My own memory of 1973 is remarkably clear about a few things: UFOs and other space stuff, and a style of pop music I would later learn is called glam rock. I was a huge fan of all those things, in that way a second or third grader is allowed to be a huge fan.

That year, I saw the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn with our own eyes through a fancy telescope my brother had scrimped and saved for; UFO and comet Kouhoutek sightings were everywhere in the newspapers.

And in a really lucky moment, I was treated to the occasional a song by T-Rex, The Sweet, or David Bowie on WLS, a Chicago AM station that was the only station we picked up out in the Indiana boonies, unless we wanted to hear crop reports.

“Let All the Children Boogie,” tenth episode of ABC’s US incarnation of Life on Mars, brings (fictional) glam rocker Sebastian Grace (played by Cheyenne Jackson, in a case of preposterously named actor portraying a slightly less preposterously named character) to the 125 precinct.  Grace has been beset by death threats, so the detectives of the 125 are charged with protecting him and tracing the origins of the most ominous threats.  Junior detective Chris Skelton, a Sebastian Grace superfan, is assigned to lead the effort.

When Skelton follows Grace and a groupie named Rocket Girl to a back-of-VW-bus tryst in the Jersey Meadowlands, Grace doses Skelton with LSD via a grape soda and a UFO shows up.  Rocket Girl disappears during the UFO incident, and Grace becomes a leading murder suspect.

A tip from another groupie leads to a deranged roadie with a Rocket Girl obsession.  Hunt and Carling display some of their worst tendencies toward interrogation brutality–lots of beating and even an almost-cigarette burn.  Skelton goes in an X-Files direction with the investigation, turning to his own intereest in the paranormal and a reclusive FBI expert on the weird named the Sorcerer, played by venerable character actor Wallace Shawn.

Sam solves the Rocket Girl disappearance by returning to the Meadowlands and having the UFO experience himself and recovering Rocket Girl’s body.  Grace is released, and invites Annie to his big New York show.

In a counterintuitive plot turn, the Sorcerer offers the rational explanation for both incidents–testing of a helicopter. I was expecting the Sorcerer to help Sam with his personal time dislocation mystery, but instead takes us into a more mundane direction.  It will be interesting to see if the Sorcerer returns to help Sam, or possibly to scorn him and sow more doubt.

The episode closes with Grace performing his signature tune (and as Sam reveals to Skelton, his wondrous one hit), “The Last Planet I Kissed.” The song title, the performance, Grace’s persona–all reflected a great appreciation for the glam rock moment of the early 70s. (If only all period details in every episode of Life on Mars showed this much care.)

And glam was but a moment, not unlike the swing moment in mid-90s post-grunge pop. David Bowie invented glam, Marc Bolan and T-Rex perfected it, Roxy Music took it in an arty direction, and Kiss sucked out every last drop of coolness and nailed its coffin shut, all in a few short years.  For a middling film treatment of the glam phenomenon, check out Velvet Goldmine starring Christian Bale.  If you think life is short and don’t want to waste your time with the movie, just get the soundtrack.

Oh, yeah, and the steamy relationship between Sam and Maria, Boss Detective Hunt’s estranged daughter, heats up. Cattiness ensues between the vixen-esque Maria and the brainy girl next door, Annie, who takes an honor hit on behalf of Sam.  The detectives tag the two women as Betty and Veronica. Meanwhile, Hunt pieces together that Sam and Maria did the nasty in the 125 file room by finding the mis-monogrammed pen he gave to Maria for her high school graduation.

The pen has some potential Life on Mars mythology implications: the monogram on the pen–MNR–is wrong for Maria, but spells a word in Russian, pronounced “mir” in English.  Mir means peace and was also the name of a Russsian space station.

Another welcome feature of “Let All the Children Boogie” is the continued development of characters, with this being Chris Skelton’s episode.  Skelton is presented as a bit of a naif, still full of youthful enthusiasm for music and the exciting mysteries of the paranormal.  By the end of the episode, he has lost a little of his naivete about his idols and his interests, but his spirit is not broken.  As the youngest of the 125′s detectives, he’s a sharp contrast to the hard-boiled old school detectives Hunt, Carling, and the enigmatic Sizable Ted.

And Annie is not all sugar, spice, and everything nice.  She can rock out, as well as navigate the unseemly back alleys of 125 sexual politics. She did, after all, show herself to be less than pure in front of Hunt–not just to save Sam’s honor (and bacon), but also to show herself as tough and worldly.

If I have but one complaint–it’s that the mythology wasn’t advanced much in “Let All the Children Boogie,” despite the tantalizing introduction of the Sorceror and UFOs and their potential for fleshing out the telling of Sam’s mystery.

Nonetheless, this episode held my attention and tickled my nostalgia bone in an unexpected way.  I’ll give it 4.9 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.