Uninteresting, Unimaginative and Unmitigated Shite
Written whilst angry. Coherency suffers as a result
Life on Mars kept audiences in rapt attention because of its premise. A Manchester cop from 2006 is run over by a car in the middle of an investigation into a serial killer, the latest victim of which is his girlfriend. Our hero, Sam Tyler, wakes up in 1973. The first episode dealt with his investigation of the same serial killer, three decades previously. Naturally our hero deals with the crisis, but the audience is left with some questions (which set up the series)
Is our hero in a coma?
Is our hero from the 1970’s, and the future was a delusion?
Or Is our hero actually back in time?
Of course, there was every hint dropped (from doctors voices, to the voice of his mother, being stoned on drugs, about to have his life support turned off, to electro-convulsive therapy literally tearing the world apart) that he was in a coma. But surely it couldn’t have been that simple? Because otherwise why would the question at the start of the series be posed? Lardy Jeremy Clarkson lookalike Matthew Graham must have had some sort of genius plan up his sleeve, surely?
Well, it turns out that after 16 hours of my life, waiting for the answer to the question and being forced to sit through a barely entertaining retro cop-show in the interim, that no. In fact, our creator Mr Graham decided to instead frustrate, annoy and alienate his audience in one fell swoop.
Sam Tyler wakes up from his coma in 2006, immediately forgetting any possible crisis, remorse for his (presumably dead) girlfriend. Of course if he was able to affect change in his past, then he’s managed to solve quite a few cases. He’s a hero. But no, the whole thing was fantasy. Gene Hunt, Maggie, the boys, are all a brain tumour induced fantasy in which he is the unloved central character.
When he wakes up (through a series of rather trite flashy camera moves) he finds 2006 ‘boring’. I’d find 2006 boring if I’d somehow managed to forget my job, my girlfriend and the serial killer I was chasing, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Mr Graham, who decides to skim over the following questions:
Was Sam back in time?
Did Sam change the future with his actions?
Were the events with his father and mother when he was a small boy real?
Is any writer of a mainstream TV series going to end the show with the lead character’s pointless nay moronic suicide?
No, sorry, they answered that last one. In the world’s most obvious steal from ‘Vanilla Sky’ Sam hurls himself from the roof of the police station (A good 10 storeys) and back into his coma. Reunited with his old crew and the radio blaring out that Mr Tyler is close to death, he speeds off into the sunset to solve a crime, the test-card girl ‘switching’ off the TV as Tyler dies, happy in his fantasy.
In short, Tyler decides that living his life is too boring, so he returns to his fallacy. The same fallacy he’s been trying to escape (and us with him) for the last 2 years.
Did it ring a satisfying conclusion to the show? No. Was it logical for Sam Tyler to instantly change his mind and decide that he wanted a few brief snatches of fantasy because he wasn’t man enough to face up to his own idiocy? No. But Graham did it anyway. This wasn’t a ballsy narrative decision, this was lazy, hackneyed and clichéd writing that hurts even more because this is 2007, and we expect better from TV writers, especially in this country. Our memory spans back 8 months, but obviously Matthew Graham’s doesn’t.
Life on Mars. The biggest let down of 2007.
