When the U.S. version of Life On Mars kicked off last autumn, it was already off to a troubled start.  The original pilot, helmed by the zeitgeist-attuned David Kelly, was by all accounts a disaster, because Kelley was attuned to a zeitgeist shared only by himself and other elderly TV execs who live in a bubble of  90s television genius.  (You know, that time of ER, Friends, and Seinfeld.)

ABC scrapped the Kelly Life On Mars, which surprisingly was set in LA, not in Kelley’s beloved Boston, and retooled with a cast lousy with edginess–Harvey Keitel, Gretchen Mol, and Michael Imperioli, all veterans of indy movies and TV (if you count a run on a critically acclaimed HBO series as “indy”).  The new, improved show was also set in New York.  The expensive cast and expensive setting drove the economics that led to the show’s premature cancellation.

“Life Is A Rock,” the final episode of Life On Mars, ends the series the way U.S. audiences demand–neatly and unambiguously.  In contrast, the BBC series ended in a though-provoking and  morally ambiguous way.  The second-to-the-last Life On Mars episode, “Everyone Knows It’s Windy,” alluded to the BBC ending with its tense rooftop climax and the Special Agent Morgan character goading Sam into jumping to his death.  American audiences and TV writers could never make suicide, moral ambiguity, or any other depiction forbidden by the Hayes Code (though the Hayes Code is gone, its puritanical spirit very much lives on in broadcast TV) a significant plot point,  let alone the ending of a series.

Which leads us to the holodeck-snowglobe-it was all a dream ending of Life On Mars.  In the closing minutes of “Life Is A Rock,” we learn that Sam has indeed dreamt his dislocation in time from 2008 to 1973.  The show runners get points for making the dislocation in time an actual mistake or bug in his  dream programming.  Tina Seamonster has raised the question on the ‘cast about whether Sam was transported back to 1973, or was he transported back to a cheesy 1973 cop show, a la The Streets of San Francisco or Starsky and Hutch.  The ending as it played out makes me think that Sam was actually programmed to be in a cheesy 2008 procedural like Law and Order or CSI and then a glitch actually put him in Baretta or Starsky and Hutch.

How else could anyone explain that music?  Not the forgotten glam and classic rock treasures by David Bowie, The Sweet, and Lou Reed, but that Shaft-like pre-disco funk TV soundtrack stuff?

Nonetheless, the dream ending smacked of a cheap shot. It could have been a cheaper shot, or even cheesier, but the dream ending was masterfully performed and written.  It brought this high-concept series to a dignified and precisely engineered end.  Life On Mars, the ABC series, ended up being exactly as long as it should have been.

I’d like to think that Life On Mars is evidence that TV execs are thinking differently about how to make great shows, and that one of the goals is not to try to create decades-long franchises that plod on and on.  Maybe the network execs have actually learned something from the achievements of Sopranos, and even genre offerings such as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Babylon 5–that it’s better to make a big impact with the finite number of episodes that any showrunners have at their disposal, than to try to milk the franchise way past its useful shelf life.

As an episode and season finale, “Life Is A Rock” earns a respectable 4 out of 5 Harvey Keitel fists of fury.  As a series, as an achievement–Life On Mars gets 4.5  out of 5 Harvey Keitel fists of fury.

Which is good.  If only Life On Mars‘ level of quality were the norm, and the economics were able to put reality TV and Jay Leno out of business. . .

Sam’s former undercover stint in McManus’ gang makes Sam a leading suspect in the McManus’ murder. The possibility of a hit by 125 precinct detectives attracts the attention of the Feds, who dispatch Special Agent Frank Morgan from Washington to investigate the McManus murder.

A search of Sam’s apartment by the FBI turns up incriminating evidence, causing Sam to question his grasp on his reality.  Sam ends up arrested in the 125′s clink, but Gene and the other detectives spring him so he can pursue McManus’ true killer–and the source of his torment.  Special Agent Morgan appears to know about Sam’s dislocation in time, and in a climactic rooftop standoff, attempts to trick Sam into leaping to his death in order to “return home.” 

