“Mars”: Is Sam Really Dead?
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- November
- 10
The Big Apple got rotten to the core during the most recent episode, “Things to Do in New York When You Think You’re Dead” (a play on the title of the 1995 feature film “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead”). After a 9-year-old black girl, Keisha, dies from a fall from a roof, the black community decides that a Puerto Rican man threw her to her death, and ugly riots ensure.
During the investigation, Sam gets partnered with a man, Fletcher Bellow, who, in the future, was his professional mentor and surrogate father. That was fun because besides seeing Sam try to bind with a guy whom his 2008 self had known for many years but the current Fletcher didn’t know him from Adam, we found out that Fletcher’s arresting Sam at 17 got him interested in becoming a cop. Meanwhile, when lawyer Denise Watkins enters the scene and Sam knows that she and Fletcher will one day marry, he tries to get them romantically interested in one another and they are both at first quite dubious about the idea. 
Some of Sam’s references to 2008: When he was about to use the term “African American” and when he rapped a Vanilla Ice song, thus giving him life-saving street cred in the eyes of the Black Liberation Army. Whoopi Goldberg was great as a woman playing a male DJ, Brother Lovebutter.
There went that creepy heart monitor again, when Sam saw a newspaper with the headline “Cop Killed In Line of Duty,” and his hearing someone say, “We’ll miss you, Sam.” That and when that mystery man and Keisha walked off together and the guy said, “We head your prayer, Sam,” strongly suggest that Sam is dead. The British version, however, had him in a coma. And at the end, lapsed-Catholic Sam prays for help to find his way home.
For anyone interested in the soundtrack, here are the songs and their artists: “Wild in the Streets” Garland Jeffreys; “I’m Gonna Keep on Loving You” Cool Blues; “Come on and Gettit” Marion Black; “He Keeps You” Boscoe; “Anywhere in Glory” The Mighty Indiana Travelers; “Everybody Is a Star” Sly and the Family Stone; and “Black and White” Three Dog Night. (I was, alas, familiar with only the last two.)
Though never a fan of Harvey Keitel, I think he’s added SO much to “Mars” in his role as Lt. Hunt. (The two shows I blog about—”Mars” and “Grey’s Anatomy”—each has a prominent character whose last name is “Hunt.”) Few other actors could pull off a character so gruff and occasionally unpleasant yet whom we are tempted to like. 
This week, on “Tuesday’s Dead,” Sam finds it difficult to separate a life-and-death hostage situation at County Hospital from his own inexplicable circumstances. Freaked out by a phone call that sounds like his mother in 2008 and begging him to wake up, he and the rest of the 125 must diffuse a potentially explosive face-off in which a crazed gunman tries to force a doctor to reverse a dangerous operation on the gunman’s brother. (Photos: ABC/Eric Leibowitz, Patrick Harbron)
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on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 4:41 pm by Jenny Higgons.
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