Life on Mars

I’ve been meaning to say something about this since the second season ended, now that the Sam Tyler story arc has been wound up—so, yes, this is spoileriffic. But, frankly, I’m not sure how I feel about the resolution.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season, despite the fact that we were watching Life on Mars when the second car (in a series of three, so far) drove through the fence, completely destroying my car and much of the surrounding property—it wasn’t Life on Mars‘s fault, but the programme did tend to trigger jumpiness for a few weeks after that.

But the first season was fantastic: the concept was clever, Philip Glenister was a joy to behold in every scene, and John Simm’s appearance as Sam—despite the fact that the character was not at all evil—made me very keen to see what he could do as The Master. And the answer to that turned out to be more a case of what couldn’t he do? I’d been looking forward to the return of The Master since the new series started; I kept saying to Nick that there was no chance that The Master returned to fight and die for Gallifrey, no chance. And I was right.

(On a slightly disconnected note, Nick and I also have an ongoing debate about his preference for the wonderful Roger Delgado and mine for The Master of my times, Anthony Ainley, who I’ve only just realised died four years ago. Vale, Anthony Ainley. So I was pleased that we both enjoyed John Simm’s version of the character.)

To get back to my main point, I was a little uncertain about the return of the show for a second season.

I am—as will come to no surprise to a readership comprised at the stage almost entirely of people who already know me—a media tart, capable of becoming strongly attached to particular programmes. I respond badly to my favourite shows being cut off in their prime, although I am flexible about what constitutes “prime”: for example, Firefly was cut off in its prime, while Angel, which I would happily have kept watching, doesn’t qualify, not after a run of five seasons.

And I’d enjoyed Life on Mars enough to want to keep watching it. What worried me was the fact that the concept might end up too thinly stretched. Some shows, no matter how good, need to end before the concept can become stale: Joe Ahearne’s wonderful Ultraviolet might still be one of the best instances of this. I would have watched more of that, but perhaps it is better that it ended at six superb episodes.

And it did seem at first as though the concept might have staled a little: the show wasn’t quite as funny nor quite as creepy as it had once been, although the episode where Gene Hunt was suspected of murder brightened things up a little.

Then we got to the final episode and, as the credits rolled, I turned to Nick to say, “Did what I think just happened actually just happen?”

Basically, my feelings about the show became thoroughly confused the minute Sam jumped off the roof.

But perhaps this is best encapsulated in a conversation that I ended up having with my mother (which I may not, after a period of some weeks, have reproduced verbatim):

MUM: What did you think of the end of Life on Mars?
ME: He killed himself!
MUM: I thought it was lovely; it brought back all the humour, which had been a bit missing from the episode.
ME: But he killed himself!
MUM: Because he was happier in the ’70s.
ME: But he wasn’t in the ’70s—he jumped off a roof.
MUM: But he was happier.
ME: But why did I spend twelve weeks of my life watching a character struggle to get back to his real life only to have him jump off a roof?

And I think that’s my main problem; it was out of character. I don’t want to characterise suicide as essentially a defeatist action, but in this case it was: after a brief period of isolation, the man who we’d seen struggling against all odds to return to his normal life gave up spectacularly and threw himself off a roof.

It didn’t seem in keeping with what we’d seen of Sam’s character up to that point.

(It also didn’t say much for the Metropolitan Police’s counselling of recuperative officers, but that’s a different matter.)

Nick tells me that the suicide reading—that Sam was genuinely hallucinating the 1970s’ episodes and managed to recover from the accident, only to kill himself—is writer and co-creator Matthew Graham’s preferred reading. (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Graham is also, apparently, the writer of Doctor Who‘s “Fear Her,” which I frankly loathed.)

But there are alternative options. The main one, it seems to me, is the option offered by the surgeon in his alternative role as the high-ranking policeman from Hyde: that Sam, deep undercover, suffered a breakdown as the result of an accident in the 1970s, and that it is the modern life that is the hallucination. In this reading, the blue-tinted return to modern life at the end of the last episode would be the result of a psychotic break that Sam suffered in the tunnel, under the pressure of the shoot-out.

This would answer one small, but perhaps significant, question that the final episode raised for me, which was why, when Sam awoke in hospital after apparently undergoing brain surgery, was his head not shaved?

But perhaps I am grasping at straws here, to explain what was to me an unsatisfying conclusion.

Perhaps I should accept instead that sometimes, when we die, we go to the 1970s. It might be an improvement on dying and going to Devon.