Life on Mars: Season 2

Sam Tyler is still stuck in 1973, unsure if he has somehow really travelled backwards in time or if he is merely stuck in a coma in 2006 and is fantasising everything that is happening to him. However, now he has been there for a few weeks he is getting more used to life in the 1970s and is starting to downplay the unusual auditory and visual hallucinations he continues to suffer from. But, just as things seem to be settling down, questions about Sam's previous 1970s life in 'Hyde' before relocating to Manchester arise, and set in chain a sequence of events which could lead Sam home...wherever that is.


Life on Mars' second season was the last, due to a combination of the producers not wishing to over-exploit the concept and lead actor John Simm's well-known reluctance to be typecast in a long-running television series. It was a bold decision for a series that had become a big hit on British television and done the seemingly impossible by getting audiences fired up over a cop show.

The second season offers up pretty much more of the same as the first season: Sam and Gene butt heads over their different approaches to policing, but they have, grudgingly, accepted that each has skills the other does not, and when they combine their approaches it often leads to good results. Sam and Annie continue to not quite get it together in the tradition of all great TV will-they, won't-they romances, and Sam continues to be haunted by hallucinations of his life in 2006 which relate to his current situation in 1973. The show also moves onto slightly more contentious ground in Season 2 by covering the more controversial subject of IRA terrorism in one episode whilst continuing to examine the extent of corruption and heavy-handed methods in the 1970s police force.

"You great, soft, sissy, girly, nancy, French, bender, Man United-supporting poof!"
- Gene Hunt's appraisal of Sam Tyler

In my review of Season 1, I mentioned that the show's continuous use of Sam's odd mental state occasionally gets a little exasperating, as sometimes you'd quite like to just see Sam and Gene butt heads and then solve the crime without Sam freaking out every twenty minutes. The producers play on this in two episodes in particular in the second season, one in which Sam doesn't have any odd experiences and starts getting worried about the lack of them, and another in which Sam reacts very badly to whatever is happening to him in the present and has to sit most of the investigation out. This latter episode, which is by far the most 'freak-out' intensive of the series, also perversely is one of the very best episodes, with flashbacks showing how they operated before he arrived (and giving rise to the unusual sight of scenes not featuring Sam, which feels odd as he is in every other single scene of every other episode of the whole series).

Of course, as good as the individual episodes are (and they are pretty damn good), the one episode that everyone will be left talking about is the very last one. British SF is awash with series-ending episodes that leave the audience reeling and talking about them for years or decades afterwards: Blake's 7, Sapphire and Steel and The Prisoner being the most notable (Quantum Leap's befuddling finale is probably the USA's closest equivalent). Life on Mars joins their august ranks with a finale that takes the viewer on a crazy existential rollercoaster ride as we finally get an answer for what is going on with Sam, but that answer is in turn supplanted by another, contradictory one in a manner that would make Christopher Priest proud. Which is the truth and which do we believe? The finale operates on multiple levels of reality with the viewer not quite able to trust what is going on. There is a very clear 'obvious' possible answer for what is going on, but just as with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, that 'obvious' answer still leaves other, key questions unanswered.

Taken in isolation, Life on Mars' finale is very strong indeed. However, the news that a sequel/spin-off series was forthcoming which would shed more light on events did dilute the strength of that finale a bit, and Ashes to Ashes' plot developments have indeed plunged much of what we thought we knew from Life on Mars' finale into doubt. But further examination of that series is for another review.

The second season of Life on Mars (****½) is thoroughly entertaining, funny, thought-provoking and just the right side of ambiguous. It draws a line under the series and sets up the sequel series quite nicely. It is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and will be released in the USA on DVD in November.

Life on Mars: Season 1

In 2006, 37-year-old Sam Tyler (John Simm) is a Detective Chief Inspector with the Greater Manchester police force, investigating a spate of murders of young women. His frustration with the lack of progress in the case spills over into his personal life when he suspends his girlfriend and fellow officer Maya from the case, fearing their personal issues are interfering with their working relationship. Furious, Maya follows upon a new lead and goes missing. Fearing she has been kidnapped as well, a distraught and distracted Sam is hit by a car near a motorway overpass. When he wakes up the overpass has gone, his clothes and car have changed, his iPod (playing David Bowie's greatest hits) has been replaced by an eight-track and the year is apparently now 1973.


