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Contains spoilers up to and including the episode discussed, but is spoiler free for subsequent episodes of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes.
“This is my city, and it will be a safe place for my mum and my wife to walk around in... Right, find out who the dead woman was, find out who killed her, do it now. Hold up, hold up. Do it tomorrow morning, first thing. It’s beer o’clock, gentlemen.”
The body of a young woman is found, and the police officers have nothing to go on but a distinctive perfume and the flower of death found in her hand. Five years before, it had been the calling card of a serial killer who raped and murdered five women. A serial killer who died in prison – so did they arrest the wrong man? Or are they dealing with a copy-cat?
To be honest, this is my least favourite episode of Life on Mars, which is why I’ve been very much putting off writing about it. The worst thing about it is that it starts really well. The first part of the episode has some brilliant Gene Hunt lines (“D’you know, I once hit a bloke for speaking French”) and moments, such as his disgust at Sam’s investigative methods (“Would you stop sniffing that poor woman?!”) The beginning of the mystery is well set up, with lots of tense and touching moments involving the other Beauvoir girls and their families.
But when they start to get into the murky world of going undercover and middleclass sex parties, the whole thing falls apart for me. Usually, Life on Mars so carefully avoids cloying “Sam is from the future and so can smugly say things that are going to happen” moments, so choosing Tony and Cherie Blair as their undercover names really jars, although the scene where he and Annie concoct their cover story is sweet. The revelation that the murderer was the angry wife was pretty obvious, but by that point I'd just stopped caring.
Still, Life on Mars at its worst is still pretty good, and there are some good moments here, but they're let down by a smugness that the programme usually so deftly avoids.
Next time: An overdose in 2006 is having some serious effects on Sam in 1973.
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