slayer on hundreds of other girls all over the world. It's a surprisingly effective and clever ending given they couldn't kill her again or have her lose this final battle, this time against the very nature of evil itself.

As a finale the episode works on all sorts of other levels as well, with Willow finally moving on from her PTSD at the death of Tara and her resulting brush with evil in the previous season and Spike embracing his role as a hero. Only the death of Anya, which goes almost completely unnoticed by anyone apart from Xander, strikes a duff note. But the mistakes can be forgiven for those final shots of Sunnydale - the suburban American dream hiding the nightmare of the Hellmouth - being destroyed and the gang standing around wondering what to do next, the world their oyster. It's an ending ripe with possibilities, which the 'canon' Season 8 and 9 comics have really failed to live up to. Still, as endings go which wrap things up but leave room for more adventures, this is a very strong one.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: What You Leave Behind

Season 7, Episode 25, aired 2 June 1999

It's important for a finale to give emotional closure to the character arcs we have followed over the course of many years. But if you have 500 starships blowing the living crap out of one another, that helps too.

If TNG ended with a fun romp, its darker, superior spin-off DS9 ended with an epic tragedy. Hundreds of millions are killed as the Federation, Romulan Empire and Klingons join forces to destroy the Dominion forces in the Alpha Quadrant once and for all and the Dominion chooses to go down in a Götterdämmerung of fire and slaughter rather than surrender. Unlike the Picard-heavy TNG finale, the DS9 closer gives every character a moment to shine. Bashir and Dax finally (after seven years and numerous twists and turns, including one of them dying) get it together, O'Brien tires of the insanity of life on the frontier and gets to take his long-suffering family home and both Kira and Rom get promotions. But it's the way the show comes full circle to the events of the pilot episode, with Sisko fulfilling the role the Prophets laid out for him way back then, that satisfies the most. There's also the fact that the show doesn't sugar-coat its ending, with 'poor, simple' Garak getting the pardon he's been craving for so long, only to find his home is a blasted wasteland that will take decades to rebuild. And in the middle of everything, the producers even find time for a much-needed moment when the Klingon revelry in death and chaos repulses their Federation allies, an antidote for a franchise that has too-often depicted these sociopathic thugs as cuddly good guys.

All the more impressive is that Deep Space Nine, unlike it's near-rival Babylon 5, was not planned out ahead of time, yet the finale does a fantastic job of tying up all of the loose ends, making sure every character's fate is at least addressed and ending on the simple note of Jake looking out into space for his missing father. Its elegance makes the absolute ham-fisted butchering of the finales to Voyager and Enterprise years later look all the worse.

Babylon 5: Sleeping in Light

Season 5, Episode 22, aired 25 November 1998

Babylon 5: our last, best hope for pizza. I may have misread that.

Five years in the planning, Babylon 5's final episode is a quiet coda to everything that came before. Set twenty years after the rest of the series, it touches base with most of the characters and shows how their lives were changed by their experiences fighting the Shadows and Psi Corps, and what impact that had on them as people. Whilst the focus is on Sheridan's dying days as he knows the end foretold by Lorien has come, there's also time to touch base with the rest of the cast (including actors tragically no longer with us, such as Richard Biggs and Jeff Conaway) and see if it was indeed "all worth it". It's a brave and atypical choice to end the series this way, with showrunner and head (and, for most of its run, only) writer J. Michael Straczynski being the guy to turn the lights off ahead of the station's final demolition.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Sozin's Comet Part 4: Avatar Aang

Season 3, Episode 21, aired 19 July 2008

Okay, he's 13 and she's 15 (there's a Weird Al Yankovic song in there somewhere), but he's just defeated Mark Hamill in epic single combat, so arguably justified.

Over the course of its three seasons, the anime-influenced animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender dedicated itself to telling just one story, one with a definitive beginning, middle and end. This final episode delivers what the previous sixty episodes had been building towards: the showdown between Aang and Fire Lord Ozai. The episode delivers on that score, with a magical battle that outclasses all the others in the show to date. Simultaneously Katara has to take down Azula in her own epic battle, and Sokka and his friends have to somehow destroy an entire Fire Nation sky armada before it can wipe out the Earth Kingdom. Cue enormous explosions and lots of destruction. But in the end it's the characters fates which are more important and the decision to end the series in Iroh's tea shop is an inspired one. It's a rich and satisfying ending that no amount of M. Night Syamalaning or inconsistent spin-offs can weaken.

Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes

Season 3, Episode 8, aired 21 May 2010

"Pub?" "The interdimensionally weird one down the road that acts as the crossroads between life and death? Okay."

From the moment Sam Tyler was hit by a car in 2006 and somehow woke up in 1973, viewers were on the edge of their seat wondering what the hell was going on. Life on Mars itself had a strange and surreal ending which was a bit too open-ended, explained when a year later we got the spin-off/sequel series Ashes to Ashes, in which Alex Drake finds herself joining Team Gene Hunt in the 1980s. Over the course of three seasons Ashes to Ashes stepped out from its predecessor's shadow to deliver a different spin on the same premise. The final season, in which the team are hounded by the devil-like Jim Keats, perhaps steps a little bit too far into the territory of the weird and surreal, but the final episode offers a logical explanation for everything that's happened. It's also a depressing, heartbreaking end for many of these characters...but it is lightened in those final moments as Gene Hunt delivers his spiel to his latest time-slipped recruit and David Bowie's "Heroes" blasts into life over the end credits.

And to my favourite:

Angel: Not Fade Away

Season 5, Episode 22, aired 19 May 2004

"Let's go to Caprica, Agents of SHIELD, Bones and Person of Interest. Sorry, work. I meant to say work."

 
There are several reasons why I find Buffy's spin-off to be better than its parent show: the presence of a story arc spanning the whole series (as opposed to just one season), the theme of redemption and consequence that is much more devastatingly explored and its more adult view of the world, being a show about taking responsibility for your own decisions rather than moving through adolescence and finding yourself. It's also a show with more weight, with a gradually building sense of doom really from the moment Doyle buys the farm halfway through Season 1. By the end of Season 5 our characters have been, in some cases literally, to hell and back. Some of the heroes have fallen along the way - Cordelia is dead and Fred, her body possessed by the demon Illyria, is gone and almost certainly not coming back - but the threat remains as it has done from the first episode: the demonic law firm Wolfram and Hart. In the final episode of the series Angel and his comrades take down the Circle of the Black Thorn, thereby declaring war against the Senior Partners. No longer willing to tolerate Angel's defiance, the Senior Partners unleash the armies of hell on Los Angeles. The series ends with Angel pondering that he's always wanted to kill a dragon. "Let's go to work."

It's an ending that's amusing for being simply way beyond the show's budget to deliver properly, so cutting away before the fight begins is the only way it can be done. It also thematically makes sense: Angel was always about the fight and the struggle for what is right, no matter the odds. It's a battle with casualties. Wesley falls along the way and Lorne, though still alive, has his soul irreparably damaged when he coldly executes Lindsey on Angel's orders. There is also hope. Whilst the odds may be against our heroes (several thousand versus four), it helps that two of them are undead vampires with centuries of experience in combat and one is, er, a dark goddess from beyond the dawn of time. The After the Fall comic indeed suggests they are victorious...at the cost of Gunn being turned into a vampire and Los Angeles descending into the pits of hell (but who'd notice?).

But as a way of ending a series without either being too saccharine or taking the mickey out of the audience's intelligence, Angel finds just the right balance, and is thus my favourite TV show finale of all time. This week.

Bubbling Under

The BBC's Merlin (2008-12) is never going to be winning prizes for greatest genre show of all time, but it was a moderately entertaining show throughout its run that kept up the tension over whether Merlin's magical abilities would be discovered quite well. The final episode focuses on the revelation of Merlin's abilities to the mortally wounded Arthur and the resulting fall-out from that discovery. Perhaps they should have revealed it earlier, but basing the finale around the revelation and the impact on the characters was a good choice. The final scene showing the ancient Merlin hiking around modern-day Glastonbury, not so much.

