Another old post - just catching up on reposting... This one is from March 22, 2009 when Life on Mars was still not finished yet. It was a GREAT show that I really enjoyed...
Sam Tyler is a detective on a cop show called Life on Mars. I won’t expound past that because if you’re not already watching this show then you probably won’t stick around for the rest of this post. :)
Still here? Ah - good. :)
If you’ve been watching the show, then you know that it COULD be time travel... or near death hallucinations... or alien abduction... etc. Me? I’m holding out for the biggie - time travel! Tyler is not the first “Sam” to leap back in time...
Those of you that know me know I’m nuts for time travel stories, so needless to say when Life on Mars started being previewed, I was all over it. Like last year’s Journeyman, I thought, “finally, a dramatic time travel show.” What I got in the bargain was much more. Each week we get a little better look at Detective Tyler and his life, both as an adult and his history. In addition to that, the shows are very entertaining in themselves. Add in the time travel strand and you have built in cliffhangers.
But enough about the background. This post assumes you already know all that. What I want to discuss is MY thoughts on what’s happening to Sam and what we might be finding out in the next two weeks (the last two episodes, supposedly). First, you know I *want* it to be time travel, but that’s not good enough. We have to have evidence to support it. So far all the things that could be attributed to time travel could also be attributed to an hallucination. If we assume that what we see on the screen is really happening in 1973, then we can only assume it’s time travel.
WOW - I just realized this will be harder than I thought... Rather than try to convince you that it is time travel, let me just give you my thoughts on some things and how they might play out.
1)Sam has confided in Annie. So far Annie hasn’t totally dismissed him. Is it because she likes him? Or does she believe him? I think she believes that HE believes it, so she’s willing to appease him. She also can’t deny that Sam saved her life when she wore the red dress. Unless he could see the future some other way, that was a BIG step toward belief in her mind. Putting myself in her shoes, I can see how it would be hard to accept this.
2)Sam has ONLY confided in Annie. He’s not told anyone else, so he’s not a threat to whoever/whatever sent him here. I’m referring of course to Project Aries. What is it? Who is it? The folder looked to me like a joint venture between the Soviets and Americans. Did they send him back in time or are they looking for travelers or something else?
3)In the episode where there was the accountant being pursued, he indicated to Sam that he arrived in 1973 with an apartment, a history, papers, etc. Sam thought he was from 2008, but instead he was from 2009 (our time, basically) and said Obama had won the election (news to Sam, since he leaped before November). He was also talking about it and apparently being silenced.
4)Sam gets a mysterious phone call from someone that apparently knows about him being an immigrant to 1973. Looking for answers, Sam follows the caller’s instructions, which lead him to a house where, in the next episode, he finds a dead body. Internal Affairs interviews Sam, Ray, Chris, Gene, etc., but they destroy the tapes of everyone except Sam. My theory is that they were checking to see if he would talk about what had happened to him. Either they concluded that he is unaware (doubtful, since they called him again after the interview) or that he can be trusted not to talk. Either way, the question still remains - did they do this to him?
This is so circular that it’s hard to put it out in a linear fashion. I think that Sam’s memories from when he was a kid are because he’s there now. In other words, it’s a closed loop. But is it a loop that can be changed? Did he cause his mother to come home crying and wake him up as a kid? If so, then did it happen to his younger self because of the same events or not? If slightly different, but same outcome, then he can change the past. If the same, then it’s a closed loop.
The thing that puzzles me, though, is why did Sam have a job, apartment, clothes, identification, a car, etc. in 1973? If it’s an act of GFTW (God/Fate/Time/Whatever from QL), then there’s the answer. If the government did this to him, then they could have set all that up. His hair was different enough that they would have had a hard time faking a photo ID of him before the change.
Actually, the more you try to find answers, the more questions you discover. ABC promises that “after next week, all questions will be answered,” but I don’t believe it. Unless he wakes up from a coma and it was all a dream (perhaps Annie is the nurse that’s taking care of him, and she’s become part of the hallucination; perhaps Gene is the surgeon or head doctor; Ray & Chris the orderlies), how else is it explained? I will say that I will be sorely disappointed if that is the answer...
This week’s show saw him promise Annie that he’d take her out when he gets home. I hope he can follow through with that...
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