Life on Mars Ends... On Mars!

The now cancelled tv series Life On Mars wasn't much.. unfortunately it was a replacement for one of three better shows that were cancelled by ABC:

• Pushing Daisies (the best of the new shows, nominated for 12 Emmys, very creative and unique, a 'fairy story')


• Dirty Sexy Money - not even a big and good cast could save this prime timer from being just another soapy yawner - too bad, I always like Peter Krause shows (Six Feet Under, Sports Night)


• Eli Stone - which had some promise when it was hallucinatory for no reason, then they had to make it all "make sense" and when it was just a brain aneurism, this also became just another soapy legal show with nothing extra...

Life on Mars had great beginning, a police detective in the present is hit by a car, go unconscious and wakes up in 1973, with the title song by David Bowie setting the tone for what could have been an interesting time travel story. But instead it became just "another police show", just set in 1973 - big deal, so were all the bad cop shows back then as well.

So in the finale, they had to do something unique, rather than just have the hero, Sam, awaken from a coma. The solution? Have everyone in the cast awaken from deep sleep aboard a spaceship, which is now landing on Mars! Great finish - now why didn't someone think of this while the series was losing viewers? The entire story of two alternate realities were all programmed into Sam's dreams while in deep sleep space travel.

..and all the other characters were there as well: Gretchen Mol, the romantic interest, was there, only with long brown hair and not short blond hair. Didn't they get that backwards? Long hair in 73, the hippie era, then short blond hair for an astronaut, a military woman? The grouch Harvey Keitel was there as well, only not as his boss only, but also as his dad! Now that was unexpected..

At least this showed more imagination than the finale of ER, which was more of the same: boring.