The third installment of ABC’s new procedural-with-a-gimmick Life on Mars is  ”My Maharishi Is Bigger Than Your Maharishi,” which is the first script for this series that ABC’s production team did not cross-walk over from the original BBC series.

And it showed, sort of.

In typical network fashion, this all-American episode of Life on Mars went for moral polarity rather than the interesting, but unsettling and entertaining, moral ambiguity that most of us have come to expect from this BBC-originated drama.  Not that this episode–or the moralizing–was all a bad thing.  Indeed, I think this may be as close as we’ll get to the big questions on American network TV.

Our intrepid 125th precinct detectives cut through a spontaneous hippy party raging in a New York park to visit the scene of a murder.  The victim is a recently returned Vietnam vet, which the detectives realize will arouse special ire from their tough guy boss, Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel). A lot of exposition about the deep divisions among Americans over hippy-dom and the Vietnam War follows, until a gay man from central casting comes into the precinct for an interview, at which time the exposition changes course onto the unreconstructed homophobia of 1973.  

Sam deduces the victim was gay (a war hero!?!) and that gay-bashing is the likely MO for the murder, so he, Annie (Gretchen Mol), and junior detective Chris Skelton (Jonathan Murphy) set a trap for gay bashers in the park.  Carling (Michael Imperioli) declines to participate in the trap, because he is a homophobe, but Hunt upbraids him for not recognizing that murder is murder, even if fags are the victims. The trap yields three idiot-jocks who earn an especially brutal interrogation by Hunt (there’s an especially well played metal chair throw), who is still outraged that war heroes are being murdered in his precinct. To neatly tie things up, American TV drama style, Sam and Annie visit the murder victim’s family and eulogize the war hero without assaulting them with 1973 shame that dare not speak its name.

Sprinkled throughout the episode are tableaux of 1973-era counterculture, starting with the aformentioned hippy party.  There’s more hippy parties, an Abby Hoffman-esque wisecracking radical leader, a maharishi guru guy, and an old-school gay bar.  Only the gay bar is actually instrumental to this week’s episode. While the retro attitudes about homosexuality and proper police conduct pervade the episode, some of the artifacts of 1973 seemed canned and/or gratuitous.  

Speaking of canned and/or gratuitous, the mystery of Sam’s emergence in 1973 was reduced to a character quirk in ”My Maharishi Is Bigger Than Your Maharishi.”  There are a few trippy flashbacks to childhood memories or the fleeting sighting of a child (Sam, we presume), which leads Sam to begin researching the existence of his 1973 self and family.  But no robot sightings, or images morphing into hospital personnel, and no Maya the 2008 girlfriend.  

In a related development taken directly from the Mediocre American Television Drama Manual, the Life on Mars characters seem to have settled into static roles.  Most significantly, the other characters seem to have arrived at a comfort level with Sam’s “I’m from the future” delusion, allowing him to pontificate about how different things will eventually be at various points in this episode.  I was particularly moved (seriously, I was) about an emotional outburst that linked 1973 bigotry to Sam’s oblique foretelling of 9/11.  My hope for future episodes is that this kind of interplay between past and present can be done more deftly, and in a way more integral to Life on Mars.

The writers have also added a significant new mythic dimension to the Hunt character:  he’s one of the greatest generation.  One reason he has a soft spot for military veterans is that he apparently was one himself during WWII.  Add this to his principled, fearless (for 1973) stance on gay murders, and Hunt could actually turn out to be a complex, storied character.  I hope this is a secret that Gene keeps for a long, long time–that would actually be authentic, because I still haven’t met a WWII veteran who actually wants to talk about his experiences. He still doesn’t look era-appropriate to me.

In another character growth development, it turns out that Annie can get her freak on:  she’s a mimeograph sniffer. That bit of cutting edge debauchery took place within the first five minutes of the episode. I experimented with mimeograph sniffing back in grade school, but the good s%$t is hard to come by these days.  And that warm, electrical, carbon-y smell from big laser printers just ain’t the same.

Ahhh, 1973.

I give ”My Maharishi Is Bigger Than Your Maharishi” three, no, make that three and a half Harvey Keitel fists of fury.