An extremely confused Sam discovers he is now a Detective Inspector with the same police force, now serving under DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). He is unable to work out if he has gone mad, suffering a coma-induced delusion or has somehow really travelled back in time. As he tries to figure out what is going on, he discovers uncanny parallels between the case the team is following in 1973 and his own investigation in 2006 and realises he may be able to save Maya by changing history, but if all of this is in his mind, how can that be?

Life on Mars was a huge smash hit for the BBC when it aired as two seasons in 2006 and 2007. Its spin-off/sequel series, Ashes to Ashes, has maintained this success with that show's third and final season due to air next year. A US remake, which resets the action to New York City, was well-received earlier this year but low ratings saw it canned after half a season (although they got a - pretty ludicrous - explanation for their mystery in the final episode). This is 'high concept' TV, where the writers can sum up the idea in one sentence and the TV exec's immediate reaction is "We have to make this." The original thought was to make a straight 1970s cop show, but this ran into difficulties since any realistic show would not paint the police of the time - sometimes racist, misogynistic and hopelessly corrupt - in the best light. By having a modern, by-the-book, politically correct copper joining a 1970s team they created a very strong opportunity for drama and social commentary which, by and large, works well.

"I think you've forgotten who you're talking to."
"An overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained borderline alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding."
"You make that sound like a bad thing."

- Gene Hunt & Sam Tyler, Life on Mars

The show is bolstered by its two leads, John Simm and Philip Glenister as the confused Sam Tyler and the magnificent Gene Hunt, an old-school dinosaur of a copper who believes that hunches and leaning on informants is a more reliable method of nailing crooks than forensic evidence and psychological profiling. These two actors first worked together in the mighty State of Play and are here reunited to stellar effect. Both actors - among Britain's best actors around at the moment - bring their A-game to this show. Glenister has a particularly tough job as Gene Hunt could become a figure of fun and caricature very easily, but he keeps the character rooted in reality. The writing is also fair, suggesting that whilst Hunt's methods for catching crooks are inept by modern standards, the lack of bureaucracy and paperwork does have benefits, with Hunt's methods sometimes working when Tyler's methodical plans fail to produce results. In fact, the episodes usually work best when Tyler and Hunt's different approaches work in tandem together.

The supporting cast is also very strong. Liz White is superb as Annie, the only person in 1973 whom Sam confides his predicament in, whilst Dean Andrews as thuggish copper Ray is also great in a role that could have been very two-dimensional. He is very much Sam's enemy on the team, but Gene recognises his limitations (which fuels his vendetta towards Sam even more), which culminates in the penultimate (and best) episode of the season. Marshall Lancaster does a great job as Chris, a younger copper torn between Gene's old-school policing and what he sees as the more efficient and fairer ideas introduced by Sam, although he has arguably the least to do of the main cast in the first season.

As the season continues, the episodes are generally divided between whatever the crime of the week is and what is going on in Sam's head (Sam suffers auditory and visual hallucinations which gradually convince him he is really in a coma in 2006) and how these impact on one another. This is a difficult balancing act to juggle, and sometimes you do wish they could just drop the weird stuff going on with Sam to just have a 'chalk and cheese' buddy cop show episode once in a while. At the same time, Sam's own internal journey is fascinating as the writers seem to confound the audience every time they think they know the rules. At least twice Sam seems to do something in 1973 which effects his present in 2006, and at one stage has what appears to be memories of one of his colleagues from his own POV as a four-year-old, which leaves the question of what is really going on very much up in the air. At this stage of the game things are left very ambiguous though. Some characters seem to know more about Sam's predicament than they are letting on, but others react to Sam's apparently insane outbursts in a more realistic and appropriate manner. What is going on? Well, we've still got a while to find out (the final episode of Ashes to Ashes promises to explain everything about both series), but the journey is a hell of a lot of fun, accompanied by a phenomenally good soundtrack.

Life on Mars, Season 1 (****½) is part social commentary, part drama, part comedy and always extremely entertaining, excellently-acted and well-written. It is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD).