Did you see the last ever of the series of the BBC’s Ashes to Ashes at the end of May? Coming as a sequel to Life on Mars (2006-7), it was a drama which people found hard to categorise. Was it science fiction, a police drama or what? The final episode answered with a spiritual twist.
Starring Philip Glenister as the foul-mouthed, non-politically correct Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, the scenario always seemed strange. Life on Mars saw policeman Sam Tyler hit by a car but ‘waking up’ years previously as part of Hunt’s team. Had he died, was he in a coma, or was it time travel? Ashes to Ashes followed similar lines, with female detective Alex Drake being shot, but likewise waking up in 1983. The lighting was unusual. The ambience of the series was always weird. The streets, through which Hunt’s red Audi Quattro raced, were unrealistically empty except for the police and the bad guys. Then there were those occasional supernatural visions.
The final episode explained it all. Gene Hunt and his team were all in fact dead and existing in a kind of purgatory, where Hunt was helping them resolve the issues surrounding their untimely deaths before they could go to heaven, represented by an ethereal pub. As a kind of saviour, this was what Hunt had been trying to do with the main characters of the respective series. So, at the end of the last episode, Drake realised she had been dead all along, not just in a coma, and let go of the idea of getting back to her child and went off to heaven.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …