Life on Mars: Season 2, Episode 7

 "I appear to have killed a man..."

The penultimate episode; we're close to the end, and it's interesting to see where they're going. The character of Frank Morgan- Gene's hopefully temporary replacement from "Hyde" with a name evoking The Wizard of Oz- is initially suspicious in his apparent desire to ruin hunt, but in the end he privately holds out to Sam the hope of getting "home". Ooh.

But all that metatextual telefantasy stuff is for the finale; this penultimate episode again focuses on a plotline that can only be done once: Gene Hunt being a suspect for murder. And it's very well done indeed, both as a whodunit and as an exploration of the bond between Sam and Gene. As Gene says, "Just be the picky pain in the arse you normally are and I should be fine." It's good to see the effects on Ray and Chris of the Guv being a suspect, but the whole will-they-won't-they romance between Sam and Annie has been strung along with so little consistency from episode to episode that their almost-kiss means very little.

It's all very clever, plot-wise, with twist and turns to keep you guessing, and a satisfying conclusion. There's surprisingly little of the usual '70s versus '00s culture clash stuff, but I suppose the premise doesn't really lend itself to that. Still, as we approach the end, I'm still of the view that Life on Mars succeeds more because of the great premise, the production and the performances, and that the scripts- while frequently good whodunits- are not really first rate stuff. But let's see how it all ends...

Years and Years: Episode 6

"This is the world we built."

Although we start the episode as one might expect- Vivienne Rook is PM, and she does a lot of Trumpy things like shutting down the BBC for being "enemies of the people" and denying Russian involvement in her election.And there's a lot of dystopian detail as per earlier episodes-
bacterial food that was never alive, working class estates being arbitrarily locked in, food banks closing- and Muriel's wonderful voice-of-the-author speech about how things have gone wrong since the millennium but how we're all to blame through wanting cheap stuff without considering the consequences. And there's a lot of horrifying stuff with Viktor and others in concentration cams which look very, very much like, well, you know.

But this is RTD. Things don't carry on through the same dystopian path. There is hope. Yes, it's undercut at the end by the point that the regime was opposed and falling anyway, but we see the Lyons family essentially toppling the government. And I now thing Edith is even cooler and Jessica Hynes deserves a BAFTA. But the point is that the very ordinary family we've been seeing turn out to be heroes- even Rosie and little Lincoln do heir bit against tyranny. Even Stephen goes some way to redeeming himself, much as though it looked for one horrifying moment that he was going to shoot Celeste.

Yet it's not just about the defiant note of hope, the insistence that yes, humans can be right bastards, but we have the potential to redeem ourselves. No; we have a fascinating final ten minutes of poetry as Edith, who I think represents someone the author would like to be, waits to die, and to have her memories and perhaps her consciousness (or just a copy?) uploaded online, perhaps to be immortal. There's a lot of philosophy about consciousness to unpick here, and I'd observe that, in all the futurology that RTD has given us, he's deliberately seemed to avoid the subject of the Singularity, of artificial intelligence becoming sentient. Is this the bit where he addresses such themes head on, being deliberately ambiguous? Is the "I am love" a statement on all this or just the endorphins of a dying woman? I don't know, but these six episode have been first rank telly.

Years and Years: Episode 5

"I’ll just topple the government. How about that?”

It’s 2028. Vivienne Rook is PM and initially little has changed- indeed, Rook’s public statements are just vacuous and meaningless platitudes. But the first thing we see is a critic being suddenly arrested on what looks like trumped up charges, mentioning the “disappeared”. Shades of Pinochet already.

Chez the Lyons there’s a struggle to recover from Daniel’s death, with Stephen visiting Viktor to tell him personally that he blames and will not forgive him. And it’s an even bleaker world- bananas are gone. Global heating means endless rain. Energy crises and co start blackouts mean much of what exists online is erased forever, and there’s an amusing scene of schoolchildren having to get used to this quaint little thing called paper. And then things get truly dystopian with dirty bombs causing radioactive fallouts in two major cities while floods erode the coast. There are floods of homeless refugees, both British and international. And this is less than a decade away.

There are positives; Muriel’s macular degeneration can be cured just like that, albeit at the cost of her family’s inheritance. But this is s world where civil liberties are despised, where “criminal” estates are walled off and where Rosie’s business is closed down because of where she lives. Each episode is getting more dystopian than the last, and scarily plausible in a world that contains such scum as Nigel Farage, Katie Hopkins and Donald Trump. I think RTD underestimates the liberal backlash but, this being part polemic, creatively that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

There’s a human side too; an increasingly bitter Stephen lives with a woman he doesn’t particularly like. Edith is increasingly cool and easily my favourite character, but she’s dying. Bethany’s joy at becoming a bionic woman is wonderful- but, as Stephen points out, she has become state property. And Celeste is increasingly bitter at having to be nursemaid to her mother in law. These are very real people, anchoring us to this world.

The shocking conclusion, of course, has Stephen humiliate himself to get a better job with an absolute wanker he went to school with, and briefly meeting Vivienne Rook, who casually mentions that is she ever resigned as PM, “they’d kill me.” And the contract they’re bidding on is one for concentration camps for refugees and other desirables, where Rook plans to solve the overcrowding problems by “letting nature take its course”. Because this is inevitably where far right populism leads.

The human dimension adds extra horror, too, as Stephen deliberately moves Viktor to the extermination camp. And Bethany knows...

This is utterly sublime.