After making us go through 3 entire series with the character of Alex Drake and being aware of her journey and conflict of trying to get back, we realize that the entire conflict never existed and there was no way of getting back. The entire show becomes meaningless in the last hour.
share[deleted]
I understand but you don't think it was a complete slap in the face to the character and her fans? I mean Sam Tyler didn't care about the present time, he came back and threw himself off a roof. He got the ending he wanted. But she wanted to get back for her daughter.. Why create the daughter in the story if the writer's weren't gonna allow her to live? Just to make it more tragic?
And after making sure she was dead and she can't see Molly again, they don't allow her to be with Gene either, they just say "you're dead now get in the pub"
Also the show completely diverted and became about the other characters, even though it was originally about Alex and her journey.
I mean don't have her character say "I'm fighting to get back I'm fighting to get back to see my daughter" on every single goddamn episode yet at the end not let her have anything and shove her into some pub.
These are just the number of ways they screwed the character of Alex Drake.
[deleted]
I dont even mean it in that way. One could make the argument that they loved each other in a romantic way. I even heard Keeley herself said so. But even if it was just platonic love. She wasn't allowed to be with her friend or daughter. They literally sh!t on her character.
I mean come on, as a viewer you expect her to get back to her daughter that's what it was about.
When you watch Ocean's Eleven or The Italian Job you expect the guys to not *beep* up the heist and get it done. Now how it happens and what happens afterwards is how the writer is going to surprise you and keep it original. As in: give the audience what they want but not in the way they expect it.
But you can put your money on it that the heist is going to be pulled off.
When you watch Reservoir Dogs, you clearly don' t have the same expectations. Because you know the movie is about something else entirely even though there's a heist in it.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying here always have happy endings. As Robert McKee puts it, when you watch Godfather Part II, in the end you don't expect Michael to grab Kay and the kids, move to Ohio, and start selling insurance.
The point is, give the ending the story deserves.
Again I repeat, why give her a daughter to begin with? Why repeat it over and over again that she needs to go back to her? Just to make it more tragic?
Just think about her entire life. Her parents die when she's like 10, her husband leaves her when her daughter is 6 months old, and she gets shot in the face by the time she's 30.
To top it off the writers are saying we never intended for her to wake up. We didn't want that with Sam either. Yeah except Sam didn't give a *beep* really and jumped off a roof to be with Annie. So really Sam got the ending he wanted. Do these idiots realize they have a different character on their hands?
[deleted]
Gene didn't want her to be there because he wanted her to be safe from the Keats character and because he kept her there so long because of his selfish reasons. That doesn't prove anything.
Either way, Sam Tyler didn't want to be in the present. He got what he wanted. You can't be sad for someone that clearly chooses his fate.
Are you seriously claiming that one can't, as a writer, explore the Gene Hunt world without revealing that Alex is dead? is it really impossible?
This can't possibly be the limit to the human imagination. I'm sure they would've found a way.
Besides, no one was asking for the show to tie up all the loose ends because that creates more problems than it solves.
Yuppyy, they're all dead cops. Gene Hunt is dead. You've been watching buncha spirits roaming around a limbo world created by him to be exactly the 70's and the 80's, even though he would have no knowledge of it, for 5 years now. Does that really make people happier?
Now every time you watch Life on Mars or the first two Ashes, you're constantly gonna be thinking in the back of your head about some weird christian mythology.
And just the fact that the writers said we either wanted her to wake up and go back or not wake up at all is the most interesting part of all this. So they only reason they didn't try the first option is because they did it the first time with Sam. How the hell does it make sense for her character to wake up and decide to leave her daughter behind and go back to the 80's? They keep saying this as if they don't realize they have a character with different goals and motivations.
[deleted]
Yeah I guess it depends on one's personality. If I watch it now, the limbo thing is gonna be floating inside my mind.
Otherwise, I would have never really cared about the mechanism of what happened and if it was real or a dream.
But there are some people that just need the loose ends tied in an elementary way.
[deleted]
The fact that Alex remembers Evan and not Gene holding her hand when her parents were blown to bits is a big clue that things are not quite right with this reality.
