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If we haven't got a new thread for this... I think my expectations were perhaps too high. It seemed a little too much of the same-old, considering that last series' arc should have made some major changes somehow. Sam still seemed to be wandering around acting "mad" and being tolerated for it ~ I'm not sure if either is plausible. After all that emotional journey last series, would you still be blurting out "I'm gonna meet you... I mean, erm, I feel like we might have already met." Surely you would have become used to blending in, keeping your trap shut and not acting the time traveller?
The "stinger" bit was cute, if a little bit inevitable, but I really wouldn't want this to turn into "Sam Tyler invents modern policing in 1973", and there were a few examples of that even in this one episode. Again, how long is that "I'm from Hyde" thing going to fly, when he keeps mentioning squads that don't exist yet and abbreviations that were introduced some time in the 80s? (And why does he keep saying the time-gap is 30 years? Was the present day really 2003?)
After the father-son arc ended with a bit of a whimper, obviously we needed another major strand to see through the series, and I'm not sure whether that's convincingly been threaded into this episode. There's no apparent visual puzzle, equivalent to Sam's flashbacks last time, and the idea that he's there to do a secret mission, but also can't return until he's let go of whatever's keeping him there (surely Annie?) manage to be both banal and kind of contradictory.
Finally, the ambiguity about his coma vs time-travel seems to have been resolved ~ disappointingly. He's obviously in a coma, and now the communication with the future is becoming rather flatly literal. The title sequence still suggests it's in question whether he's really back in time, or just imagining it. I'm not sure how the detailed, rich world of 1973 really tallies as something in Sam's imagination. |
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