Series begins on April 14 at 9:30 p.m.
London, 2008. DI Alex Drake has risen rapidly through the Metropolitan Police and has an added string to her bow. A trained psychologist, she is writing a book on colleagues who have suffered trauma, and spent several months studying Sam Tyler, the DCI who found himself in 1973 when he was hit by a car and fell into a coma. Brilliant at her job but at the expense of a home life, she has no relationship save that with her 12-year-old daughter Molly.
As Alex drives Molly to school on her birthday, she is called to a hostage scenario where drug-addled Arthur Layton holds a gun to the head of a busker. When Alex tries to reason with Layton, he tells Alex that he knew her parents, both of whom were killed when Alex was only eight years old. Layton manages to get Alex away to an abandoned boat, where he shoots her in the head.
Alex opens her eyes – to find herself dressed in a red leather mini skirt and fur coat, with Ultravox ringing in her ears. She is surrounded by hedonistic City boys (who look like something out of Miami Vice) and prostitutes partying on a boat. It’s 1981. Alex is confused, to say the least.
She is even more confused when the police crash in; they are Sam Tyler’s creations: DCI Gene Hunt, DS Ray Carling and DC Chris Skelton. Armed with this knowledge, she thinks she is in the driving seat and knows how this world works – but she doesn’t. If she can just keep her brain working by solving cases, then it should buy her time to work out how to get back to her daughter in 2008.
There’s a growing drug problem in London and Gene Hunt thinks he is the man to stop it. He suspects the brains behind it all is City playboy, Edward Markham, a man whose pastel suits and arrogance typify the 80s yuppies he hates. But while he’s planning a major drug bust, Alex finds a tape of surveillance footage on Arthur Layton, her kidnapper in 2008, now just a down-at-heel junk dealer. Convinced he is the mastermind behind the case, she challenges Gene.
Following a few bottles of Chianti, Gene looks at the evidence acquired by Alex and finally sees she is not just a bit of posh totty; she has brains as well as looks. He is ready to take on the London drug dealers in his own, classic, swashbuckling style. But Alex is convinced she needs to solve the problem alone – catching Layton might be the only way to grab control of her destiny and provide the trigger that gets her out of 1981, back to her old life and to Molly.
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