
I’m reblogging this because I wanted to say, I never thought and will never think what Sam and Gene had was a simple friendship.
Important thing here is that you have to forget about Ashes, just for a moment, and think only about LOM and what the show was about:the complicated relationship between the two contrasting characters, because THAT is what it’s all about.
Sam is thrown into a world which ‘can’t be real’ and until the very end of the show he thinks all these people, Gene and his team, are just part of his imagination. Yet he ‘believes in’ Gene, like he says so himself, and the mutual trust they have for each other goes beyond expectation. Gene trusts Sam enough to give him ‘the power to destroy’ all he has accomplished, while Sam would go against everyone and every facts to prove Gene’s innocence when he was being charged of murder. When he’s in trouble, Sam cries out for Gene and as much as he wants to go back to the real world, at the very last moment he refuses to let his Guv down. They help one another in the most meaningful of ways;they made each other a better person, in the end.
Sam takes the leap of faith when jumps off the roof when he finds out the place where he truly felt alive. It was partly because he was falling in love with Annie but more importantly he could ‘feel’. And I just want to point out, when Nelson says “when you can feel, then you’re alive”, Sam turns his head around to see the table where Gene, Ray, Chris and Annie were drinking at.
In that scene, Annie is sort of out of the picture (you can’t even see her on the side, which I think was very intentional in a way for the writers to make a point in what the show is really about) while Gene is in focus, right in the center, where Sam is looking. And from that you know why the story ended the way it did: the life Sam chose is this place, where he can feel, where he can see Gene.
Gene means life itself to Sam.
Now think about Ashes. You’ll realize that Sam meant the same thing to Gene.