Life on Mars created by Matthew Graham, Tony Jordan and Ashley Pharoah (2006-2007)
26 February 2008I started watching this show because I had seen John Simm on Doctor Who playing the Master in the new series Season 3 ending, and I was really impressed with him as an actor. And I saw that he had another BBC series playing on BBC America, and this was LIFE ON MARS, which I caught up starting with the second season, and was blown away. Once I finished, I tried to find the first series on DVD, but it isn’t released in the US, so I downloaded the first series via Torrents, and watched them on my iPhone. And again this whole series is just so damn good, that I ended up picking up the DVD’s from Amazon UK (A Region 3 PAL disc since my OPPO easily converts PAL discs to play on NTSC). This is such a great show. Not only is it an excellent 70’s cop drama, but it also has science fiction elements, and elements of mental instability as well. It is also a tale of a man who has lost his humanity, and through a bizarre set of circumstances, starts to get it back, but also to teach his humanity what it can use of his clinical self. Really of my favorite shows, I just wish it wasn’t only 2 series long, though at least ASHES TO ASHES is on now, which continues the story of DCI Hunt, but now in the 80’s. Damn this is a great show! And I love seeing it how it was, with racism and sexism and a great soundtrack, because that is how it was.
The first episode of the first series starts off with DCI (that is Detective Chief Inspector) Sam Tyler (John Simm) is leading a murder investigation in 2006 Manchester. Sam is cold an analytical, and never listens to his gut. His girlfriend works for him, she is named Maya (Archie Panjabi), and she stills believe in her gut, and that causes her to be taken by the killer. Sam starts to freak out, and stops his car, and gets out, while the David Bowie song Life on Mars plays on his ipod, and he gets hit by a car. Sam wakes up in the same location in 1973, where he finds out he is a DI (Detective Inspector) working for a gruff, alcoholic self proclaimed Sheriff of Manchester. This is Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) who is known to his people as Guv. Working for the Governor is his DS (Detective Sergeant) Ray Carling (Dean Andrews) who instantly hates Sam because he wanted his job, and Chris Skelton (Marshall Lancaster) the young coper who just wants to learn from whomever is his boss. Sam gets thrown right into a murder case, and one in the same place as the one he was investigating in 2006, but he is still messed up, so he talks to a Female Cop named Annie Cartwright (Liz White) who is super cute, though a bit overweight, and there is instantly a bit of attraction. Sam talks to her about being from the future, and she tries to calm him down, having a psychology degree himself. Sam meanwhile keeps having visions of someone in red running through a forrest, and he is also hearing voices that make him believe that he is not in the past, but is in actually in a coma in 2006, and he has to figure out what is going on, to be able to get back to his life. Rounding out the cast is Nelson (Tony Marshall) the Jamaican who owns their local pub, and who is another guiding voice for Sam.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…
Annie’s ex, who she went to college with fucks with Sam, and makes him think he is from the future, which almost causes Sam to jump from the roof to his death, but Annie calms him down and gets him to come back to the edge. She is really the one that holds him together, and they obviously have a huge spark.
Sam has to start to learn to trust his gut as the Guv does, and they manage to solve the murder, and he realizes that Maya was right, and in fact the killer lived next door to the person who they thought it was, and they solved it in because Sam knew about the artificial fibers under the girls fingernails, which turned out to be sound baffling material.
01-02. This time around they arrest a thief named Kim Trent (Andrew Tiernan) who is part of a ruthless gang, but when Sam hears that Hunt is going to plant evidence to stop any further crimes, he releases him, and of course Trent and his gang go out and rob, and also shoot a girl who works at the station, and they all blame Sam, so he has to figure out how to solve the crime. They end up finding a deaf man who has evidence, as he saw Trent, but he wants protection. Sam promises it, having Annie stay with him, and Ray and Chris are supposed to be waiting outside, but they head down to the pub, and the witness disappears. They close off the area of the city and Sam heads in and finds Annie and then finds the witness, but Trent catches up and almost kills them, but Gene shows up and saves the day.
01-03 There is a murder at a local mill, and the Guv shuts down the place to sort it out, but the union doesn’t want to close because they know they might lose their jobs period. The man who is most worried is Ted Bannister (John Henshaw) who worries for his family and his son Derek (Andrew Knott). Sam meanwhile has realizes the factory is where his flat is, and the murder is actually in his living room. The Giv thinks it is Ted right away, and they arrest him, and quickly he admits to it. Meanwhile an issue is going on with a fence selling shotguns, and the Guv puts Sam on that as well. Sam though realizes that in fact the man was not murdered, but killed by the loom, and Ted admitted to it, because the accident would close the mill. And then they realize that Derek is the one who ended up with the guns, and he is planning on robbing the place. Sam and the Guv almost end up killed, but just scrape by.
