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Life On Mars

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21:09 / 13.02.07

I stayed on to catch the second episode and, well, I second much of what you're saying - but I think that, given choice, they had to kick it back down to basics following the season-ender last time, in that they seem to be pretending that it didn't happen, or that it's all perfectly normal, etc, etc.

I can't say I didn't like the two episodes I've seen tonight, though - I do have some hopes for future episodes, and I think next week's - or the week after that's, technically, - has real real potential. But my predictions in the past have been wrong, so I get the feeling I shouldn't prognosticate in public. Not since the restraining order, anyway.

It's too late for much more in the way of coherent thought, so I think I'll sleep on it.

08:26 / 14.02.07

miss wonderstarr:

"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."

But what about the telephone call from Hyde? I'm not sure if it's suggestive of time travel exactly, but it certainly adds ambiguity.

miss wonderstarr

08:43 / 14.02.07

I thought the phone call was definitely signalled as "from the future", ie. from someone next to Sam's hospital bed in (?) 2003 or 2005. I assume it's someone we've heard talking to Sam before in season 1, but whom I've forgotten about; he recognised the voice and was only surprised that they could have a conversation, not that he could hear it.

The operator providing a Hyde number would just be a way of the "past" (the coma) rationalising Sam's visions from the future/present day, as it did with the hallucination from the abandoned TV set that was explained by having a tramp emerge behind it.

10:43 / 14.02.07

Can anyone remember the exact words? It was something along the lines of: "the job's nearly done" and "don't mess it up by giving yourself away, or we won't be able to get you out of there". To me, it didn't sound like a bedside coma message. It *could* be the memory of a 'future' Sam mission, I suppose.

11:49 / 14.02.07

For anyone who didn't watch the second episode:

"DON'T MOVE! YOU'RE SURROUNDED BY ARMED BASTARDS!"

lonely as a cloud...

12:10 / 14.02.07

That was in the trailer for episode 2 they showed on BBC1, Sax. *Excellent* line.

I was a little underwhelmed by last night's episode, I have to say. I mean, if it was another show, I'd've been pretty impressed, but... They do seem to have just conveniently dropped some points from the first series. Last night's episode seemed to give a little too much away; it'll be interesting to see how it fits into the rest of the second series.

13:15 / 14.02.07

WARNING exteme literalness follows --

The strength of the show up to now has been the either/or ambiguity of whether he's in a coma or in the past.

However, after the last show of the first season and especially after the dénouement of this first episode, it would seem that we are expected to believe that Sam is both in a coma and in the past.

Sam's hospital environment was played up and the fact that he seemed to literally change the future of 1973 or the past of 2006 (whichever!) by changing the bad guy from someone who goes on to become rich and dangerous to someone who goes on to be in psychiatric care for 30 years and is found being pathetic in a hospital in the year 2006. (His incarceration under the mental health act would seem an extreme diagnosis for one outburst while under stress in Police custody, surely!)

Perhaps the voice on the phone has found a way to telephone all the way back to the actual police station in 1973! Granted the introduction of so much sci-fi at this point might jar somewhat. Hearing the voice say 'Hold on Sam, we can get you out of there just as soon as you do what you were sent there to do' (or words to that effect), reminded me of that other Sam who regularily received precisely the same message, while unwillingly stuck in the past. Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap. In fact I was expecting Sam Tyler to say 'Oh Boy!' at some point in the proceedings.

However, this explanation would depend on Sam getting correct information from his hospital bed about how the future was changing rather than just more garbled nonsense from his subconscious.

Also, to step outside the 'text' for a bit, surely the proposed sequel starring the Gene Hunt character, but not Sam, would imply that Gene has some existence as a character beyond being a figment of Sam's imagination?

In other words that within the fiction of the show, Gene really existed in 1973?

Unless 'Ashes to Ashes' will be about another copper that goes into a coma and also meets Gene Hunt. Perhaps a side-burned, black-gloved, slightly bent cop is in fact a common archetype, deeply ingrained in every member of the human race but about whom Jung and Cambell never got around to mentioning. Then again the sequel could be about a cop who watches 'Life on Mars' and then gets a severe head-trauma and dreams of Gene-ie.

13:31 / 14.02.07

After feeling cheated by the end of series one (it felt like a hasty and poor rewrite had been done to allow a second series, and I felt cheated), I won’t be watching this until the final episode, to see how they resolve it, if indeed they do.