Meanwhile, the short-lived Space: Above and Beyond (1996) may have been pretty terrible for most of its run before a late-season improvement in quality, but its final episode is striking enough that it's still talked about today. Several characters are apparently killed off, others are trapped on a planet and only two of the heroes survive to get back to their bunks. It's a surprisingly bleak ending. Even if the show had returned, it would be hard to see how they'd have pulled everyone out of the fire without it being seriously unconvincing.

On a lighter note, the final episode of Spaced (1999-2001) got the gang back together after splitting them up and ended on a high. The combination of Take That's "Back For Good" and a main battle tank is particularly memorable. A scene retroactively added later on confirming that Tim and Daisy do get it on and have a family is a little too on-the-nose, but the original episode ended in a way that was just perfect.

The short-lived Ultraviolet (1998) - aka The Show That Gave Unto The World Idris Elba - was brilliance incarnate, but the fact that writing, producing and directing it almost killed the creator meant that the planned second season was never made. This was almost certainly for the best, as the show's final episode is now a note-perfect battle of wills between the leader of the Code Vs (vampires) and the main characters which gradually intensifies as the vampires' true plans to trigger nuclear armageddon to darken the skies for centuries to come - obviously to their benefit - is revealed. Amazing stuff, especially when Stephen Moyer's vampire character is resurrected and promptly flees to the set of True Blood.

Finally, and a close contender for this list, was the final episode of Quantum Leap. For a show so resolutely optimistic and hopeful to end on such a downer - Sam Beckett never returns home and never sees his friend Al again - was an unexpected, brave choice. This was controversial at the time, with the feeling that showrunner Donald Bellisario was being too cruel to the characters after five years of putting them through the wringer. But seen from twenty years down the line, this was an appropriate choice, allowing Sam to go on and help thousands more people.

The Wertzone Special Award For The Episode That Should Have Been The Last One Of Its Series

Four years of fleeing across the galaxy only to get irradiated to death in what briefly appears to be Brooklyn? Best. Ending. Ever.

Battlestar Galactica: Revelations

If the rebooted Battlestar Galactica had ended with its mid-Season 4 finale, it would probably still rank as one of the greatest SFF shows of all time (despite a seriously below-par third and fourth season). Revelations was not only the best episode of the series in more than a year, it delivered the single most gut-punching SF cliffhanger since the ending of Blake's 7. The 30,000+ survivors of humanity, chased halfway across the galaxy by marauding robotic murderers, finally reach their long-dreamt-of safe haven, the thirteenth colony of Earth, only to find it a burned-out radioactive ruin. The final tracking shot takes in our speechless characters' reactions as they gaze across the river at the obliterated remnants of their hopes and dreams and abruptly cuts to black.

Sadly, BSG came back with another half-season of increasingly bizarre and bemusing plot turns until it turns out that it was all a fake-out and there was another planet called Earth our characters finally stumble across thanks to mystical magic music pumped out across the galaxy by some disembodied super-intelligence via the resurrected ghost-thing of a regular character, resulting in the colonisation of 'our' Earth 150,000 years in the past. Except they then had to explain why the fossil record shows that humankind evolved here on Earth, resulting in some quite ridiculous hoop-jumping that feels like the writers are simply taking the piss out of the audience's intelligence. Going out on the note that Japanese robots may one day destroy us sent exactly the wrong message, whilst going to the "All Along the Watchtower" well for the fifteen hundredth time that season was just an indulgence too far.

That just goes to show that you can have too much of a good thing. But the other shows on this list show you can have an ending that is satisfying, wraps things up and remains true to the spirit of the series. Let's hope that some of our present-day big hitters, like Game of Thrones and Orphan Black, get resolutions that are as satisfying.

Ashes to Ashes: Season 3

Having been in a coma for several days (but two years by her internal clock), Alex Drake has awoken back in 2008. However, she finds herself unable to let go of the world she experienced in her coma and visions of her friends eventually draw her back into that world. It is now 1983, Margaret Thatcher is fighting for re-election and Gene Hunt and his department are being investigated by internal investigations over the incident where Alex was shot. The main investigator, Jim Keats, is determined to bring down Gene Hunt after him wriggling off the hook for several past misdemeanours and tries to enlist Alex as his ally. However, other coppers are now starting to have strange visions and Alex finds herself becoming obsessed with one question: what happened to Sam Tyler? And what must she do to return to the real world and her daughter for good?



