Life on Mars: cops, robbers, time travel and David Bowie

[Werthead]

Life on Mars is a BBC TV series which aired its first season about a year ago. The second and final season begins this week (Tuesday) on BBC1. BBC America has shown the show in the USA, but the creators of Ally McBeal and Boston Legal are making a US-specific version which should air in 2008 or 2009. It's a bit hard to describe, basically being a collision between a cop show and SF. The basic premise is pretty cool though.

 

In the first episode, we meet Sam Tyler, a relatively young but highly-motivated Manchester policeman who is a bit of a stickler for doing things right. He even takes one of his best detectives off a case he's working on because he's developed a relationship with her and it would be inappropriate for them to work together. Suddenly Sam is hit by a speeding car whilst David Bowie's 'Life on Mars' is playing on his iPod. When he wakes up the same song is still playing...but on an eight-track tape. Somehow, Sam has wound up in 1973. He's still a policeman (apparently having been transferred from another force), but his new boss, Gene Hunt, likes to cut corners, beat confessions out of prisoners and doesn't see anything wrong with planting evidence or taking a backhand bribe from a local crimelord as long as he keeps the lesser criminals under control.

 

The series revolves around two key factors. The first is that neither Sam nor the audience knows why he's travelled backwards in time by 33 years. Has he gone mad? Has he really travelled in time somehow? Or, as increasingly seems likely, is the whole thing a delusion in his brain whilst he lies in a coma? Increasingly bizarre events support this latter interpretation: Sam hears his mother's voice in the distance, begging him to wake up, and in times of high stress he hears the beeping of a life-support machine. Sometimes people on the television start talking directly to him, apparently representing the doctors trying to save him. But there are other signs that nothing is as it seems: the construction of the 1973 world is too real and too detailed, far beyond what Sam himself would be capable of creating in his mind, and there is a tantalising clue in the first episode that something he does in the past changes the future.

 

The main part of the series, however, revolves around the contrasting police methods. Sam's methodical, by-the-book style clashing with Gene's more casual approach. Inevitably, different episodes present both approaches being right in different circumstances. Continuity also plays an important role in the series, with events in one episode playing major roles in the next (Gene and Sam take down an important crimelord in an early episode, allowing a much more nasty piece of work to rise to power later) and an interesting relationship developing between Sam and a female police officer, Annie, who is the only person who confides his status as a time traveller to (she doesn't believe him). Season 1 ends with the apparent revelation of why Sam has gone back in time, but, as may be expected, complications arise which mean that nothing is as it seems.

 

Life on Mars is an extremely entertaining and intelligent series, funny and thought-provoking with strong central performances from John Simm and Philip Glenister as Sam and Gene. It was a major (and somewhat unexpected) success on BBC1 when aired last year. However, Season 2 will be the final season, mainly due to the producers having apparently watched Lost and, concerned that they didn't want to go down the same route of stretching things out for years, they decided they wanted to give all the answers to the audience quite quickly. A spin-off/sequel series set in the 1980s, called Ashes to Ashes (after another Bowie song) is in development.

[Niamh Sedai]

I love Life on Mars. Funny, interesting with a solid plot and really good acting. I am throughly looking forward to the start of Series 2 tomorrow night. I'm quite glad they're not dragging it out though and keeping it to the point. :)