But that’s not why I’m posting, the thing is this : if you live in London, this Friday (16th Feb), I believe they’re giving away a Life On Mars DVD with the Evening Standard ‘newspaper’. Buy it, ditch the appalling Daily-Mail-lite paper, and enjoy the DVD (one episode, I’d guess)…

14:18 / 14.02.07

Good stuff. As a bonus, that weekend supplement they have will allow me to catch up with the elevated doings of my betters, such as Charlotte Hyphen-Twittering (newly presented in society) and Lionel Foxxe-Throttler, just back from his beastly African misadventures.

Back to the thread...

15:59 / 14.02.07

I think that, with the telephone call, they're locking the series down into a more definite area in order to 'make up for' the up-in-the-airness, 'hastily written' nature of the season ender. Now, we're invited to believe that John Simm may be in a coma; he may be hallucinating; he may actually be in 1973; but now we know it's for a reason.

Possibly.

miss wonderstarr

18:24 / 14.02.07

I have to agree with Chew On Fat (and Feverfew) here. To make up for the lack of satisfying resolution to the interesting ambiguity last series, they're now subtly but significantly changing the rules and pinning down the concept, it seems. The season 1 finale has apparently been conveniently forgotten ~ that is, I've forgotten its details, and the producers seem to be taking advantage of that, doing nothing to remind me ~ and a weird new having-it-all premise seems to have been introduced whereby Sam has both gone into a coma, and gone back in time.

Absolutely, if Gene exists in the 1983 "Ashes to Ashes", then the 1973 milieu has an independent truth to it, regardless of Sam, and isn't merely Sam's creation.

But it's equally clear that Sam has a dual existence in the hospital bed and in 1973, and that he can act now to change the future.

I'm really not entirely happy with this development, which seems somehow to be at the same time a clarification and a muddying of waters.

It's as though The Singing Detective didn't reach its resolution at the end of the serial, where it should obviously and necessarily have ended ~ but started again a year later, with the main character as a real detective careering through realities (World War Two, Forest of Dean) trying to discover his secret mission so he could get back to the future. As such, it's apparently departed from psychological thriller and become just plain SF thriller. It's given up on being Iain Banks' The Bridge, and become Michael French's Crime Traveller.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

18:46 / 14.02.07

This was the first episode of the programme I've seen, and was progressively more and more disappointed with it as it passed. Still, I kept on watching, as it was sufficiently OK to see how they would handle the gradual collapse of his psyche in the coma, but the ending just made my blood boil.

SPOILERS

(His incarceration under the mental health act would seem an extreme diagnosis for one outburst while under stress in Police custody, surely!)

Though this entirely unlikely in fact, it's still fair enough that the reality of the situation can be stretched, under the circumstances, ie that he is experiencing some sort of delusions in the coma. The thing which bothered me most about this was the way in which the implications of dealing with someone you can't put inside by means of evidence by having them sectioned (or the 1970s equivalent thereof) seemed to be done as a neat, all-round clever solution with no moral consequences for our hero. Which basically, it's not, and implying that it is in a TV programme rankles more than a bit, even if said character is meant to be (apparently) making it all up in a coma dream.

19:08 / 14.02.07

I have to agree with Chew On Fat (and Feverfew) here. To make up for the lack of satisfying resolution to the interesting ambiguity last series, they're now subtly but significantly changing the rules and pinning down the concept, it seems. The season 1 finale has apparently been conveniently forgotten ~ that is, I've forgotten its details, and the producers seem to be taking advantage of that, doing nothing to remind me ~ and a weird new having-it-all premise seems to have been introduced whereby Sam has both gone into a coma, and gone back in time.

But that's not a new premise. It was always the case in the first series that if he *had* travelled back in time, then the coma stuff was still true. The coma wasn't negated by the possibility of time travel. The alternatives presented were that he was in a coma and imagining all the 70s stuff, in a coma and pushed back in time as a result of the coma, or in the 70s and not in a coma at all.

I'm glad they've decided to forget the final episode of the last series. Really, they had no other option if the show was to remain in any way watchable. I also think that the idea that the main reason for watching it was to find a solution to the time travel riddle is ridiculous - the reason for watching is the interplay between the characters, same as it ever was, and that's just as strong this time around as it was before.

And comparisons to The Singing Detective? That just confirms that you're expecting far too much from this - or, if not too much, then something completely divorced from what the reality was ever going to be.

The one thing that I'm not happy with, in fact, is the way that the writers have felt the need to put another daft, series-spanning plot device in there - the mystery telephone call. If they should have learned anything from the first series it's that they're not very good at pulling that kind of thing off. To put it mildly. I can't for the life of me see why we need that sort of crappiness in something that would work equally well - better - without it.

19:52 / 14.02.07

I love the daft, series-spanning plot devices - to be fussed about whether or not they "pull it off" in the end is to miss the point again. The point *is* to muddy the waters and stimulate a lot of highly enjoyable speculation. MYSTERY, ffs.