Morgan knows most of the details of Sam’s situation from having read Sam’s psychological profile and ransacking Sam’s apartment, but manages to work in commentary about a distinctly 2008 detail, the lamentable fourth Indiana Jones movie. Morgan, as it turns out, killed McManus and is not an FBI agent but is connected to the toy company that makes the Red Rover mars robot that has appeared in previous Life On Mars episodes..  Morgan killed McManus because McManus had robbed the toy company. 

Which leads us to mythology: Morgan has something to do with Sam’s dislocation in time, (the Indiana Jones shout out is the giveaway) but in the eyes of the 125 detectives, he was a petty crooked thief.  But all mythology questions will be wrapped up next week in the series finale.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Sam and Annie heats up but stays chaste. Annie has come to realize that Sam is not crazy, and she even admires him for his courage in the face of torment.

It was an engaging, well-paced episode that hit a good blance of gripping narrative and believable but dramatic character development, earning it another solid 4.75 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury. I’m going to be sorry to see this show expire.

The episode kicks off with disorientation.  A bearded Sam Tyler, calling himself Bono (those anachronistic pop culture references are catnip, aren’t they?), is dragged into the 125 precinct.  Bono spews ungentlemanly trash talk at the demure Annie, and fisticuffs ensue when Gene demands an apology from Bono.  For a few moments, the audience isn’t sure what is happening-is Bono sign of weirdness, as in a lookalike or doppelganger of Sam?  Sam is just undercover, as it happens, and he’s posing as a rough Irish immigrant longshoreman to penetrate the crew run by the murderous Jimmy McManus, played by pock-faced bad guy character actor Peter Greene.  Jimmy’s crew of Irish hooligans had just hijacked a truckload of VCRs (exotic gear back in ’73), and left a trail of corpses in its wake.

The undercover gig gives actor Jason O’Mara a chance to act a scoundrel part in his native Irish accent, just as the undercover stewardess assignment in episode 14, “Coffee, Tea, or Annie” allowed Gretchen Mol a chance to play to her more customary sexpot type.  Perhaps these are the indulgences of a series that has already been declared dead, but these two undercover forays have not had a “jump the shark” or “Cousin Oliver/the show needs a baby” effect on this (mostly) smartly written show.
Sam-as-Bono easily falls into line with Jimmy’s crew, and then promptly seduces Jimmy’s sister Colleen, the no-nonsense proprietor of the crew’s hangout bar.  For the second time in Life On Mars’ only season, Sam has spontaneous, rumbustious, and ill-advised sex with a newly introduced character.

Enter (or rather, re-enter) Life On Mars mythology.  Colleen is the next door neighbor of Sam’s mother and the 1973 child Sam, reintroducing the plot thread that disappeared with the “The Man Who Sold The World” episode in which Sam had confronted his ne’er-do-well father.  Sam’s mother very nearly blows his cover when she happens upon Sam at Colleen’s apartment, and calls out to him as “Detective Skywalker,” the name he gave her earlier in the season.  She implores Sam to speak with young 1973 Sam, who is acting out in response to the abrupt disappearance of Sam’s father in “The Man Who Sold The World.”  At first Sam the elder refuses, but then does have a conversation with young Sam in which young Sam morphs (via visual effects that would have been totally awesome in the early 90s) from child to adolescent to adult and back again.

Meanwhile, back at the small-time Irish crook ranch, there are crosses and double crosses.  Sam prevails, but only momentarily.  The Irish crook Jimmy blindsides Ray and Skelton with a vicious attack at a traffic stop.  The episode ends, cliffhanger-style with the hapless detectives bleeding to death in the street.

