Only a few seconds in, and with Molly talking to her Mum via the medium of an episode of Grange Hill, there's no doubting we're back in the weird and wonderful world of Ashes to Ashes and any minute now the Quattro's going to be fired up and all hell will break loose. Except, rather than breaking loose, it's been tied up. Tied up and asphyxiated. At a strip club.

True to form, Gene wants to clear things up as quickly and tidily as possible, and opts for the easy answer: sex game gone wrong, accidental death, oh dear. Matters take a turn for the worse when they discover the dead guy is a copper - PC Sean Irvine - who was working vice, but not supposed to be mixed up in it.

Everyone is telling the same story - that Sean was a good guy and being tied up in some strange sex game was totally out of character. Alex smells a rat, their only witness - the stripper Sally - is shot while being questioned, and it turns out Sean's "devastated" wife Ruth was having an affair with Gene's boss, Detective Superintendent Mackintosh. The postmortem reveals Alex's suspicions were correct - Sean had been drugged with chloryl hydrate and forcibly held down before being strangled.

His best mate Kevin Hales, who looked far too sweaty from the start, has an alibi that crumbles to dust at the slightest scratch. He retrenches to his flat with a rifle in desperation, but whatever is going on goes a lot deeper than Hales. Alex's investigations shine the blue light of suspicion in the shifty eyes of DS Mackintosh, who greasily closes ranks with Hunt, sharing a manly shot of whisky behind the door that is closed to upstart women police officers who are getting above themselves. The start of the police corruption thread that's set to continue throughout this series, I found the subtle introduction to what should have been an unexpected subtext very nicely done, and Mackintosh makes a believable (and, more importantly, easily detestable) villain.

More disturbingly for Alex, she's chloroformed and dragged off to a medically-equipped lock-up by a man who appears to know her secret. If there's more than one person here from the future, what does that mean for Alex and her understanding of how 1982 works? And are her strange messages - from TV, and from the mouths of old ladies and police dogs - really telling her that, back in the future, her body has at last been found and taken to hospital?

This long-awaited and much anticipated first episode of the new series set a great pace, but also managed the tricky balance of making that pace feel exciting and involving, rather than rushed and superficial. I don't know it it's because I've had my expectations reset after the first series, but I found the whole thing much more watchable, more believable, and more entertaining this time around. The clever (and occasionally corny) one-liners are still there in abundance but somehow the characters have "settled down" a bit. They're more real. And fleshing out the series to have more than "Alex's mystery" going on - and even to give that mystery an added dimension with the arrival of the mysterious abducter - has brought an intriguing new depth to the show.

Overall a cracking start to what promises to be a great series - the boys are back on form! And finally, remembering that nothing happens in Ashes to Ashes that is not significant, I offer you this: What's with all the low-angle shots of cars driving off with things dangling out of the drivers' doors? Were they seat belts? Coat belts? One of each? I noticed it at least twice. What does it mean?