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
Throughout the series it's hard to miss the sexual tension. In one ep they're trapped in a vault, partially disrobed, he's staring at her chest..In another his ex notices something's going on. Then there's the date. The forehead kissing with the obvious frustration when they get interrupted. Seriously? How could you miss that?
The only beef I had with the ending is that had they kissed as was originally intended during the dancing, it would've been much hotter. The one we got was more a goodbye kiss.
"Do you think the world is crawling with Phyllises?"
[deleted]
Close friends? No that wasn't close friends, that was sexual tension.
shareYes but you forgot several things.
* Season 1 episode 6 he was disapointed that Alex had taken up Evan on his offer to take her home after seeing Donny's baby brother - he was looking at his shoes and his facial expressions refer us to his disapointment.
* Season 1 episode 7 he had asked Alex out on a date and was very nervous about it. He was looking down at his shoes.
* Season 1 episode 8 - On his dinner with Alex he smiled when he made her laugh and you hardly saw Gene smile the way he did on that dinner date. Then you had him make an offer to her about going upstairs to watch a movie and was disapointed that she had rejected him. Then straight after that both took HUGE gulps of wine - big sign there.
* Season 2 episode 5 he was extremely jealous of Summers when Alex confirm to him that she was "busy" and then you had him ask her if he was seeing him again.
* Season 2 episode 7 he had asked her to "stay" when they were uncovering chris and then he turned to her for comfort in his flat.
* Season 2 episode 8 was the big one. By then Gene is getting frustrated because Alex hasn't given him a clear indication of how she feels about him and hence you see him snipe at her especially with the stiff comment. When he heard the tape confirming that she wanted to get away from him and that she hated the place he was devestated. He opened up his heart to her in the office scene where he quotes "You talk to me Alex if I mean anything to you at all". That was big for Gene, he never said that to any female not even to Sam. He was devestated with Alex's confession believing that she had pissed in his face - he had laid his heart on the line in that moment and is hurt and then he gets angry. Gene is a man that cannot express his emotions well and he takes it out on her through different mechanisms. Firstly he flaunts Jeannette around in Luigis and gives Alex the cold shoulder and becomes very nasty to her (typical for men of Gene's nature). Then you have that breakdown in the office before he threatens to kill her. He says to her (with tears in his eyes thanks to Philip Glenister's acting) "I really thought you and me, I thought we were the ones that we had a connection". Again we have never seen Gene say that to ANYONE!!! Then he uses Alex's daughter against her because he knows her so well that he knows where to hurt her the most - by saying that she is cold and a bad mother before Alex slaps him. As the saying goes we always hurt the ones that we love the most.
I was watching the show with my father and he said to me there is no way that Gene would've reacted in the manner that he did with Alex if he wasn't in love with her. Note that in series 2 episode 1, the wife who Supermac slept with asked him if he had ever been in love before going on the explain that love is a dark and dangerous place which can leave you not liking yourself very much or somthing to that nature. At the time I didn't realised what that meant but when I saw the series 2 ending it made sense, a lot of reading between the lines was required. Gene is in love with Alex but that turned pear shaped when he heard the tape and heard the confession from Alex - his love took him to a dark place where all of his most genuine insercurities and fears were confirmed to him - that he would never be good enough for a woman like Alex Drake, that she was out of his league. He then lashes out at her and hurts her in the most horrible way but when he is proven wrong about the blag and about Alex he is angry with himself hence is why Gene calls himself a bastard and hits the steering wheel of the Quattro when racing to king douglas lane. When he does shoot her he is horrified over what he had done and goes on the run which we had never seen before even when he had been accused of murder in LOM.
Series 3 didn't address the relationship very well even though it was central especially the last episode of series 2. But after Gene opened himself up to Alex in ep 7 of series 3 only to have Alex run out on him Gene becomes angry with her and is it clear that he was hurt by her actions because again he had put himself on the line by sharing a dance with Alex and tenderly kissing her forehead which again we never saw before with any woman in the series. So in the finale he snipes at Alex all the way through because again he is hurt and angry. You had him admit to her that he was trying to impress her and he had made an effort which we saw in the montage. He had a wet shave with a razor when normally he would use an electric shaver (as seen in series 2 ep 8), he had a proper suit on with gold cufflinks and he polished his shoes. We have never seen that before with any woman or even with his mates.