The music in this episode also returns to the glam rock fold, sort of, with the inclusion of the Mott The Hoople track, “All The Young Dudes,” which played as a backdrop to the adult Sam/boy Sam conversation scene.  But the inclusion of the Jim Croce song, “Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown” made me cringe.  On a seventies trivia side-note, old church ladies that I knew back in the 7os told little kids like me that Croce died in a horrible plane crash because he used foul language (“damned,” to be exact) in this very song.  Be careful, TVZ fans!

This episode’s venture into the neo-Noir territory of ethnic Irish gang activity had the potential for descent into cliché.   However, the episode worked well by setting up Sam Tyler and the 125 detectives for a mythic showdown with evil, but believable, iconic bad guy characters.  The teaser at the end confirmed for me what I was thinking at the end of this episode-this is a set-up for the series finale.  I will miss Life On Mars-but I can hardly wait to see what turns up in the dying hours of this quirkily delivered cop show.

This was an exemplary Life On Mars episode, which earns it solid 4.75 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.

The premise of the episode requires some suspension of disbelief–that is, beyond the suspension of disbelief of the show’s central premise of a detective dislocated in time.  The 125 detectives notice that a murder victim, stewardess Valerie Palmer, bears a striking resemblance to their own female auxiliary officer, Annie. When this kind of peanut butter gets mixed with this kind of cop show chocolate–it’s all but inevitable that Annie must go undercover as Valerie Palmer in order to smoke out the killer.

Annie-as-Valerie becomes immersed in the go-go, hypersexualized lifestyle of Pan Atlantic stewardesses, which is reconstructed in slavish detail for this episode.  Seventies stewardesses and pilots, and indeed, air travel itself, were the ne plus ultra of early 70s chic–those were the days when only an elite few could afford to fly, the industry was still relatively small, and the level of service was still luxurious.  Top designers vied to design the uniforms of airline personnel as well as other accouterments of the passenger experience–such as the china and flatware used to serve in-flight meals.

In those days, stewardesses were fully expected to be sex objects, and pilots were regarded in heroic terms.  Indeed, the recent outpouring of adulation for Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who miraculously crash-landed an airliner in the Hudson River after a catastrophic bird strike, reflects the lingering reverence for the romanticized aviator figure.  The undercover assignment of Annie into this quintessentially 70s scene allows the actress Gretchen Mol to stretch her legs (literally) in the kind of vampy role she for which she is known, and physically suited.

Put another way, anybody out there who has been waiting for Gretchen Mol to do a cheesecake scene in Life On Mars gets their wish with “Coffee, Tea, or Annie.”

A darker, more exotic flavor of cheesecake is also served up with a guest role played by Gina Gershon (cue drooling Homer Simpson: “Mmmm, Gina Gershon . . .”), who plays an oversexed stewardess who hosts car key swinger parties but who is murderously jealous.

(That was a spoiler)

Sam also gets in on the undercover airline act, and assumes the role of Captain Tom Cruise, an alias he obviously makes up on the fly. In past episodes, Sam has trotted out anachronistic pop culture references to great comedic effect, and in this episode he relentlessly works the Tom Cruise references.  At the episode’s climactic swinger party, Sam even spouts Cruise’s filmography in a vain attempt to hit on a swingy, 70s woman spouting New Age jargon. Not surprisingly, she rejects Sam.

In his 70s airline pilot get-up–complete with cheesy Burt Reynolds ‘stache–Sam looks the part of swaggering, swinging 70s guy.  The new setting and costuming for Sam and Annie set the stage for the lighter, comedy-of-manners tone that sets “Coffee, Tea, or Annie” apart from previous Life On Mars installments.  Additionally, certain procedural obstacles to much of the action in this episode–like court orders,  rival cops or Feds–which might have figured in other episodes, are glossed over, much to the benefit of the narrative flow.

In a mild nod to Life On Mars mythology, Sam recalls playing astronaut as a child, and how a Norman Rockwell-esque illustration from Saturday Evening Post magazine depicting an airline stewardess tending to a little boy inspired him.  He later finds a copy of the magazine in the trash–and the stewardess in the illustration is clearly Annie/Valerie. What does this suggest? That Annie has some pre-ordained role in Sam’s life?

