Life on Mars had a built in ambiguity - he didn't know if he was back in time or in a coma or "something else". This one starts on a weak foundation - she KNOWS she's imagining it all, so quite happily dresses and acts like a hooker, drinks to excess and generally acts like someone who would get booted out of the department and off the force in five minutes - because since it's her "fantasy" - nuthin matters.
Also - and I'm aware this is sexist but what the hell - Ashes to Ashes is written by, produced by and directed by, women. Could this explain why the male personalities - already charicatures - have now become wafer thin 2-dimensional characters.
There might be a few good one-liners but there's some awful dialogue in there too. The religious nut waiter on the boat - Gene says "Impure". He says "but inside filthy and full of old bones". Would he blurt religious mumbo jumbo to a stranger that had just sidled up to him two seconds before?
Ah - but I forget the writer's convenience of making it a definite fantasy - anything can happen without explanation.
Also - if it's her "near death hallucination" should we any scenes at all where she's not present?
P.S. D.I. Drake actress should not be scripted to act drunk - she can't do it!!!!!
I watched it last night after missing last week's, thinking it may make up for the flat pastiche of the opening episode, but, alas, it seems to be even weaker as the series goes on. I am with Tellyboy in the congratulations to Life On Mars and the unanswered queries it had inside to keep us hooked, but this has no such draw. It also has the key difference, for me at least, that LOM had an everyman, a one-of-us, a fella who you liked and wanted to get the life he more controlled back. But this has us supposed to feel supportive and at one with Gene, a character built mostly for humourous ends rather than emotional realism. He has a failed marriage and keeps being rejected by the new snoot he classfully disapproves of, but i don't want to see their partnership develop truly as it's all untrue and his creation's at her unoriginal behest.
And as Tellyboy says, the male cohorts with moustache and nerdery as their sole symbols, are hideously undeveloped, their ugliness unexplored.
I think i am giving the rest of it a miss.