What did people reckon to the handling of - hang on, that's episode 2, innit? This is going to prove frustrating...

miss wonderstarr

19:53 / 14.02.07

The alternatives presented were that he was in a coma and imagining all the 70s stuff, in a coma and pushed back in time as a result of the coma, or in the 70s and not in a coma at all.

That's fair; but now all but one of those options has been apparently closed down, I suppose. It's B.

I'm glad they've decided to forget the final episode of the last series. Really, they had no other option if the show was to remain in any way watchable. I also think that the idea that the main reason for watching it was to find a solution to the time travel riddle is ridiculous - the reason for watching is the interplay between the characters, same as it ever was, and that's just as strong this time around as it was before.

Well, we can't say why people other than ourselves watched it. The time travel riddle wasn't my main reason, but it was a key reason. The interplay between the characters is certainly appealing, but I can see it becoming a bit samey without any sense of progression or "arc".

And comparisons to The Singing Detective? That just confirms that you're expecting far too much from this - or, if not too much, then something completely divorced from what the reality was ever going to be.

Again, while I can see your point of view, I'm not sure if the absolute sense of what the reality of Life On Mars was ever going to be can be pinned down as a comparison point. I can accept that it's plausible the creators didn't mean it to be read as a complex psychological mystery like The Singing Detective, but if it was really just intended as a fun 1970s nostalgia buddy romp, there was no need for the hallucinations, fantasy visions, flashbacks and four-image-per-second sequences, which were presented as an ongoing puzzle that built up week by week, clearly aiming at a resolution and climactic epiphany in the final episode.

Do you see The Singing Detective as some kind of high-flown art-TV with which it's ludicrous to compare Life On Mars? It was a popular, entertaining drama, among other things ~ like much of Potter's work.

miss wonderstarr

19:54 / 14.02.07

The point *is* to muddy the waters and stimulate a lot of highly enjoyable speculation. MYSTERY, ffs.

Even in Scooby-Doo, a mystery is solved at the end. If Life On Mars is about mysteries that refuse closure, it's more art-TV than The Singing Detective, which was happy with a nice ends-tied wrap in the final episode.

20:21 / 14.02.07

if it was really just intended as a fun 1970s nostalgia buddy romp, there was no need for the hallucinations, fantasy visions, flashbacks and four-image-per-second sequences, which were presented as an ongoing puzzle that built up week by week, clearly aiming at a resolution and climactic epiphany in the final episode.

That felt like a hedging of bets, to me - kind of "if the 70s cop thing doesn't take, maybe the coma/time travel thing will". Also, some links back to shows that may well have provided inspiration for this - in particular, Quinn Martin productions like The Fugitive and The Invaders, and the frequently terrible Quantum Leap - where the iea of there being a hidden reason behind everything that's always just out of reach of our main character provides the makers with a world of excuses for continuing the franchise.

The two things sit together so uneasily, imo, that they don't feel like part of the same process of creation - the culture clash is clearly the core of the show, because that's what it's always spent most of its time focusing on, and teh mystery comes across as having been pasted on halfway through development of that core idea.

That's why I don't think comparison with something like The Singing Detective is accurate - because there you have a show that is obviously a complete package, a coherent whole that you couldn't take anything out of without ripping the entire thing apart. Here, you could pull the rubbish leading up to the Sam's dad episode from the first series and the telephone calls from this one without having any kind of negative effect on the individual storylines.

I mean, the telephone call mystery thing is *so* unimportant to the enjoyment of these first two episodes of the second series that it doesn't even appear until thirty seconds before the credits roll each time. It detracts from everything that's gone before, because this time around you know it's just there to provide Simm with an out and the writers with their exit strategy.

miss wonderstarr

20:36 / 14.02.07

Interesting points and you put them across reasonably and persuasively, so thanks.

07:55 / 15.02.07

Randy:

"The alternatives presented were that he was in a coma and imagining all the 70s stuff, in a coma and pushed back in time as a result of the coma, or in the 70s and not in a coma at all."

miss wonderstarr:

"That's fair; but now all but one of those options has been apparently closed down, I suppose. It's B."

A is still an option, isn't it? Yes, Sam hears voices saying that "a nutter got in and nearly killed him, but it's alright now" but we, the viewers, have been given no evidence that that has actually happened in the real world. There is no cut to Sam, present day, in his hospital bed, medics rushing around etc.

We only see and hear what Sam himself sees and hears, and therefore the apparent glimpses into the real world could be as imaginary as the world he's stuck in. Including all the stuff that happened with his father in the final episode of season 1, btw.

"Even in Scooby-Doo, a mystery is solved at the end. If Life On Mars is about mysteries that refuse closure, it's more art-TV than The Singing Detective, which was happy with a nice ends-tied wrap in the final episode."

Oh, I'm not saying there won't be a solution at the end. I'd love it if there wasn't, but it seems unlikely. No, what I'm saying is that I'm not afraid of a weak solution, or an incredibly contrived, implausible one, because I'm too busy enjoying the mystery and the speculation etc to care about whether the writers have been terribly terribly naughty and/or lazy.

08:44 / 15.02.07

"What did people reckon to the handling of - hang on, that's episode 2, innit?"

If we're thinking of the same thing, then I wan't totally impressed, but I can't help but feel that it was supposed to be a 'burning issue' toned down in language and content to fit the BBC brief, which meant that while it was supposed to be a shock, it almost ended up being as accepted that it was 'just another part of the 70s'.'

It also reinforced a pet theory that I have that each of the policemen in the unit represents a different aspect of Sam's psyche, and that Ray is the negative aspects of the psyche, Chris is Innocence, and that Gene is overseeing all of this while a parade of psychological issues goes by in the form of criminals and crimes for Sam to sort out as a form of therapy. Perhaps I'm not the only one with this theory.

I was similarly unimpressed with the ease of the sectioning and the seeming ease of Sam's rationalising of such - especially when you consider that, if both realities are right, that this causes Warren's character to be sectioned, apparently, for knocking on thirty years for what was made out to be a fantasy story about an arresting officer - that part was a little chilling, and led on to the whole 'What will Sam do to have to survive a future he can't prove exists outside of his own head' issue...

09:24 / 15.02.07

Feverfew:

"If we're thinking of the same thing"

Yep. I thought it dodgy that Sam had to be the inspiration for *cough cough spoilers etc but you know what I mean*

"I was similarly unimpressed with the ease of the sectioning and the seeming ease of Sam's rationalising of such"

I agree on the former - though for all I know such things were possible back then - but I thought the latter was explained by Sam's belief that he could influence the future and his knowledge that the Casino geezer was going to brutally rape and murder his future wife. Given that, it seemed fair enough to me.

09:40 / 15.02.07

I agree with you that the end technically justifies the means - but the idea behind the show of Paradox and Flow of Time makes it relatively complicated, and this doesn't always, in my humblest opinion, mesh with the narrative necessities.

I find it problematic because there are, to me, so many angles;

- If Sam is really from 2006 and knows - knows - that what he remembers will come to pass, then sectioning one man for thirty years to avoid many deaths, injuries and broken lives is not a bad plan.

- If Sam is, however, really in 1973 and hallucinating 2006, then he has no proof inside his own head or outside to prove that what he's experiencing pain-and-penitude wise in the episode is down to Warren's character. From this angle, it becomes cruelty, especially when the hallucination changes to show Warren's character as - and I can't remember the exact phrasing here - 'just an old psycho case' - and Sam is satisfied because he has prevented his hallucinatory death by destroying someone else's life.

- Or if , as the phone calls suggest, Sam is there for a real reason - he has some sort of function in the system there - then the sectioning means that he has removed one more dangerous element from the system he's stuck in, and that he was, possibly evidently, meant to do this. This then becomes the 'it's not nice but it has to be done' theory to me.

I'm analysing this in too much depth - I'm well aware of this - but it's playing on my mind a little at the moment.

The question becomes, for me, then; what lengths will Sam go to to establish his reality - whichever one is true, shiny and real?

miss wonderstarr

20:12 / 20.02.07

Based on episode 2, they seem almost to have abandoned the whole time-travel enigma and just made a decent cop show set in 1973. Or, they've gone 90% in that direction, and the remaining 10% seems pretty cheesy: mysterious voices, visions, predictions that Sam really would have learned by now not to keep making.

Regrettable Juvenilia

21:31 / 20.02.07

I would have enjoyed that episode thoroughly were it not for the simultaneous political and aesthetic car-crash that was Sam teaching Fletcher to be a good role model. Because, of course, there's nothing like a nice LIBERAL FROM THE FUTURE to inspire teh black man... Dear Lord. It's as if Marty McFly had not only inspired Chuck Berry to invent rock and roll, but also told Dr King he ought to have a dream. It's the kind of thing that makes you think "surely somebody must have realised how deeply condescending this would seem?", but I guess not...

