Don't Move, You're Surrounded By Armed Bastards (Wearing Lots of Hair Gel)

SO, DCI GENE HUNT is back. And this time he's taking guff from a bird.

Ashes to Ashes, the sequel series to Life on Mars, debuted last week in the U.K. to seven million viewers.

Ratings dropped in the second week by a million, as more than a few viewers decided the eighties weren't quite as fun as the seventies. Tell me about it, brother.

1973 is out. So's Manchester and Sam Tyler. Our hero now is DI Alex Drake. Taken hostage in 2008, she sees the bullet that will kill her. Now, in her estimation she's a moment from life or a moment from death.

The conceit of Ashes to Ashes (starring the delectable Keeley Hawes from MI:5/Spooks) is that, unlike Sam Tyler -- Alex knows precisely what's going on in her jaunt to the past. We find out that she studied Tyler after his coma. (We see a brief notation on his file: suicide.) During the course of becoming acquainted with Hunt, (who along with Ray and Chris, have relocated to London and the Metropolitan Police) she finds out that Sam Tyler lived and worked with them for seven years. It's only been a year since he drove his car into the water during an operation, never to be found.

This shocks Drake and re-frames her experience: seems that the seven years Sam experienced here were only a moment in the "real" world. She wants to get home, back to her daughter, Molly.

But there's that Gene Hunt...

Ashes to Ashes suffers somewhat by not having the shock of the new about it. Philip Glenister is still aces as Hunt. We don't get much of a sense of eighties Ray, but Detective Chris Skelton gets a nice grace note. He's not the nervous or hapless guy he was with Tyler -- as he says, he's just "cautious."

And maybe that's why the pilot of Ashes To Ashes left me a little flat. Cautious does seem to be the word for it. Hawes doesn't seem as immediately sympathetic as John Simm did, and I guess I have to admit a certain bias. Having been there the first time, the glance at some of those eighties fashions was...disturbing. Especially the women's fashions. The first time we see Drake in a Flashdance-style off the shoulder tshirt number, I kind of entered a sensory fugue state and no amount of Depeche Mode could pull me out.

There's a hint at where they're going in the pilot -- we're going to see the softer side of Gene Hunt. He certainly seems much more open to Alex's psychological-based insights into policing than he ever was with Sam's 21st century techniques. He even allows a moment of doubt: "the time for coppers like me is coming to an end."

There's a hint that things could turn romantic between the two leads, which certainly would take it into less Mars-like territory. But by offering a concrete explanation up front for Alex's experience, and not letting it be vague and open-ended, it feels maybe like a little something's been lost.

Future eps take on the wedding of Charles and Diana, and hopefully the scourge of shoulder pads.

Ashes to Ashes is fun enough. It's good to see Hunt back in the saddle (of an Audi Quattro, this time) but it's not as fun as Life on Mars.

Time will tell if Hawes signed up to be in the bestselling show, or if she's just beating up the wrong guy.