Annie’s star turn in this episode extends beyond her show-offy sex kitten persona.  She arguably breaks the case–as she has done in past episodes–and finally scratches up the courage to tell Gene that she wants to be promoted to a full-fledged detective.  Gene does not reject Annie’s request out of hand.

It will be interesting to see in the remaining few episodes how Annie’s increasing assertions of equality will be addressed.  It will also be interesting to see if the creative adventurousness of this episode–the comedic and period dimensions, in particular–will be evident as Life On Mars winds down.

I laughed mightily at this episode, which has character development and period authenticity in abundance, but doesn’t advance the Life On Mars mythology.  “Coffee, Tea, or Annie” gets a respectable 4.6 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.

The 60s/70s radical terrorist group Weather Underground makes an appearance in the 125 precinct in “Revenge Of Broken Jaw,” and the Life On Mars creative team did a much better–but still not exemplary–job of using real period history in the unfolding Sam Tyler saga.

Save for an occasional book or obscure documentary film, Weather Underground had been all but forgotten by the mainstream of American media and politics until last year’s presidential election.  Detractors of candidate Obama attempted to portray his some-time interactions with Bill Ayers , a former Weather Underground member, as evidence of his secret radical, anti-patriotic agenda (they were on a community board in Chicago together, well after Ayers’ terrorist stint).

In reality–and this point pertains to this episode of Life On Mars–Weather Underground was one of history’s least effective and poorly led terrorist groups, ever.  They managed to inflict the most casualties on themselves via their incompetent bomb making, and were riven by internal power struggles and personal animosity.  What the episode got wrong was that Weather Underground was really good at targeting and killing jackbooted imperialist cop swine.  What it got right was that the high-falutin’ intellectualized revolution talk was a cover for more base motivations of key Weather Underground figures.

Anyways, the Weather Underground show up at the 125 precinct, blowing up Gene Hunt’s old cop buddies in the days before the big Ali-Frazier fight in 1973.  The 125 detectives deduce that a radical leftist college professor, Pat Olsen, is connected in some way to the series of bombings.  The steely, revolutionspeak-spewing Olsen is modeled loosely on the real life Weather Underground figure Bernardine Dohrn, who is married (in real life) to the above mentioned Bill Ayers.  During interrogation, Olsen lets on that the bombings against Hunt’s old cronies is revenge against a “Red Squad” of old McCarthy-era cops, whom Olsen believes poisoned an up-and-coming charismatic revolutionary, Rodney Slaven, the year before. Some detective work by Sam and Annie turns up indications that Slaven’s poisoning was not a heroin overdose staged by the Red Squad, but more likely by a physician.

Not coincidentally, Olsen’s long-suffering husband is a physician, and when it becomes clear that Olsen’s daughter shares Slaven’s peculiar eye coloring, the 125 squad realizes that the husband–not the Red Squad–killed Slaven out of jealousy.  In a fit, Olsen’s husband dashes out out of the station and into Gene Hunt’s car, which had been rigged with a bomb.

Meanwhile, the 125 detectives don’t have a place to watch the Frazier-Ali fight, which was shown on closed-circuit television.  And all of Gene’s buddies had been killed by the Weather Underground, so Sam arranges for the whole lot of them end up in a strip joint that is showing the fight.  Gene even brings along the grown son of one of his fallen buddies, an embittered Vietnam vet who had been disabled in war.  The moment of the fight signifies Sam’s embrace of his 1973 life and his 1973 workplace family, per the advice of a therapist that Sam has been visiting.

A bonus moment of poetic justice: Sam bets big against the obnoxious philistine Ray on the fight, using his future knowledge of the outcome.

In other Life On Mars news, ABC has announced the show will be cancelled.  Show producers, citing the ratings, actually pushed for cancellation, with an eye to actually bringing the show to an actual conclusion, and not just abruptly ending it.  So far, there’s no indication how Life On Mars will end. Is it a coma-induced dream? An elaborate conspiracy? Mental illness?

