Heading home tonight the motorways are gridlocked and so I take it as a sign that I should divert off the motorway and choose instead a route that just so happens to take me past some shops (it would have been rude not to stop).
After getting home and sorting some tea, it’s about half nine, by the time I sit down to watch the finale of Life on Mars (the joys of chase record on a PVR means real time watching is a thing of the past).
Just after ten, Sally phones.
“You’ve just watched Life on Mars, haven’t you?” I ask, guessing the timing of her call is no coincidence.
“Ooh yes, but I don’t know what to think of the ending, I…”
“La, la, la – don’t tell me!” I interrupt “I’m only half way through!”.
After our chat I finish watching and like Sally I’m not too convinced by the ending, but perhaps not as dissatisfied.
Certainly I wasn’t as disappointed as Laura over at You Can’t Control the Message (warning contains serious spoilers!), though I agree with her that Jon Wilde's son’s theory on the Guardian website (this was speculation in advance of the final episode ie no spoilers!) is infinitely neater. Basically his theory was: "Tyler hasn't gone back in time at all. His experiences of 1973 are all too real. In the final episode, it will be revealed that he slipped into a coma in '73 and has been unconscious ever since. When he wakes up in the present day, he finds he's a middle-aged man whose knowledge of the present has been culled from the conversations that have been going on around him."
Whether it would have worked in the medium of television is perhaps not so clear, but in terms of plot alone, it strikes me as a far stronger resolution.
2 comments:
Ooo, go on, share some of your further dissatisfaction about the ending, do, do! I need someone else to grrrumble with... :-)
Just not sure...I suppose very clever because we don't really know where Sam belonged...what was real, what was dream, what was coma...you know you are alive, because you can feel...did he choose life or death? Was Gene Hunt's era of prejudice and bias preferable to today's political correctness and Health and Safety killjoys? Need I go on....
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