Life on Mars: the final episode (with spoilers)

[selenay]

My mind is too full with the babble and the squee to say anything really insightful at the moment. Mostly I'm thinking "that wasn't how I expected it to end".

But I did really like the end. I had a rather large grin when Sam and co. drove off (not quite into the sunshine, but...).

There were two possible scenarios that I had for this episode. In the first, Sam woke up with a Dorothy moment - "I had the strangest dream and you were there, and you, and..."

Frank Morgan did fit that, and it was good to finally find the significance of Hyde and the telephone number, but that was as far as that scenario went.

My other idea was that Sam would wake up and, at some point just before the credits cut in, he'd find newspaper cuttings or something about Gene and co. that would prove everything was real.

The last thing I expected was for Sam to chose to stay in 1973, no matter what the eventual reason was for everything. In that, though, I really liked the ending. He spent two series trying not to be involved, trying to return home, but discovered that he was happiest and most alive in the 1973 world even though it's nothing like home. That image of a dead life at home, all meetings and discussions of the minutia of regulations, isn't like the Sam Tyler we've come to know.

If it's all in his mind or if there was some element of time-travel (I'd still argue that that hasn't really been settled properly...), it's understandable why he wants to go back a world that's so much more vibrant and where he gets to make a visible difference.

Plus, of course, there's Annie :-) Which has been quite a sweet relationship.

The other interesting element of this is how the sequel is going to work. If the whole Life on Mars world was in Sam's head, then how will the sequel be explained? Or was there really a time-travel element that can be used in the sequel?

Really great ending, leaving lots open for us to discuss and plenty of questions unanswered that require a sequel to answer :-)

Comments

[gmul.livejournal.com]

And I've watched it too now. "mind is too full" sums it up exactly! It got to the end and I looked at the time and knew there was something else to come. It got to the end and and I looked and...

Still, the test card girl in this series wasn't a fraction as scary as in S1.