Ashes to Ashes' third season brings to an end not just the three-year story of this series, but also resolves outstanding questions and mysteries from its parent show, Life on Mars, as well. It's a big task to put on the show's shoulders, giving this season a sense of expectation and resolution only exceeded by the weight of expectation viewers have put onto the final season of Lost (in a quirk of fate, the series finales for the two shows aired within forty-eight hours of one another).

To start with, Ashes falters. Alex is returned to her coma and the world within it very easily, some might say way too easily and conveniently, in the first episode. However, soon we're back with Gene and the gang investigating crimes, which is good, but now with the added menace of Jim Keats looking over their shoulders, sometimes helping, more often egging on Gene to fail so he can bring him down. This element is interesting, with Daniel Mays turning in a great performance as Keats, but it is mishandled. The Keats storyline interferes with and slows down some storylines and feels like a tacked-on fifth wheel in others. Similarly, the Keats storyline also rips apart the dynamic at the heart of the show, with Keats trying to get each of Hunt's team to turn against him, resulting in lots of angry confrontations and a sense of distrust and suspicion hanging over the series. Given how hard-won Alex and Gene's mutual trust and respect was in the first season, resulting in their excellent and devastatingly effective partnership in exposing corruption in the police the second, this feels like dumping the characters back to square one for no real reason. Life on Mars' episode dealing with Ray's horrendous mistake was better, for handling the same story far more concisely without betraying prior character development.

There's also the mythological elements of the series, with characters other than Alex having strange visions of things they cannot explain. Whilst it adds a tremendously creepy element of foreshadowing to the series, it does again interfere with the episode-by-episode storylines. Some of these, such as Gene's bull-in-a-china-shop approach exposing an undercover operation or Gene having to work alongside his old nemesis Lytton from Manchester, are packed with promise, but never develop sufficiently due to time having to be found for the myth-arc and stuff with Keats' storyline.

Farewell to the 'guv and to the Quattro

Luckily, if the series falters over the longer stretch, it does eventually end in style. The penultimate episode welds together the myth-arc element with the episode's own story (about ANC radicals fighting apartheid in London) very efficiently and is much more interesting to watch.

Then there's the finale, which sees actors, writers and the director firing on all cylinders. The great revelations about Gene Hunt's past and Sam Tyler's fate make sense, whilst other revelations, perhaps less expected, are equally convincing. The ending is emotional without being over-wrought, perhaps because there are real elements of tragedy and grimness to the resolution. It's not a neat ending with a nice tied bow to everything, and some revelations are bit of a blow to the gut. But it tracks, makes sense, is thematically satisfying (which is more than can be said for Lost's, but more on that later) and Gene's final words on screen are a great way of sending the series out pretty much where it came in, complete with great accompaniment from David Bowie. The post-credits clip from another famous British cop show is a nice touch as well.

The finale season of Ashes to Ashes (***½ for the season overall, ***** for the finale) is not the knockout, eight episodes of awesomeness that viewers were hoping for, but it is effectively dark and foreboding, setting up an excellent final episode. Gene Hunt and the team, you will be missed. The season will be released on DVD in the UK on 5 July 2010, and will appear in the US (on DVD and BBC America) next year.

Plot Holes and Revelations and Big Finales

This article contains spoilers up to the penultimate episodes of both Lost and Ashes to Ashes.

For fans of genre TV, this weekend is a pretty big deal. On Friday the last-ever episode of Ashes to Ashes airs in the UK on BBC-1, ending a five-season storyline that began back in 2006 with the first season of Life on Mars and modern cop Sam Tyler finding himself in 1973 after suffering a traffic accident in the present. Then on Sunday in the USA, the final episode of Lost airs, concluding six seasons of convoluted, complex plotting that began back in 2004 with a commercial airliner crashing on a mysterious island in the South Pacific.

