The backdrop to this week’s A2A was a fairly run-of-the-mill cop story: Gypsy is killed while being chased by police, turns out to have been under the influence of drugs because a bent doctor had been shagging his girlfriend, whom he used to abuse, so one or other or both of doctor/girlfriend had been feeding him sleeping pills and lending him an Austin Princess with its brakes cut hoping for the inevitable to happen. Beneath the surface though, there’s lots more going on. For one thing, the doctor is a square sort of bloke.

Related: Episode 1 review

Loved the “death of a Princess” line, by the way, delivered in trademark clipped tones by Gene while looking at the upturned vehicle he’d been chasing. I’d lay money that I don’t catch all these snappy one-liners after only one viewing of each episode, but the ones I do catch are bloody funny. Mostly.

Anyway the “police corruption” thread warmed up this week as Gene, on the back of the revelation that Doctor Battleford is a square sort of bloke (i.e. a Mason), is invited to join the inner sanctum, where he discovers that Ray Carling is The Tiler. An interesting dynamic is established where Ray has the upper hand at Masons’ meetings while Gene remains The Gov when they’re at work. Another excuse for Ray to vent his frustrations with… well… just about everything. He’s an angry man, is Ray.

Alex, having followed Gene to the induction, is convinced he’s gone over to the dark side, but he later reveals that he’s playing them. He needs to find out how high up the corruption goes, and he can only do that from the inside. She’s relieved on account of him being one of her only anchor points in the 1980s, but she has another scary visitation on the stairs at the Masonic Hall from the “other” future-dweller and receives several messages via TV and computer screens that she’s in crash, with only minutes left to live.

After the good start last week I found this episode a little disjointed, with the references to Alex’s future life once again beginning to feel “tacked on” to the main action. This is a repeat of the pattern established in the early episodes of Series 1, and is slightly disappointing, but it’s early days yet and the action remains interesting in an eighties-cop-show-blunt-nostalgia kind of way. I only hope we’re not going to have to sit through six run-of-the-mill “middle” episodes just to benefit from a decent opening and a (hopefully) brilliant series finale. This could easily turn into one of those shows you have to keep watching just to discover how it turns out, even though much of it is like watching paint dry.