Guest Post by Debaparna Das, INFJ

Ashes to Ashes

Dominant Extraverted Thinking (Te): Alex wants to be in control over her environment, her body, and her fate, all the time. She is thoroughly methodical and goal-oriented, setting clear priorities, drawing up plans, and following precise steps to achieve those goals. If there’s something she’s put her mind to, nothing – except getting bound, gagged, and thrown into a freezer––can stop her from doing it. (She revives a woman from clinical death using CPR and sheer determination.) She gets impatient with the team’s incompetence and problematic attitudes and can be quite ruthless at times. She doesn’t believe in anything without hard evidence to prove it, and is a tireless worker, sometimes going without the recreational breaks that the rest of the team can’t give up on. She asserts her authority by adopting a blunt, somewhat aggressive persona, sometimes shocking the team with her behaviour. However, she can quickly change her attitude when needed, using her training in psychology and criminal behaviour to soothe, intimidate, lead, and manipulate people. As a result, by series 3, the team is following her instructions as promptly as DCI Gene Hunt’s, to the point that Gene feels threatened at times.

Auxiliary Introverted Sensing (Si): Alex is strongly driven by her childhood experiences––her unresolved emotions regarding her parents and her godfather, and the trauma of losing both her parents to a car bomb explosion. She remembers her childhood home vividly and is delighted to be able to revisit the place. For most of series 1, she is haunted by a clown signifying several elements from her past associated with death. Failure to prevent the death of her parents – especially her mother’s – continues to hurt her for a long time after the event, and these feelings form a good part of her attitude as a mother. She pays attention to detail in order to aid her investigations––digging through a number of garbage bags on one occasion because “nothing is insignificant”. She has a good memory and can remember smells, etc. from several years ago (or several years in the future). She relies on her past experiences and training as a police psychologist and is not amused when her old methods don’t succeed. She is also sharply aware of her physical condition, the state of her coma, and the medical team’s attempts to save her.

Tertiary Extraverted Intuition (Ne): Alex thinks she knows exactly what the ‘80s London around her is, but she still wants to be surprised. She has little difficulty in finding new ideas and improvising solutions on the spur of the moment. She can read between the lines and draw inferences to swiftly spot a lead. Much of her work as a psychologist depends on this function – her observation of people, their behaviour and habits, etc., and attempting to draw connections and build a theory. She often makes throwaway comments about pop culture in the future and future developments of current events. She can be very impulsive at times and even paranoid, occasionally jumping to unrealistic conclusions. She keeps hoping that she’ll eventually be able to return to her daughter in the future, despite not knowing when or how, and desperately clinging to any possible way of doing so.

Inferior Introverted Feeling (Fi): Alex refuses to succumb to police corruption at any cost. She takes her job as a psychologist seriously and sometimes tries to help people beyond her duties as a police officer. She almost never discusses the nature and depth of her emotional attachments with other people and rarely gets sentimental in public. On the few occasions that she can’t avoid letting her emotions get in the way of her work, it hurts her more often than helping her. This is something of a problem for people around her, too. Gene Hunt, for instance, often takes her to be a heartless person. However, Alex does care for a limited number of people. She slowly comes to care for the team she works with in the ‘80s, eventually becoming a sort of mother figure to them. She is absolutely devoted to her daughter and wants to return home to her in any way she can. She remains loyal to Gene despite a high level of emotional pressure (although she had once used her connections to temporarily boot him out of office when he wasn’t conducting an investigation properly).

Author’s Note: I kept thinking for a long while that Alex might really be an ISTJ, considering her Fi, but I changed my mind later. Firstly, the plot is shaped in such a way that it focuses on her lower Fi a lot. Initially, she’s in little control over her psychological issues, and much of her arc consists of how she comes to terms with it. She gains the upper hand over it only gradually, reverting to her upper functions for support along the way. Secondly, Ne is stronger in her than how it typically is in an average ISTJ, with only some of its problems from being lower in the function stack. Thirdly, her Te is much more powerful than her Si. To conclude, Alex is a mature ESTJ who develops her inferior function substantially in the three years that she spends in ‘80s London.