Goddamn did the final episode of Life on Mars suck. It's disappointing. The show wasn't amazingly fantastic, but it was a pleasant diversion, occasionally clever and frequently entertaining. It was a little too episodical in nature, which is an odd criticism for a television show really but I've come to expect more from the medium than just 'face crisis, return to equilibrium' every week. I blame the Wire.

There were some really good episodes in the second season, particularly the kidnapping episode where Sam was experiencing the effects of an overdose on his future-comatose body. Then the penultimate episode was great, with Sam remaining loyal to the Guv when everyone else turned their back. But then in the last episode two seasons of character development get thrown out with Sam betraying everyone twice. The stuff with Morgan and Sam's supposedly created persona didn't make any fucking sense either. And then when he does end up back in the future you want me to believe an ace detective can't even do some basic police work and look up a few records from thirty years ago to find evidence of what happened? The shoot up in train was awful, and the way everyone suddenly forgives him for being an utter bastard leaves only one conclusion: the whole damned thing was just a coma dream he's returning to in the moments he lies dying.

Which is then contradicted by the sequel series where another detective travels through time back to the eighties and runs into DCI Gene Hunt. Maybe I'm expecting too much, but you don't have to create an overarching narrative for every tv series, just make sure when you step back and look at all the peices they fit and don't contradict each other. This shit is only one step away from eighties family sitcoms where a perfectly normal looking teenager suddenly had a crisis with pimples or getting fat even though they looked exactly the same as they did the previous episode.