01-04 Sam arrests a man who is beating up someone, and who says that he should leave it alone. It turns out he works for a local boss named Stephen Warren (Tom Mannion), They get an invite to Warren’s club, and the Guv takes Sam in to see him. He basically gets put in his place, and has money put in his pocket, and meets a woman who works for Warren named Joni Newton (Kelly Wenham). Sam is feeling bad about the whole thing, and ends up meeting his young mother (Joanne Frogatt) who is also getting pushed by Warren’s men, Sam gets angry, and when Joni Newton comes to him, and asks for help, saying that Warren threatened to rape her. Sam takes her home and cooks her dinner, but wakes up having been drugged, and handcuffed, she was his honeypot to set him up, and the Guv and Annie find him totally naked. Sam goes and confronts Joni, and actually makes a differece. She comes and burns the negatives, but is going to run, but instead she turns up dead. Sam is blamed again, but he joins up with the Guv to lean on Warren’s henchmen, so they can go and get Warren, and take down a man who has corrupted so many cops.
01-05 A local well like Manchester United fan shows up dead. The Guv instantly thinks it must be a City gang that beat him up and killed him before the big game on Saturday.Sam thinks differently. The body isn’t beat up at all, and has a single strange injury in the back of the neck. Sam goes and tells the family, and the son, who is wasted by this. Sam convinces the Guv to go undercover in the bar, and they go with Annie, and do find some rowdy fans, but no clues. Sam realizes that Annie had noticed an aftershave on the original scarf found and one of the roudy youth, sot hey go and take him in and find out that it was another man at the club who did it, with his keys, and they go to get him at a big fight before the game, and arrest him for murder. Sam takes his ticket and gives it to the kid, and then sees himself as a child heading to that game.
01-06 Sam hears his mother’s voice from the future saying goodbye to him, and hears that his life support will be shut off, and freaks out, but then hears that a man has taken prisoners at the local paper and will kill someone by 2 PM, so they head over to deal with it. Sam takes charge, or tries to. They send in Annie undercover as a nurse to deal with a sick hostage, and then Sam decides to go in before the Guv’s rival can try and take over and create a bloodbath. The guv also goes in, and Annie is exposed, and the guy freaks out. He is obsessed with heroes, and has decided to be a villain. It seems he worked at the paper, and tried to be a good guy, but was never noticed. He is finally going to kill Sam, but the Guv takes the shot, and they get him. And it turns out only the Guv’s booze was hit, and the paper gives the Guv great press.
01-07 Sam and crew pick up a local flasher who has some cocaine on him named Billy Kemble (Kevin Knapman). The Guv wants to lean on hims hard, and puts him on a cell with a hardened criminal and leaves Ray in charge, while he goes to dinner with Sam. Sam realizes that if they don’t figure this out, the public will never trust the police again, and decides they have to know what happened. Sam begins the investigation which threatens to pull the whole team apart. Eventually Chris admits he taped what went on, and that Annie has the tape. The tape proves that Phyllis (Noreen Kershaw) fell asleep, and Ray forced Billy to take his cocaine, which gave him a heart, and Annie didn’t call a doctor when he said he was having chest pains because she listened to Ray who was in charge. The Guv is furious, but wanted Sam to do this after all, and he demotes Ray to DI, but that isn’t enough for Sam. Sam takes the tape to the superintendent (William Hoyland), but he destroys the tape. And the Guv tells him he needs to learn the ways of the world.
01-08 This series ends with them having a high speed chase, but the others guys end up in an accident and are dead. The only clue is a room at a local hotel, and when they go there they find Vic Tyler (Lee Ingleby) Sam’s father. Sam does all he can to prove his father innocent, but things look worse and worse. He shows up in the background of illegal pornos, and when they bring him to meet with the supposed brothers who are trying to take over in the wake of Warren being gone, but everyone ends up dead except Vic. Vic manages to get away though, though Sam tries to convince him not to leave his family, but heads to the family wedding where his father disappeared. He sees his father go, and Annie is there in a red dress and chases him into the woods, and Sam realizes the flashes he was seeing were of his father beating up Annie to escape. Sam wants to give Vic a chance and even pulls a gun on the Guv, but then Vic takes his gun and would use it, but Sam emptied it. Sam can’t arrest his father though, and lets him go, and it is his message to his mother Ruth that he remembered getting so long ago when his father left. The Guv then takes them off to the pub, still a team.