The cast of Ashes to Ashes in Season 2.

Unusually for genre shows, both of these series went on to become major mainstream hits. Mars and later Ashes frequently won their timeslot ratings against all-comers, whilst Lost pulled in more than 20 million viewers on several occasions. They have both also achieved some measure of critical acclaim. Certainly all of the UK TV magazines this week have been emblazoned with coverage of Ashes' final episode, whilst in the USA the equivalent mags are dotted with various Lost images. Conversely, the USA is barely aware of Ashes' existence (although the arrival of the series on BBC America has picked up some positive coverage in the last few weeks over there), whilst Lost jettisoned most of its UK audience when it moved from Channel 4 to the cable and satellite Sky service after its second season, and coverage of its finale (which airs next week in the UK) has been altogether more modest over here as a result.

The cast of Lost in their second season.

The two shows coming to an end marks an interesting moment for serialised, mystery-based TV shows. As mentioned in my Arc of Truth series of articles from last year, truly satisfying serialised shows have been somewhat few and far between, due to their lack of forward-planning and tendency to get cancelled halfway through, culminating in the highly divisive and flamewar-inducing finales to shows such as Battlestar Galactica and The X-Files. This is highlighted in those shows, like the two mentioned, which are based heavily around mysteries, secrets and dense mythologies. Shows which have more straightforward and linear story arcs, where any such mysteries are short-term and resolved in a season or two at the most, are notable for ending much more successfully, such as Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

With both shows having aired their penultimate episodes, it is interesting to see which way they go. Ashes to Ashes, for my money, has the greater potential to end successfully, simply because it's a much less dense show than Lost. It's more episodic, with the ongoing storylines relegated to subplots whilst a 'crime of the week' is pursued in the foreground. This approach has been somewhat inverted in the final season, but it means that the questions that need answering from three years of Ashes and two of Mars are nowhere near as numerous, and all seem to be tied into one central answer.

Sam Tyler, Gene Hunt and Annie Cartwright in Life on Mars.

Lost, on the other hand, is far more sprawling and more epic, with more than twice as many episodes, a much larger cast and a much bigger storyline expanding across decades. There have already been many characters and storylines which have been abandoned or jettisoned, leaving unresolved plot threads dangling throughout the show's history. The potential for disappointment with Lost is considerably greater, although after the penultimate episode I am more hopeful that they can pull at least the major mysteries and plot threads together.

Gene Hunt and Jim Keats on Ashes to Ashes.

Both series have chosen to go down the 'dark and grand epic mythology' route for their conclusions. This route was more unexpected with Ashes, supposedly a chalk 'n' cheese crime drama about a modern policewoman having to work with a bunch of semi-sexist, emotionally retarded early 1980s coppers and clashing badly. Yet the latest season has played around strongly with the imagery of death, with Gene Hunt and new character Jim Keats both 'helping' dying people at the moment of their passing, or tugging other characters' loyalties between them like an angel and devil sitting on a person's shoulders whispering advice to them (or in Gene's case bellowing loudly). At the same time, other characters are seeing the world melt away around them, leaving only a cold, disturbing image of millions of stars behind before things snap back to normal (leading to some British viewers hyperventilating in panic that the producers are going down the same road as the patently ludicrous American version of Life on Mars). Certainly life, death, dreams and a battle between two powerful characters seem to have risen to the fore in Ashes, with perhaps the fate of the world that they inhabit at stake.

Jack and Locke, the final protagonist and antagonist of Lost.

Similarly, Lost's early seasons raised the prospect of it having a storyline involving the ruins of the DHARMA Initiative and a power struggle within the ranks of the native 'Other' inhabitants of the Island (between Ben Linus and Charles Widmore) with the survivors of Oceanic 815 caught up in the middle. Elements such as the disturbing smoke monster and visitations by dead people were more 'out there' but could perhaps have been given credible explanations. Instead, as this last season has developed we have discovered a complex set of 'rules' governing the behaviour of two antagonistic, long-lived beings, the (relatively) benign Jacob and the evil 'Man in Black' (the smoke monster in human form) who have manipulated events from the very start and indeed for two millennia before that to lead to an epic, mythological showdown between their avatars (now identified as Jack and Locke) with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

The smoke monster on Lost.

