Life on Mars: Episode 1 (season premiere)

(S02E01) Detective Inspector Sam Tyler, Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, and the rest of the Life on Mars gang returned for the first episode of eight in the new (and final) series -- and with a bit of a bang too.

Paying some due deference to viewers who may not have caught the first series, this season premiere was peppered with recap elements designed to bring everyone up to speed (along with the standard cold open).

Sam Tyler is a police detective from Manchester in the UK in the year 2006. He suffers a nasty car accident, and wakes up in 1973.

Is he in a coma? Has he travelled back in time? Or is he just plain mad?

Either way, it's like he's landed on a different planet, and he has to make the most of things until he finds his way back to the future.

Warning: spoilers after the jump.

This week, Gene and Sam were thrown headlong into a spate of violent murders, linked to a local small-time casino-operating hoodlum, Tony Crane.

The only thing is, Crane also happened to be a big-time criminal in Sam's future -- where he was messing with Sam's life support machine in 2006, determined to bring his life to an end.

For once, Sam's modern police methods simply didn't work; he couldn't find the evidence he needed to stop Crane from building an empire and destroying lives. So, he did what any self-respecting policeman in 1973 would do when faced with a desperate situation; he tried to fit Crane up.

However, before that, he foolishly spilled the beans to Crane about his time-travelling exploits, and how Crane was trying to kill him in the far-flung future -- a foolish ploy which ended up turning to his advantage when Crane tried (and failed) to explain to a packed police station that Sam was losing his marbles, only to be dragged off to the local looney bin.

As with season one, this show has everything you would want from a good BBC drama; humour, excitemernt, mystery, fantastic acting, great scripts -- and some cool tunes (I caught myself happily humming along to the Bay City Rollers' "Shang-a-Lang" and David Bowie's "Starman" at the end credits) -- and there's something truly comforting about knowing that this series will come to an end in just over two months.

Hopefully, by the time it all draws to a conclusion, we'll have most of the questions answered from series one -- and if the finale of this first episode is any kind of yardstick, we're in for an intruiging mystery as Sam attempts to complete his 'mission' in 1973, before he can be returned home.

Also, it's interesting to read that there's a US version in the pipeline, along with a spin-off series following the lives of DCI Gene Hunt and company in 1981...