02-01 Sam starts hearing someone in his room, that is torturing him, and will kill him. They start investigating a murder and it leads them to a gambling club run by Tony Crane (Marc Warren). Crane turns out to be someone Sam was investigating in 2006 as a huge crime lord. He tries to stop his black wife Eve (Wasmin Bannerman) from ruining her life by being with him. No one believes Sam, and he even confronts Tony with the truth, but eventually Tony turns on them and wants to kill Sam and the Guv, but they escape, and manage to get Tony. Tony tries to say that Sam is nuts though, but they take him away to the looney bin, and Sam hears that it was an escaped psychiatric patient that was torturing him. The Guv re-promotes Ray as well, and needs a new DI, so Sam gets Annie to be the new DI, and amazingly the Guv agrees.
02-02 Sam, Chris and Ray and picking up a safe cracker to question him, this is Dickie Fingers (Steve Evets). They are run down by armed men, and Dickie is taken. A series of big robberies then start happening, so the Guv brings in his mentor Harry Woolf (Kevin McNally) to help as well as DC Glen Fletcher (Ray Emmet Brown) a man who would later become Sam’s mentor, but is now a black man always making fun of himself to fit in. Harry pinpoints a man named Arnold Malone (Stephen Bent), but he gives them the locations of the next robberies. Dickie fingers, Woolf, but the Guv won’t listen, and he escapes, under the supervision of Fletcher, who was helping Woolf. Finally Woolf Disappears, and they find a bank book proving Woolf took the money. He has cancer, and wants to get away with the money, but people died, and finally the Guv shoots him an takes him in.
02-03 The police get a call from someone saying that it is the IRA with dynamite near a school, and they go, but the bomb is late, and Sam dares Ray to go because Sam believes it can’t be anything, as the IRA had no dynamite, but Ray gets blown up, and everyone blames Sam. They then learn of some dynamite stolen from a local construction site run by a Frank Miller (Peter Wight), but who has a bunch of Riish on staff, and one is off duty named Patrick O’Brien. The Guv fingers him and they find him and take him in and beat him. Sam has another hunch though, he thinks it is O’Brien and goes and finds gambling debts and a map with a location that hasn’t been called in which has a bank. Sam and Annie convince the Guv, and they head to the bank and find Miller. Miller takes Ray hostage, but they manage to calm him down. He was stealing money for his family because he was so in debt.
02-04 A young and beautiful girl is found dead in the outfit of a door to door saleswoman, and Sam sees another kicked out of a car. The only lead they get is the man, Roger Twilling (Nicholas Palliser) who holds swinging parties with his wife Carol (Eva Pope). The 2nd girl goes missing, and Sam decides to go undercover with Annie, though the Guv doesn’t like all the spying and sneaking around. It does pay off though, and Annie and Sam get invited to the Twilling’s key party, but the Guv busts in uninvited with a hooker. Sam ends up with Carol, and Annie with Roger, and when Sam and Gene here her yelling they go and arrest him. The lawyer gets him off, but Annie placed a radio in Roger’s car and they can hear Carol with the missing girl about to kill her. They realize she is at the same place and rush to the rescue, just in time.
02-05 Sam is sick, and in fact from the voices he hears overmedicated, but he gets called in to work to help with a man who is going to hang himself, but sees strange visions on the ways. Sam is sped out of his mind, and sweating bullets. He goes in and sets up the investigation by looking into a year old case that they investigated over the murder of a 14 year old. Her 16 year old boyfriend Graham Bathurst (Adam Beresford) was quickly found by the Guv, and scared into a confession, and Sam has to figure out what really happened, and figure out who is doing the kidnapping. The problem is that they change Sam’s medicaition and he passes out, but the team uses what he taught them to help solve the crime. Annie goes to the father of the dead child, who is a photographer, and the Guv figures out that a photographer sent the father of the kidnapped people a photo as a warning. He is a gymnastics teacher and was a teacher of the girl. Annie finds the kidnapped women, and thanks to Chris the Guv uses Sam’s advice and takes the man with no problem. And Sam wakes up alright, but when the Guv tells him the kind of oil found on the rag, he tells him it is a wood oil and not a motor oil, and they realize the gymnastics teacher killed the girl.
