Seventies-themed cop-series Life On Mars finished with more than a few bangs, but was it a fair cop… or a cop-out?

We have to admit that, for twenty-something hours, Life On Mars was a great series – the best thing we've seen on British Television since we-don't-know-when. Although the middle-episodes of season two threatened to lapse into cliché, they never quite did-so, and we loved Gene's one-liners ("I'll say that again… only louder…") and Sam's very English (and thus totally sexless) romance with Annie. It sure showed Dr Who how to do real sci-fi.

But the final episode was a crushing disappointment, which left us confused and angry. We were promised a finale which would tie-up the loose ends, and would (in the words of lead actor John Simm) "blow our minds". What we got was a shameful cop-out.

Where shall we start? The final episode had no real plot – which would have been acceptable if it was "closing the arc", but instead it just couldn't make up its mind. We read somewhere that the producers had filmed two endings to the show, and it is as-if they decided to use both of them – showing us glimpses which suggested that both 1973 and 2007 were real, but leaving untouched all the contradictions which that entailed. The fact that the "ending" leaves a clear way-open for a third season is evidence enough that the loose ends were not so-much tied up, as given to a litter of kittens to play with.

If we accept the final ending (the jump back to the 70s) as the "real" ending, it was filled with internal contradictions – everyone's sudden forgiveness of Sam's betrayal, and a horrible dramatic blind-spot regarding his undercover identity, which just seems to "become" his real identity, with no questions asked or answered.

In fact, the only thing worse than the 70s ending, was the 2007 one - "he woke up and it was all a dream, with no wider significance to any of the main characters." We could have written that... when we were seven!

In short, it was rubbish – we wasted an entire day of our life on this series, and it let us down badly. Someone really ought to call the police.

POSTSCRIPT: Since this article was written, the writers have popped up to clarify that it was actually the 2007 ending that was "real". While this makes more logical sense, the fact that they had to explain anything at all, only serves to show how ill-conceived the whole thing was in the first place - a well-written script shouldn't need posthumous super-textual justification, and we're not dropping the charges!