This was a servicible, though not excellent, episode that made good use of actual 1973 history and advanced the development of the Gene Hunt and Sam Tyler characters.  Unfortunately, melodrama weighed it down.  “Revenge Of Broken Jaw” gets a gentleman’s Four Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.

When the U.S. version of Life On Mars hit the airwaves last fall, I pessimistically anticipated the show would lapse into some kind of ‘gimmick of the week’ pattern, similar to Star Trek‘s oft-derided ‘Alien Civilization of the Week’ or other genre shows’ ‘monster of the week.’  A few early Life On Mars episodes focused on connecting protagonist Sam Tyler’s 2008 life as detective with his 1973 life in the 125 precinct.  I fully expected the show to regularly return to a pattern of Sam using his recall of some random 2008 crime scene detail, or maybe his enlightened 21st century crime fighting methods, to solve 1973 crimes.

This ’21st century insight of the week’ device has not turned up that often in Life On Mars, but did so in ”The Simple Secret of the Note in Us All” in a sophisticated way that contributed more to the development of Life On Mars characters.  When a colorful but notoriously cranky newspaper columnist turns up dead, the 125 detectives are overwhelmed by leads–apparently, this columnist had crossed up everyone in New York with his poison pen at some time or another, including 125 supremo Gene Hunt.

The murder of a high profile journalist brings such high-level pressure down on the 125 squad that Serious Authority Figure Actor and Former Ultra-Long Shot Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson arrives on the scene to lay some Serious Authority Figure gravitas down on Gene’s 125 detective crew.  Thompson, playing a District Attorney or Police Chief or Inspector General or some other such heretofore unseen uber-boss figure, is keen to have the murder investigation go quickly and according to procedure, because police misconduct was part of the murdered columnist’s beat.  Gene Hunt was even a subject of the columnist’s scrutiny, underscoring the need for the 125 to extra special care of this case–and revealing more about Gene’s checkered past, and rocky relations with the media.

Of course, the investigation does not go by the numbers, because Sam recognizes a figure seemingly tangentially connected to the case as the perp in a particularly heinous case he worked in 2008.  As Sam recognizes the striking similarities between the 1973 columnist murder and his 2008 case, he becomes increasingly unhinged–and unprofessional.

Here’s where episode 12 jumps the tracks and misses an opportunity to show the audience more about Sam Tyler’s 2008 life.

Sam’s impulsive behavior in this episode is inconsistent with his behavior in past episodes, where he repeatedly showed a conscientious, even persnickety, devotion to procedural details.  But throughout episode 12, Sam violates restraining orders, disobeys his superiors, and even gets kicked off the case.  The audience gets that the 2008 case really disturbed Sam–but why? Additionally, there are hints that Sam had his own problematic relations with the press over his 2008 case–why? What happened?

Obviously, there are parallels between Gene’s 1973 and Sam’s 2008 problematic press relations, which could have been better developed and engendered more audience empathy for the uncharacteristically unhinged Sam .  Instead, Sam engages increasingly erratic–and narratively inconsistent–behavior.

Annie gets another moment in the sun, conveniently securing a last-minute warrant and saving 125′s bacon.  Ray, however, shows cowardly neglect when he withholds until the last minute evidence that would corroborate Sam’s half-cocked assertions about the columnist murder.

Music again reinforced the period atmosphere.  The Moody Blues’ epic, operatic “Isn’t Life Strange” stood out as a particularly fitting background note to the episode.

And about that mythology. . . where the &@#$ was it? We have become accustomed in his second half of the season for at least a weekly hit off the mythology crack pipe, but episode 12 left the audience cold turkey.  What gives, Life On Mars show runners?

The lack of mythology and a stammering attempt at showing Sam on professional fire really detracted from an episode with otherwise excellent potential.  This episode gets a respectable 3.75 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.  There have been better, but it could have been much, much worse

The mythology of Life On Mars’ central premise, Detective Sam Tyler’s dislocation in time from 2008/2009 to 1973, took a galloping leap forward when a perp with a story identical to Sam’s gets dragged into the 125.

When the 125 detectives bust a brothel (a “No Tell Hoe-Tell,” per wisecracking detective Ray Carling), one of the johns turns out to be Bobby Prince, a colorful muckraking city politician. In private, Prince tells Sam that he, too, is from 2009, and that he has figured out how to get back.  At one point in the exchange between Sam and Prince, he shares news from 2009–specifically, that a black man has become president. During the episode, Sam even sees fleeting television images (a now recurring “channel” from 2008/2009 back to Sam in 1973) of Barack Obama’s inaugural speech.

Prince even proclaimed to Sam that 2009 is so much better and hopeful than 1973.  For this viewer, this sequence  was hauntingly effective, stitching together emotionally engaging imagery from today with snowy gray bleakness of Sam’s 1973 reality.  At an instinctive, emotional level, I agreed with Prince–even with gloomy headlines portending the dawn of a modern day Great Depression, hopeless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and environmental meltdown, I knew that I would rather be in 2009 than 1973.  I suspect most viewers agree.

The arrival of Prince, and his apparently obsessive desire to return to 2009, give focus to several intriguing questions and puts the mythology of Life On Mars center stage. Are there more Sam Tylers and Bobby Princes wandering around, suffering in silence and/or madness, and will Sam Tyler encounter another?  Is dislocation in time a result of a kind of cosmic accident, or part of a design or conspiracy?  Are the Russians and the Aries project and the little robots merely observers of Sam’s and Prince’s ‘condition,’ or are they orchestrating or otherwise conspiring to cause it? And is the hellishness that Sam and Prince feel in 1973 a reflection of the awfulness of the past, or the result of the uncertainty of knowing that a whole other existence has been left behind?

Unfortunately, Prince gets killed before any of this can be meaningfully explored. Later in the episode, Annie uncovers evidence that Prince actually did suffer the same dislocation in time–or the delusion thereof–that haunts Sam.

Hunt’s response to the shooting is lock down the 125 station house and find the killer.  Over the course of the episode, Hunt cleverly susses out the killer in the interstices between family and romantic melodrama that unfolds between Hunt, his estranged daughter Maria, and Sam.

Conveniently, Maria happens to be in the precinct at the moment of the lockdown, forcing confrontations between her and Gene and Sam.  As a result, some ham-fisted Maria character development unfolds. The audience previously had been led to believe that Maria was a tough, no-nonsense, liberated 70s kind of gal–a kind of slutty Mary Tyler Moore–but this episode completes her transformation into a petulant, obsessive ingrate. Obviously, Maria is being set up as a foil to the brainy-girl-next-door Annie for future Life On Mars melodrama–a cynical sop to supposed female demographic viewing preferences.

The lives of two other characters unfold more interestingly–and convincingly–when Annie gets paired up with the philistine Ray Carling for some investigative street work in the aftermath of the brothel bust.  In an unexpected display of taking Annie seriously as a  law enforcement professional, Ray introduces Annie to his wife, Denise, who is–cue The Office‘s Andy Bernard–delightful!

I had expected the character of Ray’s wife to have been developed into an impossibly awful off screen harpy, a kind of dialogue device seen on so many tired sitcoms.  Instead, the audience gets a look into Ray’s more or less stable and blissful domestic situation.  In keeping with his doting big-brother role seen an episode or two ago, Ray turns out to be a doting and nurturing, if somewhat confining, husband to his outgoing and creative wife.