02-06 Heroin has just hit and Manchester, and a Ugandan Asian Man who owned a record store is shot, and they thought killed, but he is still alive. He has drugs on him, so they think it is about drugs, but Sam isn’t convinced, and meets the man’s brother’s girlfriend, a white girl named Layla (Alex Reid). The Guv wants the brother named Ravi (Paul Sharma), and will let a thug named Toolbox Terry (Ian Puleston-Davis) deal with him, but Sam won’t let him. And Sam tries to protect Layla as well, keeping her at his place, when her place is burned by white supremacists. They find that Ravi and his brother were smuggling the goods from their old country, and that their was Heroin in it. Toolbox takes Ravi and is going to kill him, and the Guv will let him, but Sam goes to get Layla and Annie, but gets hit and taken on the head. They go to Toolbox, and it turns out to be his heroin, and he shoots Ravi (though he doesn’t die), but Chris and Ray show up and save the day. And Layla turns out to be pregnant with the dead man’s baby, who turns out to be Maya, Sam’s girlfriend from 2006, who wants Sam to let her go, and he finally does, because he really cares for Annie.
02-07 Gene freaks out at a trial and threatens to kill a man who he say beating up one of his boxers. That night Gene gets drunk, throws a brick through the window of the man’s house, and then loses his gun and gets out of Sam’s car. The next day Sam is awakened to a call from Gene, who is in the man’s house, and the man is dead, and Gene is covered in blood. Sam goes over, and Gene wants him to lead the investigation because he is the only one he trusts to help him. They arrest Gene, and a new DCI Frank Morgan (Ralph Brown) is put in charge. He is hell bent on taking Gene down. And in fact the whole team seems against Gene except Sam. Gene gets out on bail, and sneaks away from a tail by Ray and Chris. Sam finds Gene, and they work on the case, and find that in fact Gene is innocent, and the fighter Terry Haslam (Seamus O’Neill) was supposed to throw his last fight and didn’t, and he killed the man and his trainer, and used Gene and Gene’s gun as a perfect alibi. Gene is back. As Frank Morgan leaves he tells Sam, that it is too bad they missed their chance, as if he takes Gene down he can go home.
02-08 The CID finds a dead miner who had come to help from the Guv, and the Guv against police procedure had left him out to draw people out. Gene wants to get the collar and plans on going undercover and putting his team in danger without armed backup to stop a train robbery. Frank meanwhile comes to Sam and tells him he has amnesia, and that his whole belief that he came from the past is false. He is from Hyde, and is undercover to destroy Gene Hunt as an example. Sam doesn’t believe it, but Frank shows him graves of his real parents the Williams, and then shows him graves of the Tylers from the 1800’s! And Frank tells him he can only get him by taking the team down, and Sam starts to believe that Gene is a cancer in his brain. Sam is freaking out, and finally talks to Annie, who slaps him, and gets him to tell Chris and Ray, who also hate him. They will do the deal with Sam at the robbery as Gene is already undercover, but that is it. Frank gives Sam a radio and tells him he can call for backup at any time. The robbery on the train goes down, and Sam’s radio goes off, warning the bad guys that they are cops, and the shit goes down. A huge firefight starts with the team in serious danger, and Sam goes to find Frank to get help, but promises to return to Annie. Sam gets to the tunnel and finds Frank, and there is no backup, they are going to let the team die. Sam sees the team come out of the train and sees Ray and the Guv get hit, and Annie screaming, but Sam goes with Frank, into a bright light, and wakes up in modern Manchester. The world is a little bluer, and more lifeless. Sam goes back to work, but he keeps thinking about something Nelson told him about only being alive where you feel alive, and back in modern times he finds life completely lifeless. Sam talks to his mother and tells her that he has to go back because she made a promise, and she tells him he will always do the right thing. So Sam goes to the roof and jumps off.
Sam then comes out of the train tunnel, and pulls his gun and saves the team. Back at the bar he apologizes fro getting Ray shot, but Ray met a bird, so he is OK, and Phyllis tells him to go find Annie, so he does. Sam gets Annie to tell him what to do, and she asks him to stay, and he says he will forever and kisses her (finally). Then the Guv pulls up in his Ford and grabs the team, as their has been a shooting, and they are off.
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What a great series, and a great ending. I really thought they would end it with him going back to 2006, but I love that he went back to be alive, and to be with Annie the woman he loved more than anyone. Such an amazing show!
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The disc also has some great behind the scenes docs that go into all aspects of making the show, except maybe the amazing licensing of expensive music. I just wish this show was longer, but at least I have seen the torrent of Ashes to Ashes first episode, and have ordered the British DVD, which I will get later this year. I hate that they have Sam die after 7 years in that, but at least he got to be with Annie for a while, and I hope they married! Damn I love these characters!