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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Life On Mars

  
  

Page: 12(3)45678

 
 
e-n
11:29 / 08.02.06
I think the intially supspected assailaint sataed that the others were too yeller to pick a fight or just eweren't "on" for it which is why they staged the beating.

As for the beating itself, I think one fella called his name to distract him while the other attacked him from behind with the key in order to stun him, so the beating could occur without giving the game away.

The initial blow proved fatal , the two saw this and then scarpered.
...
Your honor.



Oh and gene is the best.
Can we haave a "pub landlord gene" spin off please?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:26 / 09.02.06
"Go and arrest the landlord of the Trafford Arms."

"What for?"

"Make something up on the way."

This is genius. Just watching it now. I can't believe I chose Smallville over this. I am evil.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
01:19 / 10.02.06
Yeah well, welcome to the real world, Inspector bleeding Morse.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
11:27 / 10.02.06
Apparently this show is not just on for a second series (let it be 1988) but an export to America and a possible feature film.
 
 
lonely as a cloud...
07:21 / 14.02.06
So, last night's episode - isn't Reg currently playing a character in Coronation Street?
 
The parallels between Reg and Sam were quite obvious, as well as the parallels between what was going on in 1973 and in "the present". I liked that a lot, it wasn't as forced as a lesser show might have been IMHO. The biggest laugh, obviously, was Gene's multiple hip-flasks. Gene messed up a couple of times, but then they brought on the head of the other group (whose name I've forgotten - the guy who looks a bit like Boycey from Only Fools And Horses) to fuck up even more, and make Gene look good.
 
So, having in reality nearly died, where to next for Sam? My current theory is that Gene is a father-figure in Sam's subconcious, and that trying to get Gene to become what, by Sam's definition, a policeman *should* be, Sam slowly progresses back to full conciousness, possibly being awoken in the last episode, by his Dad, played by Phil Glenister.
 
Or, maybe not. Oh, and if anyone's registered with IMDB (i'm not bothered to register), how 'bout taking a look at Could Gene Hunt defeat Chuck Norris?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
08:53 / 14.02.06
I hope it isn't bad form to copy in the discussions on last night's episode from my other regular board.

H1ppychick

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Best lines tonight:

Sam: I'm the negotiator.
Gene: I'll make you a hat.

- otherwise a bit weaker than previous episodes, I thought. Nice to see the return of Lee-from-Press-Gang as swaggering Lytton, though - it felt a bit like the news crew rumble from Ron Burgundy.


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kovacs


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Yeah, I think it's stretching a bit now. It was pretty great as a hostage drama, but the time-travel twist is either being played down, (no anachronism jokes this week -- though again, Sam is using terms they shouldn't recognise, like "gutted") or is becoming too familiar (you know the Singing Detective style flashback of silver buckles will come in at some point.)

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H1ppychick

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Yes, I agree with you, I've felt that they've paid less attention to the anachronistic word usage as the programme has gone on. For example, I remember Gene calling Sam a brainiac a few weeks ago, and there is no way in hell that term was in common currency in 1973. There was some obvious stuff last night in terms of the hostage negotiation process but they don't seem to pay as much attention to getting the day to day language right.
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jonesy999

I thought it just ran out of steam last night. The hostage situation was milked down to a wrinkly, empty, grey condom of a boob (a bit like this, see) which just dried up and died. I was actually, to coin 1970s terminology, gutted.

Tony Jordan said it was conceived as "CSI meets the Sweeney". I understand what he's getting at but, well, the John Simms character just doesn't feel that hi-tech in his methods. Granted he doesn't have access to a spectalmacogrophiser or lots of test tubes, pretty lab assistants and haunting electronic melodies (He does have The Who, though) but his mad CSI skillz seem to be based on saying "Don't beat the witness to death before he tells us the name of the murderer, science tells me it's better to get the name first."

Maybe the first few episodes have led me to expect too much from Life on Mars. It's just a bit of harmless fun, after all.


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kovacs


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I agree with both of you. The double-edged problem is that Sam Tyler has acclimatised (part of the fascination in episode 1 was how this guy copes with being in 1973 all of a sudden... now he's got mates, a local, a potential girlfriend) but still acts like a man out of time (staring off into space for flashbacks or mysterious bleeping, shouting at invisible doctors, using 21st century slang).