Gene's dialogue is still the best reason to watch this.

miss wonderstarr

21:39 / 20.02.07

There was something very retro, in a bad way, about seeing Glen turn from clownish minstrel to noble, grey-haired old sage ~ from the Stepin Fetchit stereotype to the Morgan Freeman stereotype. And ironic on a few levels that Sam had to tell Glen he didn't have to be an Uncle Tom. Donald Bogle's book on caricatured representations of Black people in cinema would identify the 1973 Glen as a "coon", but the 2006 version seems to fit his account of a "Tom":

hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless, and oh-so-very kind. Thus they endear themselves to white audiences and emerge as heroes of sorts.

16:21 / 21.02.07

Okay, just to keep the thread from becoming messy and spoilerific, I'm going to ask that we refrain from talking about episodes shown on BBC4 until they're aired on BBC2 - that's a delay of a week for those watching the digital channel. Any early mentions of episodes yet to be shown on BBC2 will be put forwards for editing from this point on.

Fair enough?

miss wonderstarr

20:27 / 06.03.07

Well, this show seems to have lost its Barbelith fanbase... I felt this episode was pretty meaty and satisfying, with about the right balance of future-shock, knowing cultural foreshadowing and pertinent contemporary parallels, in the mix with a good wallop of flirting, tyre-screeching action and wire-cutting tension. As such, I'd say it was classic LoM.

Interesting (and a little disappointing) to note, though, that the first post on this thread identifies the key theme from the post episode thus

"whatever happened to trusting your instinct?"

which doesn't suggest it's all moved on very far.

miss wonderstarr

21:15 / 06.03.07

Oh yes. Frank Miller? I found it hard to take any scene very seriously when they used his name.

07:10 / 07.03.07

Ditto.

I watched this two weeks ago on the beeb4 showing, so it's not entirely fresh in my mind - but one thing stuck with me, and that's Gene Hunt's Equal Opportunities Xenophobia (or, occasionally, Misanthropy), which seems to be used again and again as an attempt at humour to make the viewer laugh at him, but just ended up, in my case, making me feel uncomfortable.

It's not even so much the anti-Irish tendencies Gene shows throughout the episode - it's the throwaway line about pyjamas to an Asian couple moving in at the end that annoyed me. Like I say, possibly just thin-skinned.

Also, Ray still just annoys me for no logical reason.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:16 / 07.03.07

Well, this show seems to have lost its Barbelith fanbase...

Er, no, it's just that viewers with cable (teh man out of time) haven't seen a new episode in two weeks. I'm a bit baffled by what the BBC are doing, actually - they skipped a week because of the football, and did the same with the one-week-ahead BBC4 episode, repeating the first episode of this season on that channel in that slot instead. But then this week, when you'd expect them to get back to normal, they showed the second episode of this season in that slot... i.e., directly after the third. Between this and the Sky/Virgin mardy fight that means I'm deprived of Lost and BSG, it's tempting just to jack the whole thing in and watch DVDs instead (mmm, The Wire). SORT IT AAAHT, BEEB!!

miss wonderstarr

09:17 / 07.03.07

Er, no, it's just that viewers with cable (teh man out of time) haven't seen a new episode in two weeks.

True, including me ~ I was just being impatient that nobody had posted about it in the first half hour following last night's screening.

07:40 / 14.03.07

Oh, but I was apparently a fool, to believe that BBC4 would actually screen the next episode.

There's some humour in a channel showing the previous episode of a time-travel show instead of the next one - as advertised - but I'm not awake enough yet to appreciate it.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

19:32 / 21.03.07

I found this week’s episode a good deal more fun than this series has been so far. The Camberwick Green stuff was classic and resulted in me and my mates shouting ‘Keep out of Camberwick Green’ at each other all day at work, much to the perplexity of those who don’t watch the show. The episode also seemed to show Gene u pas even more of a nasty shit than usual – less the sort of wrong bastard, love to hate him, but he gets the job done type, and more just a useless, incompetent tosser, which is actually okay by me. Obviously the attempts to blur the issue of whether Sam is in a comma or really in the past remain increasingly clumsy, but all in all still probably the most fun episode of the new series so far.

22:07 / 21.03.07

I quite liked the key-party episode.

Reminded me of my happy days in Broadmoor in the 70s.

20:14 / 28.03.07

I'm finding Life on Mars strange; some of the main plotlines for recent episodes - for me - don't engage, and yet they feel stronger as a whole. Last night, however, the introduction of Toolbox felt a little odd, in that I would have thought he might have popped up earlier; and I thought some of the institutionalised racism was badly handled, but I can't put a finger on what, specifically.

However, I really did like Sam's expression of abject frustration every time someone - mostly Ray - said something incredibly offensive like it meant nothing. That was a highlight.

Is anyone else sticking with this? And are we going to have to print up the "Free Gene Hunt" t-shirts after next week?

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