Ashes to Ashes has proved that it is an original and well written TV series. All of the characters in the show are fantastic and you instantly fall in love with them. Gene Hunt is a god as far as I am concerned! Although he may be slightly caustic, his character develops before your very eyes. The relationship between him and Alex has been very intense from day 1, his team are all so different and diverse yet normal if that makes sense?! The final series has been a real eye opener. You find out the truth about Gene's world, who he really is and why Alex was there. I wont give the ending away in case some people haven't seen it yet but I thought it was incredible. No-one I know could guess the ending. Ashes to ashes is a classic and will be for many years to come!

I never started watching this until last year and i absolutely loved it so i bought the box set for £20 from ASDA. I am 15 but i love the 1980s very much. I love the music, the fashion and the era itself. I also then watch Life on Mars and i equally loved it. DCI Gene Hunt is one of the most iconic TV detectives of all time. I don't think i have ever seen anyone like him and Phillip Glenister plays him absolutely fantastically. The final scenes i found moving as Chris, Ray, Shaz and Alex all say goodbye to Gene Hunt before they all pass off into heaven. The plot at the end i also thought was completely brilliant as the idea that there are 2 different worlds in which when police officers die or are severely injured end up in this other world in which Gene Hunt is there to pass the people into heaven. This is a brilliant show with a brilliant storyline and ending all in all 100% class.

After all that she was dead anyway. All that rubbish in the first series about her parents being killed in a car bomb! It all came to nothing, the story line just dropped. We didn't even find out who shot her or why. All the screen time they wasted showing her angst over being apart from her daughter and she never got back to her. The last episode played out with Gene Hunt as a God type figure acting as custodian for the lost souls of dead coppers. His rival spent a couple of minutes trying to usher the supporting cast down to "the basement" before putting in a ridiculous turn outside the pub snarling like some hell hound. Alex Drake was supposed to be strong willed, resourceful and intelligent and yet she played no part in the three minutes or so they used to end the story. Why couldn't they just have her wake up in the hospital bed? I will watch out for further work from the writing team and avoid it to save myself further misery.Just as disappointing as Life on Mars when Sam Tyler solved the mystery of who kidnapped his girlfriend. He solves it in an early episode, they arrest some guy and Sam realises he will become the kidnapper later on in life, but when Sam returns to the "real world" we don't get any further mention of his girlfriend, the kidnapper or the fact that Sam has put the pieces together. These, along with DI Drake's daughter and the mystery of her parents' death are the reasons we tuned in each week and the writers just left them hanging. What a shame. I've seen the ending to the US version of Life on Mars and at least it had the good grace to provide a proper ending, even though they nicked it from an episode of Red Dwarf.

This is certainly an entertaining show, but not up to the standard of Life on Mars.The basic template and structure is here, with similar plot devices, etc (the clown instead of the testcard girl, and the vision of a key event from childhood, for example), but what is lacking is an emotional depth to the character of Alex who is almost flippant about her predicament, and the more cohesive links between the "present day" and 1981, such as the links between Alex in 1981 and what Alex in the present is enduring. With LoM we were strongly reminded on a regular basis of the link between Sam's present day physical self and his 1973 self. Apart from the odd vision of her daughter, Alex appears to have almost no connection at all.Furthermore, the occasional forced dialogue and "speechgiving" we saw in LoM is present in abundance here, along with a severe amount of cheese and an embarrassingly predictable attempt at "sexual tension".The result is something that, instead of coming across as a kind of sequel, comes across as a poor copy. Disappointed.