| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
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Tuesday, July 25, 2006 ( 7/25/2006 11:48:00 AM ) Bill S. "TAKE A LOOK AT THE LAW MAN . . ." – Forget Nightmares And Dreamscapes. This summer, BBC America is where the true horror's at: in Life on Mars, no-nonsense 21st century DCI Samuel Tyler (John Simm) is flattened by a speeding car, only to come to in 1973, wearing flare trousers! Pause to briefly shudder . . . Simm has been in pursuit of a serial murderer who may have kidnapped his ex-girlfriend Maya – but now he's seemingly stuck in the seventies as a demoted Detective Inspector. His jeep has been downsized and its sound system (from whence we hear the Hunky Dory era Bowie hit which provides the series title) is now an eight-track player. Has our man really gone back in time – or is he in a coma from that hit-&-run? At times, Simm seems to hear voices that sound like doctors hunkering over a medical consult, while in one scene, a droning television lecturer suddenly appears to start talking about our hero as if he's a patient in a teaching hospital. Perhaps poor Sam is going mad? His new colleagues on the force definitely have their suspicions. Mars doesn't reveal too many cards in its opening ep: its trio of writers (one of whom has written for Doctor Who) focus on the specifics of our detective hero's plight without overly resorting to Marty McFly Calvin Klein jokes (though there are a few funny moments – as when Sam offends a phone operator by referring to Virgin Mobil). Tyler's plight, we're regularly reminded, has a deadly serious side to it: back in the twenty-first century, after all, Maya is in the hands of a monster. Torn between blending in with his fellow officers (including his thuggish alpha male supervisor, Gene Hunt) and denying that any of what he sees is real, he still can't help noticing that the first case he's given in the 70's is connected to his serial killer hunt. Is his unconscious mind working things out while he's in Intensive Care? Simm plays his out-of-sync detective with the right mix of agitated despair and still keen-sighted thoughtfulness. When he stoops down to examine the hand of a newly discovered victim, he looks as intense as Agent cooper pulling a typed letter out from under a corpse's fingernail. Standing on a building roof (in a moment very reminiscent to Hurley's crisis of faith on this season's Lost), you can see the guy's anguish. Time traveling – even if it's only in your head – is definitely no lark. But the moment that hooked me on Mars' first eight-episode season was a lighter one. Wandering through a neighborhood that would be much revamped in thirty years, Sam comes upon an appealingly funky local record store. It's the same place, he wistfully realizes, that he bought his first record: "Cars" by Gary Numan. The only track that might've been even more apt is "Warm Leatherette." # | |
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