Stream On: ‘Life on Mars’ is even stranger than its title
Is he mad, in a coma … or has Detective Sam Tyler really travelled back in time?
It’s not about the Red Planet; the 2006 police procedural is named after David Bowie’s 1970’s song. Life on Mars concerns a detective who is hit by a car—and awakens in 1973. As he says at the beginning of each episode, “My name is Sam Tyler. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.”
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅100%🍿97% /Trailer /2006-2007 /TV14
What’s the big idea? According to screenwriter Matthew Graham, the initial idea was for a humorous, family-friendly program that overtly mocked the styles and attitudes of the 1970s. As it turned out, the show’s effect was similar to that of the sci-fi adjacent The Prisoner, in which the protagonist awakens in a mysterious village in which he’s imprisoned.
In Life on Mars, Sam Tyler (John Simm), who finds himself in 1973 after an auto accident, but still working as a detective in his precinct although with a lesser rank, lets one person, simpatico Police Constable Annie Cartwright (Liz White) in on his situation. She likes Sam, and thinks he’s probably concussed after being hit by a car.
But be it 2006 or 1973, crime goes on in Manchester, and Sam fills his time. When he shows up for work on his second day, the detectives are a bit puzzled, after his assertions of not belonging there. “Where else can I go,” he asks, before getting on with the day’s police work, which are presented as pure police procedurals.
But from time to time he’s reminded of his situation. Over the phone, or on the radio, he hears what sounds like an operating room, and voices addressing him by name, and Sam decides he’s actually in the hospital in 2006, maybe in a coma, after the accident that put him in 1973. Another troubling occurrence is the occasional appearance of the girl from the BBC’s Test Card F (like the test patterns in the USA, shown on a TV channel while off the air), taunting and threatening Sam when he awakens in the night.
So Sam believes he’s imagining 1973 while in a coma, and is amazed at the realism of his dreams: textures, colors, strange details about things. Moreover he comes to believe some of the cases are relevant: In one episode, on a disconnected phone, he hears his mother tearfully talking to him, saying she’s sorry, but there’s no sign of brain activity and she’s going to “pull the plug” at 2:00 p.m.
Then a call comes in to the station, a man is holding hostages, and he’s saying “somebody’s going to die at 2:00 p.m.” Sam believes if he can save the hostages and solve the day that he himself will not be taken off of life support in 2006.
He meets younger versions of his own parents. (His dad is a small-time gambler who becomes a person of interest in a murder case—and is younger now than Sam.)
So Life on Mars is a show for everybody: science fiction, time travel, police stories, drama and a good dose of comedy. It makes the audience think about the usual dramatic police-show subjects, good and bad people doing crime, for a variety of reasons, but also the nature of existence itself, and objectivity versus subjectivity.
I’ve finished the series, and while I was skeptical during the first episode, by the second or third episode I was hooked, and the final episode, which ties everything up, is one of my favorite final episodes in TV—and I’m not alone. Jon Wilde wrote in The Guardian, that “It ended with magic sprinkled all around.” On The Anorak Zone (Cult film and television), a ranking of Life on Mars episodes says “If a TV series is to be judged on its last episode, then Life On Mars was first rate. Featuring a multi-layered resolution…, it also had enough ambiguity and meta-referencing of form to make it a true classic.” (I’m not linking those two quotations as the articles contain spoilers.)
There were remakes made in several other countries, including an American version of the same name in 2008. The trailer looks stupid, like the ‘90’s, not 1973 or 2008, and an article I read about its final episode (which also contains spoilers about the UK version) makes it sound just awful.
Good news for me is that the original 2006 Life on Mars had a 2008 spin-off, or sequel, titled Ashes to Ashes, which I will be watching.
Sources include Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.