So on the one hand, there's no real culture clash anymore. Gene and Sam's methods aren't that different: Sam tries the softly-softly approach, Gene steams in, but that's partly just down to character, not period, and the programme is deliberately bringing them towards a common ground, as part of their bonding (Sam instructs Gene to punch the hostage-taker in the face / Gene comes out with some official-sounding double-chat for the journalists). While their building friendship is the show's emotional centre, it was more interesting when they were at odds.

On the other hand, we've got this "am I in a coma" enigma that's becoming very, very samey and forumulaic.

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The Strobe
09:00 / 14.02.06
Um - do all those people mind you cutting and pasting their opinions, kovacs? It's nice to have outside input, but the point of communities being seperate is that, you know, they're different places.

It'd have been different if you'd paraphrased, but right now, I'm finding the wholesale dump of other people's ideas - to bolster your own conversation, ostensibly - a little annoying.

Mods, a ruling? Shall I take this to the Policy?

In other news: the most "filler" episode yet. Still entertaining, but the pace wasn't what it has has been, and nor was the reward structure. The writing was perhaps a notch lower, but it's still up there.
 
 
h1ppychick
12:20 / 14.02.06
I'm not bothered, can't speak for jonesy obviously.
 
 
h1ppychick
12:25 / 14.02.06
Whilst I'm here, didn't the actor who played Reg Coyle also act with John Simm in The Lakes (another excellent twisted programme which is sadly missed)? Taken alongside the several examples of the Philip Glenister / John Simm history, it's quite an incestuous little world in Manchester in 1973.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:25 / 14.02.06
Yeah, take me to the Policy charged with this thought-theft. I don't see it as an attempt to bolster my conversation -- at worst it's just lazy not to type out the same thing twice, and I don't know if my comments on TMO would have made sense if I'd just pasted them here in isolation, out of context, stripped from the surrounding comments. But yeah, for laziness, I think this should go up before a team of moderators immediately.
 
 
The Falcon
15:35 / 14.02.06
fwiw, Paleface, I think that's a risibly officious suggestion. I'd put it in the barbannoy, but I'd not want to say it 'behind your back', so to speak. kovacs did qualify himself somewhat there, if you look at the first sentence.

By all means, though, put it in Policy and we'll see what happens.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:50 / 14.02.06
Why not save busy people time and trouble, and just delete either my post in which I lazily quote people, or the quotations from other people, with my permission?

I admit it was a lazy thing to do, but when I discuss this show on two boards, and welcome people's responses to my views on both forums, it didn't seem worth making the same comments twice in slightly different words. Neither did I want to post my thoughts about last night's episode only on the other forum, TMO, after I'd been participating in discussion on this one.

Taking other people's comments and pasting them in here could potentially be resented by the original authors (in this case, I don't think so) or by people on here who see it as inappropriate and space-wasting, but it wasn't meant to bolster or serve me in any way, except by presenting my views on last night's show within context, as part of a discussion.

I don't think it warrants any kind of investigation here or much debate over its rightness or wrongness by moderators, unless it's a slow day for them and there's nothing more interesting to discuss. I have no problem with my post above being edited down or deleted.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
16:41 / 14.02.06
Well, y'know, you could have presented them within context as part of the discussion here.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
17:00 / 14.02.06
Sort of... it would have been a bit weird & artificial to modify what I'd said as part of a conversation elsewhere, so it worked in isolation out of that context, here...

I can't help thinking that while I've said several times that my action was lazy, it doesn't warrant quite so much attention. I've suggested that the post can be edited or deleted, and if it's the general opinion that what I did shouldn't be done, I shan't do it again.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:09 / 14.02.06
Dude, it's not really *had* all that much attention. One post was all. That was an over-reaction, but so was your follow-up. Follow-ups.

There may be a discussion worth having in Policy about the rights and wrongs of reposting the comments of people from other boards without checking with them first, and without making the effor to tailor comments to fit in with ongoing threads. If there is, let's have it there and get this one back on track, mmkay?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:55 / 14.02.06
Sure: would have been rude not to reply to you, though. That's the nature of discussion boards.
 
 
Feverfew
18:22 / 15.02.06
Just for my absolute two-pennyworth; last night's episode was good, but not as good as those before it.

The elements that, to me, seemed slightly out-of-kilter

- The seeming congruity between Sam and Reg, as in the "We're both men out of time, we are"; this to me felt a little thin, not to say it wasn't a good idea, but still.

- The re-introduction of their opposing side in the police force; these are nice, and the play-off between them is good, but when your boss is Gene Hunt (who, let's not forget, could take on Chuck Norris), the only way to play the opposite number to the "good copper whose heart is in the right place" is to have the "absolute bastard who isn't even a good copper", and they're trying, but Gene's opposite number still comes off like an absolute numpty.

- The Maguffin of the Life Support machines being turned off; this was obviously supposed to be a Major Plot Point, but I get the feeling that maybe it should have been placed in the season's final episode for greater dramatic effect, because while the audience supposedly don't know why Sam is where he is and if he's really in a coma, it's surely very unlikely that he'd spend the last two episodes dead?

All idle thoughts, really. I look forward to the last two episodes.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:57 / 20.02.06
"Why am I still here?"

The woods! The woods!
 
 
h1ppychick
20:02 / 20.02.06
Squeeeee! a return to form tonight, definitely. gave me warm tinglies.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:13 / 20.02.06
The ending was depressingly noncommittal, though. The only thing stopping Sam from going to the family or the press with the truth was the fact that there's one more episode in the series. All that build up for very little pay-off.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:18 / 20.02.06
Yeah, that was a good one in many ways. It felt like, I don't know, a Brecht play the way the team walked silently "on-stage" while Tyler ran the cassette -- as if they were all lining up as jury or accused. I thought at first it might be some kind of symbolic vision, though it also (just about) worked on a realistic level.

Glad of course to see that the Singing Detective-style mystery plot returns, though is perhaps not resolved, next week: and that my prediction seems to be coming true, though I reckoned Sam would turn up in the park or forest of his flashback in episode 7. The flashbacks are getting just slightly clearer with each installment. I've been watching the last weeks on TV, not download, which ironically means less careful viewer-detection, although you do get the benefit of feeling you're watching in tune with the "LoM CoMmunity" -- but even at normal speed without freezeframe, his flashbacks are less dreamlike now and show details like the girl's handbag.

Interesting (probably irrelevant) that Britney Spears featured in both Tyler's LSD vision and in his hallucination in the curry-shop window.
 
 
The Strobe
20:03 / 27.02.06
Oh, piss off, BBC1 drama. Just piss off. That counts as a worse resolving-nothing than the end of Ultraviolet.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:04 / 27.02.06
Arg.

So this guy, right, who - and this has been hammered into us since day one - has absolute belief in and respect for the law and Doing the Right Thing, lets a pornographer, multiple-murderer and cop-killer go?

Fucking genius.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:06 / 27.02.06
Jumped the shark.
 
 
Feverfew
20:22 / 27.02.06
Pretty much agreed.

Would it be cynical to hypothesise that the lack of a definitive ending was in relation to the creation of the second series?

Although, granted, he could have come out of his coma, woken up in 2006, stretched his legs, walked out of the hospital and been hit by... for the sake of argument, a van this time... and woken up in whatever time period would have best suited the BBC?

You'd then get the voiceover from his Mum during the coma-flashes; "Sam, you're just taking the piss, now. Wake up, love. There's a double-decker outside if you're feeling like the eighties are getting boring."
 
 
miss wonderstarr
20:30 / 27.02.06
A real shame the last ten minutes effectively retro-fucked up the previous eight weeks. Just resisting the mercenary drive for a second series and ending it neatly right there, as narrative, character, even internal logic demanded, would have made it one of the most surprisingly rewarding TV series of the decade (not that I watch much TV): as it is, my feeling about Life On Mars right now is oh fuck off! and I wonder if that will overshadow any enjoyment from reviewing previous episodes.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
20:55 / 27.02.06
Just resisting the mercenary drive for a second series and ending it neatly right there

Or ignoring the need to have there be a reason for Sam's time-travelling in the first place. You could take out all of those rubbish 'running through the forest' vision bits, scrub the last episode in its entirety, and still end up with a decent show. That shit was very much a minor part of the previous episodes - you're talking about slicing twenty, thirty seconds from each, at most.

I don't know that it's going to have any major effect on how enjoyable watching the other episodes again will be, but it's likely to screw the following series up big time. They either ignore it and pretend it never happened, or else they have to create a whole new, series-long 'why am I here' to provide the character's motivation - a character who they've already managed to compromise beyond repair. Either way it ends up with a gaping great hole smack-bang in the middle.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:18 / 27.02.06
You could take out all of those rubbish 'running through the forest' vision bits, scrub the last episode in its entirety, and still end up with a decent show. That shit was very much a minor part of the previous episodes - you're talking about slicing twenty, thirty seconds from each, at most.

True, but that was the underlying drive (for me) towards some feeling of resolution, some reason for him being there, some puzzle to solve and event to set right. I know I was perhaps the only person on this thread who enjoyed that little guessing game (and happily guessed mostly-right, though perhaps it wasn't hard) but I felt there was a bigger story arc going on that kept returning us to Sam's mum and dad, and little Sammy. Cutting the red-coat visions would trim 30 seconds an episode, but I feel it would take that overarching spine out. Yes, you would still have a great show, and by not trying for a "purpose" to the whole thing, they wouldn't have been able to totally surrender that purpose in the last scenes.

I'm not entirely sure that Sam as a pure and simple time-travelling tec would really sustain two series, either: not if series 2 was in the same milieu with the same characters.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:33 / 27.02.06
It's an issues show, though. Well, it was until tonight, at any rate. It would only have run out of steam once they'd run out of 70s stereotypes or 70s/00s social comparisons to exploit.

Doesn't really matter now. There's no way that they can have Sam stand in judgment over Hunt and have it mean anything from this point onwards - not unless they're willing to revisit the dad thing right at the start of series two and either have Sam make amends for his inaction or reverse the roles so that it's Hunt who gets to be in the right the majority of the time.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:38 / 27.02.06
The absurdity of the notion that Hunt would let a DI pull a gun on him, and then cheerfully chum up again and ask Sam down the pub, made the last scene feel like one of those alternate endings you get on DVDs, or like the crowning dream sequence in a series full of visions ... Sam should have woken up from that unconvincing little utopia and found himself dying in the forest at night as Gene walks away throwing the gun into a bush.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:43 / 27.02.06
And another whopping ARG at the lengths they're expecting us to go to in order to suspend our disbelief re: the timeline. Are we really supposed to swallow the notion that despite all of Sam's meddling, the Cartwright/Vic/woods situation would still set itself up in exactly the same manner it did in the original timeline? Cartwright's only at the wedding in the new timeline because Vic was able to get to it because of Sam's numerous interventions whenever Hunt wanted to bang him up. Why was she there originally? Makes. No. Sense.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
21:44 / 27.02.06
The absurdity of the notion that Hunt would let a DI pull a gun on him

I've a feeling that already happened once before in the series. No?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:55 / 27.02.06
Cartwright's only at the wedding in the new timeline because Vic was able to get to it because of Sam's numerous interventions whenever Hunt wanted to bang him up. Why was she there originally? Makes. No. Sense.

I was going to say that, but thought I'd get people replying "you're asking too much of the show!"

Re. Gene having a gun pointed at him, unless I'm forgetting another scene, the closest was the textile mill in episode 3, where the kid had a rifle on Gene and Sam was unarmed, though they were in a kind of triangular stand-off.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:16 / 27.02.06
Don't worry ex-LoMmers. :mad!: :fume?: I have just fired off 10 pertinent questions to "Matthew Graham, Co-Creator and Lead Writer of Life On Mars" on the BBC website.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
07:03 / 28.02.06
For once I am pretty much in agreement with all Barbelith's complaints about the way this ended. I felt sure that we were going to see either a) Gene shooting Vic to save Sam, after Sam had foolishly handed Vic the gun, or b) Sam letting Vic go, only to find Gene with a bullet in his gut elsewhere in the forest, cue massive cliffhanger, or maybe even c) Sam lets his dad go, gets pulled back to the present, and finds out that Vic then proceeded to murder Annie and Gene, cue "How do I get back?!?"

I mean, I hate fanwanking these things, but... Jesus. Any hope that this was a set-up for Sam having to bring his dad to justice at a later date is massively undercut by all that "pub?" nonsense. Gene and co DON'T BELIEVE HE'S FROM THE FUTURE, therefore they DON'T BELIEVE THAT'S HIS DAD, therefore they have absolutely no reason to consider his letting Vic go as being under any kind of mitigating circumstances. Argh.

And it started off so well...
 
  

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