So there was more than just sexual tension there and there was that deep love there, you just have to read between the lines.
It's life. People with children often get killed.
Love is never having to say you're sober.
Jesus I know that, but in life people also get into random car accidents and die, for no reason. No significance to the events leading up to it. This can't happen in fiction. Fiction follows certain guidelines. You can't have a movie where the main character dies in a car accident and the car accident had no relation or connection to anything in the story.
There was also a guy that broke into the Buckingham palace and got lucky all the way through(with different guards doing different things and/or being absent), and miraculously reached the queen's bedroom. This was real life. You can't do this in fiction because it won't make any sense to have so many coincidences. Coincidences happen in real life to, yet in fiction it's largely frowned upon.
Get my point?
All I meant was Alex's journey didn't follow the initial premise and the logic of the story. There was no real point to her death.
I get your point, but coincidences do happen all the time in fiction. The popular scenario where the rescuer pulls the person to safety a second before the car explodes or the building collapses, for example.
In real life they would either be too late or have plenty of time to spare.
There used to be rules in movies that children were not allowed to die, but that changed long ago as well.
But with A2A and LOM before it, neither plot stands up to close analysis. You could pick it apart on dozens of points. And it certainly can't be compared with Christianity either.
(Theism/Deism perhaps.)
Just got to take - or leave it - it on face value.
Love is never having to say you're sober.
That's more of a close shave than a coincidence.
A coincidence is two independent things happening by random chance and solving the logistics of the story. Usually Deus ex machina.
And yeah i wrote this years ago, i don't really feel so strongly about it now. Still a bit of a cop out of an ending.
That's more of a close shave than a coincidence.
A coincidence is two independent things happening by random chance and solving the logistics of the story. Usually Deus ex machina.
And yeah i wrote this years ago, i don't really feel so strongly about it now. Still a bit of a cop out of an ending.
[deleted]
"Says who? Fiction does not have to follow any guidelines, see French New wave ect. "
Says William Goldman, for example. But maybe he's not good enough for you.
That's why I didn't say rules I said guidelines.
I know about the French New Wave. I was thinking about Brigitte Bardot's character in Contempt dying in a car accident with Jack Palance just completely randomly and for no reason, as I was writing this. But that's the New Wave.
Just because certain few specifically choose to not adhere to guidelines does not mean that some guidelines don't exist. You're thinking way too black and white here.
[deleted]
There are enough hints in that first episode of S3 that she never actually left the other world - the DVDs and posters with Gene, Chris, Shaz and Ray and the fact that she was reawakened by Gene with a slap suggest to me that she was only dreaming that she had returned home to Molly.
She even said to Shaz that it didn't seem real - but she thought that where she was in 1983 wasn't real even though it felt real.
[deleted]
What, so fiction can't end tragically?
shareYes fiction can end tragically but this was poorly done and had no logic in it whatsoever with more holes in the stories than my grandma's rotton curtains.Also what was the point of Alex's journey besides the overall mystery which by the way wasn't really a mystery to begin with. She was a plot device in the end which is pretty lame. The railway arms had NO connection with Alex's journey and it was randomly brought up in a desperate last minute attempt to shoehorn in LOM. You had Luigis that had been there since the first series and yet we never hear from him in the last episode.
Life on Mars was Sam's personal story - a man who was trying to find his heart again. In the real world he was about logic and facts and as a consequence he had stopped living and feeling as a result of it. Being in Manchester 73 made him live and feel again, it made him trust his animan instinct more which was brought up by mayer in the first episode. Nelson said to him "If you can't feel then you ain't living" and that was what summed up the whole piece.
[deleted]
I disagree-Alex had to have a reason to get back to the 'real world'. Molly was it. She was an important plot device and, yes, she was there to tug the heart strings.
share