Life On Mars: Out Here In The Fields [series premiere]
By fred | October 10, 2008
(S01E01) This is yet another British-based new series, and once again I had not watch the original series, meaning that I don’t have anything to compare it with. That being said and while my impressions of the show will obviously be different than for anyone who had seen the original, I did know few things about this show before I stared watching, other than the main idea of the show — a cop who gets hit by a car and wakes up in the 70’s.
And what I knew didn’t really made me had any hopes about the show, more lire fears actually. Because I knew David E. Kelley bought the rights of the show and wrote a first pilot, which was shot in Los Angeles. Later on, Kelley exited the show and the pilot as scrapped, and everyone except for the main character, Sam (Jason O’Mara), was replaced.
A new episode was then written and shot in New-York, where the show had been moved, and still wasn’t completed a month ago. Now all those are signs of trouble, and indications that more often than once, it will suck. Of course, there’s always exceptions to the rule…
And clearly so far, this is an exception. Now granted I hadn’t seen the L.A.-based pilot either, so I don’t know if it actually got better or not, but what I can say is that this episode was really good. From the get-go I was grabbed, as the camera work and music were really doing their work. This didn’t stop once in 1973 obviously, with always a great production value and a pretty solid soundtrack.
We open in 2008, where Sam is working a case about some serial killer. His partner and girlfriend is kidnapped, and as he’s out looking for her he gets hit by a car. When he wakes up, the year is 1973. Now there’s something you don’t see every day. I don’t know for sure obviously, but so far it seems obvious what is actually going on : Sam is in some sort of coma.
Because he did not just travel back in time, since in 1973 he has a life, a car, and even a job — he’s still a cop. But yet he wasn’t there in 73, or, not like that, since he was only 4 at the time. But a couple of flashes, the fact that at some point he could hear his girlfriend telling him she was okay (which could have only been his conscious telling him not to go through with what he was considering doing), or the doctor he saw on TV which really seemed to be talking to him and someone close to him, while he was unconscious at the hospital, all indicates that none of this is actually real.
Which begs the question, actually : what are we going to get from now on, during the next episodes ? Are we just gonna have yet another procedural cop-drama, only set in 1973, so different style, different methods, different rules ? Because if that’s the case, the show might lose all of its appeal to me very fast then.
What made this episode work, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t the obvious time-travel jokes which sometimes sounded a little too much like straight out of Back To The Future, it is not the jokes about how a couple of weeks to get a fingerprint results is amazing, it isn’t how results were obtained quite differently back then, where you just kick the doors and kick some asses to get your answers, what made the whole thing work was that he as working the same case than in 2008, somehow.
It’s that all time-travel mystery attached to the case, and the consequences it had on the future, Maya’s fate, that made the whole thing interesting. If this will turn into just another procedural only in the past, there won’t be much left. Especially if, since we are in a fake world made up in his mind, all cases are somehow based on previous cases he worked on, with the obvious hunches that could result from it, it risks to be boring fast I’m afraid.
As for this week’s case, I wondered why he didn’t try to find his parents, see if there was another him age 4 living in the same city. About the case, it did seem a little too easy to solve, but of course the whole setup about the time travel and everything had to be explained, so there couldn’t have been much more time for the case itself.
And that’s also why it was fine, it was fine that he didn’t realize how women were treated back then, which is far from being the way they should be; it was fine that he resolved the case thanks to a hunch and similarities to the case from 2008, but not much else; it was fine we had all those time-traveling jokes and time spent on how things evolved over time; it was fine he was shocked over the different ways to interrogate a witness… it was all fine, for this one time.
But if that’s the only thing this show will have to offer, and sadly I’m seriously thinking that it will be the case, it will make for a great and exciting pilot episode, because that was the case, but a rather classical and boring procedural after wards, which won’t really have any other interest over all the others except for being set in the seventies.
Because what got me excited during this episode wasn’t the procedural stuff, it wasn’t solving the crime, it was the time travel of course. It was trying to figure out what happened and how he could “go back”, it was to see him seriously considering shooting the kid, whom he knew would grow up to be a serial killer and eventually kidnap his future girlfriend (and also thought for a while we might have two realities playing at once, 1973 & 2008, so he would work cases in both times somehow or something — guess I was wrong on that one). That’s what made this show work, and I’m wondering how much of that will live after this first episode…
Do you think the show will remain as good as this episode was ? Or will it (slowly) turn into a boring procedural like so many others out there, only with a mustache ? And if you have seen the original series, how did it compare ? Was it much different, or quite close to the British pilot ? Any major changes, for better or worse ?
Posted in Reviews
Shows: Life On Mars