In both cases, the move to grand, epic themes has been well-handled, but it's a dangerous move which has the potential to backfire spectacularly. Battlestar Galactica started off as a tense, action-driven drama about the human race on the run for its life with some interesting subtexts about the War on Terror, political rights and civil rights in a time of war. Whilst it had some mystery elements (most notably the identity of the mysterious 'Head Six' that only Baltar could see and hear), the show was mostly based on the idea of a dynamic, forward-moving storyline. A few weeks into Season 3 it switched to asking deep questions about the nature of the 'Final Five' and the Cylon god, going on to bring in mythological concepts and elements (such as the 'Temple of Hopes' on the algae planet) and then brought a character back from the dead. Because the show had not been designed with this mythology in mind from the start, it handled it badly and dropped the ball in its final season and during the finale, leaving a good half or more of the fanbase severely disappointed.

Both Lost and Ashes have the advantage that their storylines have been preplanned, although to what extent remains contentious: the producers of Ashes have admitted that whilst they've known the ending since working on Mars, the character of Keats was created quite late in the day after writing on Season 3 had been underway for some time. The producers of Lost only mapped out the current story arc involving Jacob and the smoke monster in the middle of the third season. Still, in both cases this was far more than what BSG attempted, and should hopefully mean that the endings of both series track better.

This time next week, we'll know if either, both or neither of these shows joins the canon of truly satisfyingly ended genre shows, or if they fall at the last hurdle. Reviews of Season 3 of Ashes to Ashes and the final six episodes of Season 6 of Lost will follow next week.

BBC schedule their biggest SF shows

The BBC has scheduled the new seasons of its two biggest SF shows in the UK. The third and final season of Ashes to Ashes debuts on Friday 2 April 2010, whilst Season 31 of Doctor Who (the first featuring new Doctor Matt Smith) will start on Saturday 3 April, both on BBC-1.

Ashes to Ashes: Season 2

It's 1982 and Britain is at war. Whilst the nation cheers on its soldiers and sailors fighting in the Falklands, life back in London carries on as normal for DI Alex Drake. Well, as normal as it can do when you're really from 2008 and your entire life appears to be a fictional construct within your own mind as you suffer from a bullet-induced coma. Having failed to avert her parents' death, Alex is now unsure what it is she must do to return home, until the rising tide of police corruption within the Met becomes clear and she and Gene Hunt make it their mission to bring the bent coppers down. But as their dangerous game of cat and mouse with their corrupt superiors unfolds, Alex starts getting odd messages and hints that she might not be the only temporally-displaced person in this world...


After an initially shaky but eventually compelling first season, Ashes to Ashes returns firing on all cylinders for its second. Learning from their experiences, the writers have put together a much more compelling season-spanning story arc than either the first year of Ashes or both seasons of its predecessor series, Life on Mars, with Gene and Alex leading an attempt to bring down their corrupt bosses in the Met. This storyline takes up the first half of the season, but no sooner is that out of the way than Alex is confronted with the notion that she might not be alone, and has to find out who is sharing her 'hallucination' and why they are there.

The writing is tighter this time around, the characterisation stronger and, in particular, the writing for Alex Drake is much improved, making her a more sympathetic figure than the arrogant know-it-all who dominated the first half of Season 1. There's also a nice subplot for the hitherto under-utilised Marshall Lancaster and Montserrat Lombard as Chris and Shaz, whose engagement provides a nice undercurrent of humour to the proceedings (and unexpectedly ties into the main storyline later in the season). Keeley Hawes and Philip Glenister are still impressive as the leads, with Dean Andrews continuing to provide solid support as Ray Carling, who shows some interesting character growth this season. We also have two recurring characters, Charlie 'SuperMac' Mackintosh (Roger Allam) and Martin Summers (Adrian Dunbar), who act as antagonists through much of the season, both well-played and nicely developed as characters.