Annie hits it off immediately with Ray’s wife, further reinforcing Annie’s versatile nature, but by episode’s end, Annie shows herself not only as an ideal, consensus-making feminine caregiver–but also as an ideal, kick-ass law enforcement professional when she quick-wittedly saves Ray’s life. The impromptu pairing gives Ray and Annie ample opportunity to spout their respective personal philosophies. In a moment that indicates how elevated Sam has become in Annie’s estimation, she lets on that she acknowledges Sam’s account of the future–that women will take their place alongside male detectives.  Her assessment of Sam as a “case” to be studied changes a bit as well, when she realizes that the murdered Prince suffers the same time-dislocation problem as Sam.

And there was more excellent glam rock! “Ballroom Blitz” by the long forgotten The Sweet backgrounded the cathouse bust that kicked off the episode.  The Sweet’s other big top 40 hit, “Little Willie,” played during a bust scene earlier in the season.  I’m ready for the Glam Rock revival, but instead, in the real world, there’s a revival of Journey. Barf!

Great mythology in this episode, but melodramatic remnants of the earlier, abortive David “Ally McBeal” Kelly version of Life On Mars stuck in my craw.  This ditty gets 4.75 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.

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.

If every episode were this good, I’d be the guy organizing the campaign to drive as many little Mars robots as possible into ABC headquarters when Life on Mars is canceled on schedule later this spring.

What made it so danged good?

First, continuation of a gripping story arc started in earlier episodes.  “The Dark Side of the Mook” kicks off with the resumption of cliff-hangerage that took place in the final moments of  Episode 1.7, “The Man Who Sold The World,” which aired back before the holidays in November.  At the end of that episode, Sam Tyler leaves the hospital, where he is recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by his own father, to follow up on a cryptic clue left by his father.  Following this clue, Sam ends up at a suburban address, where a mysterious phone caller directs him to unearth a headless corpse buried nearby. The headless corpse yields yet another clue–this time the phone number of Sam’s colleague and rival, hard-boiled detective Ray Carling.

The episode unfolds via a series of investigative interviews conducted by a kind of man in black–is he FBI? CIA? Internal Affairs? The humorless investigator questions Sam, Ray, and Gene, and a story emerges of decapitated bodies, petty theft, and one of those uber-rich dudes who is completely above the law.  Entangled in this plot is Ray’s underachieving brother Eddie.

Which gets us to unexpected character development. Through the introduction of the Eddie character, the audience gets a rare glimpse into the inner life of the philistine Ray.  In previous episodes, Ray has been a monolithic or even elemental character who spews a constant stream of cynicism and ill will at most of the other characters, particularly the main character, Sam.  There have also been intimations that Ray might be a crooked cop.  But we’ve never gotten a good feel for what drives this dark and hostile character, until now.  But it turns out that Ray carries the burdens of propping up his loser brother Eddie and insulating his retired parents from the shame and worry that Eddie causes.

This detour into the reality of Ray Carling doesn’t distract, though, from the central developments of “The Dark Side of the Mook.”  The mystery of Sam’s dislocation in time is the focus of this episode, and there’s weirdness aplenty, starting with that man in black investigator character.  The Mars rover robot never appears, but a burned, disfigured killer does.  Annie indicates that she is ready to believe Sam’s bizarre story.  And then there’s that secret “Project Aries” file, labeled in English and Russian, which harkens back to the Russian scientist who appeared in episode 1.8  “Take A Look At The Lawmen.”

Television Zombies’ own Chris Piers pointed out in comments to my review of episode 1.8 “Take A Look At The Lawmen” that  “Take A Look At The Lawmen” and 1.9 “The Dark Side of the Mook” have been broadcast out of sequence, and that “Take A Look At The Lawmen” should have been shown after “The Dark Side of the Mook.”  Several elements of “Take A Look At The Lawmen,” however, seem to fit better before the events of “The Dark Side of the Mook;” in particular, the Russian scientist’s explanation of his research back in the mother country into miniature probes of the human soul and admonition that Sam “embrace his immigrant status.”  The mystery deepens.

So just what is Project Aries? Who was investigating the 125 Precinct?  Is the burned killer truthful, or a stooge?  Who is calling Sam and giving him instructions and tips? What’s with the robots?

