Life On Mars

Genre and Narrative

Life on Mars is a hybrid genre of crime drama and sci-fi, this can be easily identified as the iconography of each genre comes up. At the beginning it seems just to be a normal crime drama starting off with a car chase, police cars, police uniform and a normal chase in a urban city, then they catch him and do a police interrogation and show their office. Then the main characters girlfriend or sidekick gets kidnapped and the main character becomes distraught causing him to be in an accident, he has some flashbacks and wakes up in 1970. This is when the sci-fi part comes in as he has travelled time from 2009 to 1970, or its all in his head like a coma. It changes from a normal crime drama to a historical drama as it has new iconographies like the location is an 1970's version of the urban city he was in previously and a cop comes over to him with 70's uniform. He goes back to his office to find the 1970's version of it with other people inside everyone is wearing 70's clothing and is smoking, the new sidekick and boss is there too, he is immediately put into a murder case and starts making connections to the real time and this time and why he is there. Now and then, the main character can hear or see signs of the 2009 time seeping into his visions like the TV talks about his coma condition, this is all definitely sci-fi as this is all impossible. This change of everything around Sam links to Neale's theory of how the initial genre is easily recognisable but it slowly changes or borrow from other genres however Life on Mars doesn't slowly change, its a sudden change from crime drama to sci-fi crime drama and historical crime drama. The rest of the episode is him struggling to figure out if he is really in a coma or not and is slowly figuring out other enigmas one at a time very slowly.

Sam Tyler, the main character has problems with himself right at the beginning just like other crime drama's, his problems are that he has lost his skills in his job and doesn't do as well anymore, has relationship issues with his girlfriend and another issue that later comes up is him getting emotional about his girlfriend being kidnapped. Then more problems comes up as he goes into the 70's, he is mainly confused with why he is there, struggles to fit in and he doesn't know how to solve crimes in these times as they don't have the equipment that he had in 2009. While in an interrogation in the 70's, you see the good cop side of Sam and then the bad cop side of the boss, maybe meaning that the Boss is the missing part of Sam and he needs to learn skills in the 70's so he can go back to being good at his job. 

Enigmas

There are many enigmas in the first episode, first starting off with, the first crime in the episode, what is going on, why are they chasing him, where is it, then we go to the interrogation scene and find out its not him, so we still need to figure out who is the suspect. Also, why has the main character lost his skills, and has relationship issues, all these problems are normal problems that appear in basically every crime drama. Then we go into the 70's with more enigmas, why is he there, what does he do, what does he need to do to go back, how is he going to cope, how is he going to solve this 70's crime. Towards the end, Neil pretends that he is his subconscious and talks to him, making Sam and the audience completely sure that he is in a coma, but then Cartwright talks to him about how he was joking which confuses us and Sam twisting the main enigma and plot. 

Representation

At the beginning, it shows a normal representation of a modern urban city with different genders and ethnicities working together which is also shown in the office scene. The police are very serious and act professional. When Sam goes back in time, representations change, the representation of the urban city he was in has changed from well built structures and quite clean to less crowded buildings but more messy. The policeman who approaches him is more rude compared to modern police and is confused when Sam talks about mobile phones and cars which don't exist yet. When Sam goes to his work place to find only white men who are smoking, this is a close representation of what workplaces was like in the 70's, they are also very careless as there is a scene of a guy dropping his sandwich on the evidence and doesn't really care about it because in the 70's, it doesn't matter as they didn't have the equipment to see fingerprints and analyse them. The boss is violent and careless too as rules then wasn't as strict as they are now, The boss could do anything without getting in trouble. The methods they use in solving crimes represent what it was like in the 70's like sending an important object from the crime scene to Scotland Yard and waiting 2 weeks for feedback shows how limited they were in the 70's. The only female that goes into the office is a nurse to help Sam out, in the 70's, women had jobs that were considered more feminine because it was believed by many men that only men should do the serious jobs. Only in 1960 is when women started working properly but many man still didn't like it. The only black character so far in Life on Mars is Nelson,