The mystery element, namely why did Sam Tyler and now Alex Drake find themselves in the past, is also developed with some intriguing new clues hinting that what the audience previously assumed or thought they knew is completely wrong. Events culminate in the final few moments of Season 2, which rival episodes of Twin Peaks or The Prisoner for sheer surrealism and bemusement-inducing incredulity. What is going on? The third and final season of Ashes to Ashes, which will also mark the final appearance of Gene Hunt and the end of the five-season arc begun at the start of Life on Mars, promises to hold all of the answers.

Ashes to Ashes: Season 2 (****½) is a superior slice of SF-tinged crime drama. It is available now on DVD in the UK, with a US release planned for next year. Season 3 starts airing in the UK in April.

Ashes to Ashes: Season 1

In 2008, DI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes) is a police psychologist based in London who is planning to write a book about the criminal mind. She is intrigued when she is forwarded a batch of reports from a Manchester copper named Sam Tyler, who fell into a coma after a car accident and experienced what appears to be a vivid hallucination about going back in time to 1973. Drake is fascinated by the world that he apparently created in his own mind. So, when her own encounter with a gun-wielding criminal goes wrong and she is shot, when she wakes up in 1981 and almost immediately meets DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and his constant sidekicks DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton, she immediately knows what the game is and the rules are.


100% convinced she has created this world in her own mind after slipping into a coma like Sam's, Alex sets about trying to find out what it is she needs to do to wake up. Realising it is only a few weeks before the deaths of her parents in a car bombing incident, she convinces herself if she can save them, she can save herself. But Alex's situation is different, she's not getting any messages from the beyond like Sam was, and her hallucinations (about a clown) seem to be very different. So what is going on this time around?

The notion of Life on Mars having a sequel/spin-off series, especially after its finale seemed to answer the outstanding questions (or at least given the viewer some very strong clues as to what was happening) from that series, always seemed a bit weird. When the premise was announced, the uneasiness settled in. Was it just going to be a cheap rehash of Life on Mars but in the 1980s rather than the 1970s and with a female lead instead of Sam? These fears seem justified by the first two episodes of the first season of Ashes to Ashes. Unlike the perpetually confused Sam, Alex Drake immediately cottons on to the 'game' and rather smugly thinks she knows an explanation for everything that is happening. It has to be said that a smug hero isn't the most likable of characters, and in these opening episodes Alex is very tedious. Also, the writers seem to have forgotten some of the basics of Gene's character, and he is uncharacteristically passive as the series opens and his new DI starts going a bit loopy.

Luckily, things pick up a lot in the third episode after Alex has had the wind knocked out of her sails a few times and the mystery elements of the show kick in. We start to see less of a pastiche of Life on Mars and more of an intelligent evolution of the premise. The characters of Gene, Ray and Chris have moved on somewhat since the 1970s, presumably thanks to Sam's influence, and the 1980s' own issues start to be explored in an intelligent manner, from the shifting attitudes to sexuality to the music of the era and various characters' amazement at cutting-edge technology such as Space Invaders and Betamax. The arc story is also stronger than the two in Life on Mars, with Alex's attempts to avert her parents' deaths lead her to inserting herself into their lives and learning some secrets that perhaps were better left buried. The writers also rediscover Gene Hunt's voice around episode three, and the classic lines and the wince-inducing bull-in-a-china-shop approach to policing are soon front and centre, as they should be. There's also a highly amusing bit of sexual tension between the two characters as well.

The remaining episodes are very strong, the music is excellent, the characters are developed nicely and the denouncement in the final two episodes is compelling. In particular, the rules of the game that Life on Mars laid down and Alex has been following seem to be shattered by the events in the final episode. What really is going on? With two seasons to go after this one it'll be a while before we find out, but after a very shaky start, Ashes to Ashes hints that the answer could be stranger but more interesting than we first thought.

Ashes to Ashes, Season 1 (***½) takes a while to get going, but once it does it becomes a worthy continuation and successor to its parent series. It is available now on DVD in the UK. A US release is planned for 2010. Season 2 will be released on DVD in the UK in a couple of weeks.