An inspired music choice added to the enigmatic quality of “The Dark Side of the Mook.” “White Room” by Cream embodied the jazz-fusion-art-rock genius of Eric Clapton at the height of his powers, and the imagery of this song–one part glamorous sixties spy movie, one part acid trip, and about a hundred parts over-the-top epic rock pomposity–complemented the episode’s dramatic tension.

It was all so good, I forgot that Harvey Keitel needs a haircut to look like he belongs in 1973.

Here’s hoping there’s more episodes like this one, so it gets an unheard of 4.9 Harvey Keitel Fists of Fury.

The episode opens with Hunt, Tyler, Carling, and the 125 homicide posse at a suicide standoff.  The jumper is a businessman who just lost everything after his mobile phone deal goes bad.  Apparently, his wife thought his investment in mobile phones was ridiculous, as does every other character in the scene. Remember, this is 1973, and the idea of a mobile phone is laughable–but not to twenty-first century boy Tyler, who starts to make some progress in getting off the guy off the ledge.

Unfortunately, Tyler is interrupted by the arrival of Hunt’s arch-rival, Lieutenant Nunzio (Vincent Curatola, the slippery Johnny ‘Sack’ of the Sopranos), and his detective squad (also played by ex-Soprano-ers), who take charge of the scene.  Nunzio’s taunts (including more ridicule of the jumper’s mobile phone idea) actually cause the jumper to jump, and the rap falls on Hunt, reigniting a long-standing feud between the two old boss detectives.  Over the course of the episode, a wistful Hunt lets on that his rivalry with Nunzio goes back to a woman with whom Hunt ultimately had a family.

To get back at Nunzio, Hunt and the 125 squad muscle in on a bank robbery investigation in Nunzio’s district, and it starts to look like Nunzio and his detectives are in bed with Russion gangsters who are involved in the bank robbery.  A key witness is a little boy, occasioning the appearance of social worker Maria Belanger (Mad Men‘s Maggie Siff) who, of course, is a smokin’ hot firecracker of a 1973 babe.

Cue the improbable semi-violent workplace sex.

Nunzio and Hunt finally team up in a climactic, fisticuffy bust of the Russian gangsters, complete with goofy soundtrack music right out of schlocky 70s detective shows.  The bruised-up 125 gang retreats to their watering hole for some hard drinking, where Sam learns that the comely sex kitten Maria is actually . . .

Gene Hunt’s daughter. Sam Tyler will so need some ice for that burn!

Over the course of the episode, the little robot from the 21st century returns. Most significantly, a young Russian scientist, who recently immigrated to the US but had become entangled with the Russian gangsters, unexpectedly veers into a conversation with Tyler about little tiny robots that Russian scientists had developed that could explore the human soul.  All of this takes place as one of the tiny robots drives out from under the scientist’s eyelid and around his face.  The scientist goes on to advise Tyler to “embrace his immigrant status.”

While the robot’s appearance seems to suggest that the writers are sticking to the task of unraveling the mystery of Tyler’s dislocation in time, the sudden appearance of a love interest with whom Tyler engages represents a new direction.  At a minimum, it shows that Tyler is settling in to 1973.  Of course, making that love interest the daughter of the show’s alpha male character is a cheap, soap opera-ish ploy to notch up the tension between the characters.

Backstage, its worth noting that signs of Life on Mars‘ likely cancellation are emerging.  The TV Series Finale web site reports that despite Life on Mars‘ well-received opening episode, its ratings have been in a steady slump of viewer indifference.  TV Series Finale also points out that the show’s rescheduling to the slot just after Lost is another sign of doom, citing the fates of The Nine and Invasion.

Inspired casting was a high point for this episode, but the melodramatic tension seemed contrived.  This ditty gets three out of five Harvey Keitel fists of fury.

Oh, and Keitel he still needs a !@#$ haircut.  Everybody else on the show has an appropriate 70s coif–what gives?