Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: Diving Into the Ashes to Ashes Third Season Premiere

"Sometimes in life, you can't help which way you fall."

There was a moment in the third season premiere of BBC One's trippy genre-busting drama series Ashes to Ashes that had me jump for joy: the gorgeous shot of a sheet being sucked backwards off of Gene Hunt's cherry red Audi Quattro before he and Alex took off into the streets of London to the tune of Eurythmics' 1983 hit "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)."

It was a period-appropriate sequence that gleefully summed up everything I love best about this winning and mind-bending series, now entering its final season in the UK. In the hands of co-creator Matthew Graham, we're given a season opener to Ashes to Ashes that is at once dazzlingly operatic and provocatively bleak as the final endgame to a mystery that began all the way back in the first episode of Life on Mars finally comes to a head this season.

That mystery, of course, being: Who is Gene Hunt?

It's a tantalizing one that's at the heart of Ashes' third and final season. (For more on this mystery, you can read my one-on-one interview with co-creator Matthew Graham here.) Thanks to a friend in the United Kingdom, I was able to watch Ashes' fantastic season premiere over the weekend and I'm already jonesing for another fix as this dark new season promises to be the series' best yet.

Warning: spoilers abound for US viewers who haven't seen Season Two of Ashes to Ashes.

The third season begins roughly three months after the events of the second season's cliffhanger-laden finale--in which Philip Glenister's Gene Hunt accidentally shot Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes)--as Alex finally emerges from her coma in 1983. The opening sequence is the television equivalent of pulling the rug out from underneath the audience as it initially appears as though Alex has paid promise to her mission and found a way back to the present day and daughter Molly.

But not so. Despite the scenes shared with a police psychiatrist--clearly intended to echo the final scenes of Life on Mars with John Simm's Sam Tyler--and her trip to a Virgin megastore (where she glimpses DVDs and posters containing Gene and the Fenchurch East team), Alex reemerges from her coma... but back in the world she's come to know as her home, a world shared with Gene Hunt, Ray Carling (Dean Andrews), Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster), and Shaz Granger (Montserrat Lombard).

But while the dream sequence seems like a classic Ashes mind-game, there are some potential clues lurking within Alex's subconscious, most notably the first appearance of Daniel Mays' Jim Keats and the ghostly presence of a dead policeman with half his face missing. It's the juxtaposition of the two which have a striking effect. Does Alex know Keats from her world? Who is the dead copper? Does any of this have to do with Sam Tyler's unsolved disappearance? And are these three things somehow related? Hmmm...

Waking up once more in this dystopia (thanks to a well-timed slap to the face from Gene), Alex discovers that Gene has been on the run in Spain since her shooting and is under investigation by the Discipline and Complaints Division, who has sent their best man--that would be DCI Jim Keats, natch--down to Fenchurch East to keep an eye on Gene and the others. Jim seems to maintain an easy camaraderie with Alex; he claims to want to help her and seems almost aware of her predicament here, saying that he "knows what [she's] going through." He's also keen to get the other officers on his side, offering them champagne and free drinks as an incentive to think of him as just another cop and not a "rubber heeler."

Shaz and Chris have split up, Ray has been promoted to Detective Inspector, and nearly everything is out of whack. While Alex might need a bit of R&R after her coma, she's not going to get it. Dragged back to the station, she attempts to clear Gene's name while jumping into an ongoing investigation into the kidnapping of Dorothy, a young girl being held for ransom.

But while the team manages to successfully recover the girl (hidden at her father's old Dot Matrix warehouse by her step-mother and her criminal ex), there's an ominous scene behind closed doors between Jim Keats and Gene Hunt that's all the more revealing as Jim promises to tear down Fenchurch East around Gene's ears and destroy everything that's he built, offering a reveal that he knows what Gene has done in the past and says that he hates him. One can't shake the feeling that what Gene did might just be connected both to Sam and Alex appearing in this world, Sam's disappearance, and more. It's aided, quite effectively, by Alex finding Sam's redacted file in Gene's cabinet, which had been moved to the storage room during his time on the lam.

"You fooled everyone into believing in you," says Jim. "I have the unpopular job of showing the world what you really are." But what's really quite intriguing is that Jim claims to know just what Gene did "three years ago." Which would be exactly about the time that Sam Tyler disappeared and could explain just why Sam's file is so heavily blacked out... and the reappearance of the half-faceless young copper Alex saw in her coma. Is it Sam Tyler? Did Gene kill him? Was it in an accident or something far worse?

And what does Jim mean when he says that Gene "can't leave here" and that it "defines him"? Just who and what is Gene Hunt? And, consequently, who and what is Jim Keats? What is this place? If it's not Oz, what is it? What does Alex suspect that she would hide Sam's file in her desk? (Love that he offered her a cup of alcohol, nicely echoing the moment in the very first episode of Ashes when Gene poured her a very full glass of wine.)

All questions that will likely be answered over the course of the next seven episodes of Ashes to Ashes' final season, which will finally provide illumination on just what the Manc Lion really is. If this first installment is any indication, we're likely in for one hell of a bumpy ride to the finish line. Just be sure to buckle your seatbelt in the Quattro.

On the next episode of Ashes to Ashes, a severed hand is sent to Fenchurch station; Alex joins a dating agency in order to investigate the murder of several female clients; Alex tries to discover the truth about Sam Tyler's death, but Gene is obstructive.