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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Life On Mars

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miss wonderstarr

21:03 / 15.04.07

Yeees, but Hyde was never a real place anyway (is it?) It was always treated as somewhere obscure and distant from Gene's Manchester, I thought. Having Ashes set in London wouldn't necessarily mean Alex Drake couldn't supposedly come from there... or so I understood it.

Anyway, probably not a big deal but I'm just suggesting that some aspects of the Gene 73 were apparently shaped by Sam's specific needs and hang-ups, so the same should be true for a new person entering that fictionverse.

21:06 / 15.04.07

Hyde's in Manchester. The real one, obviously. But Hyde was Sam's anyway, wasn't it? Way I see it, 1973 was Sam's afterlife. Only he wasn't quite dead, and couldn't embrace it as fully as he needed to. Which is why the Hyde story was created by his subconscious mind, to allow him a reason for being in 1973 that wasn't time travel. And when he finally topped himself by jumping off the tall building, he was able to go back to the afterlife fully and properly with a perfect backstory to stop him thinking things through too deeply.

The new character will have a different Gene Hunt. The same but slightly different. Like someone else playing the same computer game.

miss wonderstarr

21:18 / 15.04.07

Ah, OK. Sorry, I didn't realise Hyde was a real place.

miss wonderstarr

21:23 / 15.04.07

Stupid me, just looked it up and remembered that the creators had some qualms about using Hyde because it was Harold Shipman's manor (as well as being where Hindley and Brady were arrested).

Maybe the new protagonist could enter Gene's world as a cop from Harrow ~ fitting for someone who's lost her daughter, and I have some vague idea there's a police training college in Harrow too. Oh they should recruit me as a writer they really should.

00:38 / 16.04.07

Life on Mars is where good coppers go when they die. Everybody gets a different one. Gene Hunt's like St Peter, or God or something. Makes perfect sense to me.

I think so, yeah.

Sam, I suppose, being the kind of character who'd have joined the Force so he could 'make a difference', while at the same time having signed up for duty because he was on some level seduced by images of early Seventies cop shows on TV.

So '1973' is really the best, most comfortable version of hell, or the Bardo experience, anyway, that's available to him. It's a bit tragic to think of Sam fighting with Gene's unreconstructed ideas for the rest of enternity, but on the other hand, from Sam's point of view, he does get to make a difference, plus get in car chases and so on, so it could be worse.

It'd be a bit crass to bring up 'The Third Policeman', but as an example of a hell that would, in a funny way, be almost tolerable, it's possibly, vaguely, something that was being referenced in the script.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

06:44 / 25.04.07

If I were Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan or Ashley Pharoah I would be really thankful that John Simm and Philip Glenister have gone on record as attacking the BBC for various cuts made to things like the show budget as it handily diverts attention from the shockingly bad scripts that we've had several times this series.

I suppose I don't like the way that the internal logic of the show has been twisted to suit the story du jour. What especially annoyed me were things like the series one episode where an episode revolved around the key point that Hunt was violent, hateful but he wasn't corrupt and on the take, only now we find that he was. There's also been precious little sense that each episode happened after the last one, again a key episode last season had Hunt unleashing Sam to expose corruption in the department because he respected him enough to know he was actually a very good copper. That seems to have been forgotten in the rush to make every episode about the sore thumb that stops his colleagues making mistakes. Unless the writers didn't write the last episode until the day before it was filmed, it wouldn't have cost too much script-time to give some sense of Sam getting increasingly disillusioned with Gene's methods, that he was actually losing the belief he had at the end of the first series that Gene was a neanderthal but generally good copper. A series finale where Sam has arrived at a place where he genuinely believes Gene is wrong would be more dramatically satisfying than Morgan saying "You have to destroy Gene Hunt" and him going "OK".

Is the ending Sam's Jacob's Ladder? Has he decided to stop fighting so that Gene can drive him up to heaven?

Janean Patience

07:28 / 25.04.07

I didn't realise Hyde was a real place.

Hyde isn't exactly in Manchester so much as near it. It's one of those satellite towns that's gradually becoming subsumed but back in 1973 it would have been still pretty separate and still part of Cheshire rather than Manchester, rather leafy and Victorian where the slums weren't being demolished and replaced with concrete multistorey multipurpose buildings. It had, and still has, a fair number of red-brick mills. And up until about 1990 it had the Hyde Stink, a stench that dominated the town from a rendering plant that turned animals into glue. Unless you've smelt it it's hard to describe how pervasive it was.

08:34 / 07.07.07

A link, I bring you, for information and curiousity value, mainly.

14:32 / 07.10.08

The U.S. version starts Thursday.

With Harvey Keitel as Gene Hunt and Michael Imperioli as Ray.

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