ABC’s Life on Mars didn’t catch on with enough viewers and was unfortunately cancelled after one brief season. Sadly, tonight we had to say goodnight to the outstanding cast of Jason O’Mara, Michael Imperioli, Gretchen Mol, Harvey Keitel, and Jonathan Murphy.
Thankfully, the show’s creators were given enough time to craft a true series finale. Executive producer Scott Rosenberg told Scifiwire, “Basically, this episode was always going to be the season finale, so we just switched things up towards the end. But we always wanted it to culminate with him and his parents… Amongst our favorite things that we did was always with his father and his mother. Every time we went to that well, it really worked for us. You’ll realize when you see it Wednesday night at 11:00, you’ll see that the whole theme of the entire 17 hours was all leading up to this. It was all about what we deal with in episode 17.”
Fellow executive producer Josh Appelbaum told Variety, “When you see you see the ending. as much as I think it’ll be wildly unexpected, it’s also sort of the inevitable. Even in the pilot there’s a lot of things that are leaning toward what the ending tells you. There were a million ideas thrown out early in the writers room, but when this one landed we all knew that was the one it should be.”
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Rosenberg concluded, “We’re not only answering the why of 1973 but more importantly, it’s what this whole journey was about for Sam — why it was these particular characters and this emotional landscape. It’s his emotional heroes journey that is answered by the end.”
So, what do you think of the series ending? It was a shocker to say the least. Are you happy to leave Sam and friends on the Martian surface?
Or, would you prefer to think that the Mars landing is actually a hallucination or another piece of Sam’s time travel mystery?
Image courtesy ABC.
Cancelling the show and then wrapping it all up with a neat little bow was NOT what this show should have been about. Great series done a great disservice with this ending. UK version was a ton better even though that too ended after only 2 series.
I am so disappointed. I loved the show! I looked forward to Wednesday nights!
Jason O’mara was fabulous! I hope he is cast in another show soon! This was one
of the bright spots in my week!
Television, for the most part, is a wasteland. There’s an endless supply of mindless reality shows……..it’s such a shame that when a show appears that actually makes you think, that there’s not enough of a following to allow it to survive. As Imzadi said……” a waste of a truly great show”. The mindless throngs can go back to ” reality tv ” CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I absolutely loved it. I would have been satisfied if it had ended with Sam & Annie’s kiss after her promotion (and Ray’s little bit of souls searching), but the ending truly rocked. Everything about it was just amazing. What a waste of a really great show. If you didn’t have Lost and Desperate Housewives, ABC, you’d have nothing.
I sort of hated and loved it until that white loafer hit the surface of Mars and then I laughed and really got it. We all live on a rock, just live…
Very nice writing to sum things up at the end. All the shows I like get cancelled. We need more shows like this on the air.
I loved this show, loved the ending…. I hope the make a DVD!
This was the best show on TV this year. With “24” taking a dive this season, I watched “Life on Mars” from the beginning. Will ABC ever learn that the viewing public does not want to watch stupid reality show crap any longer. Oh yeah, the replacement shows look like they’ll go far, sure. Hopefully we’ll be back in 73′ again soon.
I actually liked the ending…very clever. I thought Sam was going to choose to stay in 1973 and then they would show him back in 2008 in a permanent coma. The actual ending was much better! Oh, to the poster who asked about Lisa Bonet’s character…The writers said she was originally going to appear in 30 seconds of footage, then they decided to rework the script. I think the implication was that she was actually President Obama in Sam’s actual time. Morgan says, “President Obama wished she could have congratulated you herself but, she and her sister have gone to… Read more »
I hated the ending. It was all a dream. That’s the worst cop out any writer can do. I felt like the writers were giving the fans the finger saying “Screw you for getting us canceled.” I loved the show and I was very sad to see it go. But to give us an ending like that? — what an insult.
What a disappointing ending to a great and short-lived series. Life goes on, but not on TV. 🙁
I loved the ending. A million other shows end in completely expected, barely-climatic ways: fall in love and stay with the girl, wake up and reallize it was all a dream, and so on.. Instead, they went out on a creative limb and delivered what I thought was a fantastic idea for the whole show. And, if the show is ever continued they could use the trip back to earth as a vehicle for a completely different neurostimulation “reality”. Then, what about another season based on actual reality – what living on earth in 2037 would be like (2035 +… Read more »
What happened to the Lisa Bonet plotline? Wouldn’t he have known that the Harvey Keitel guy was his father in “73. I feel as if they found a quick way to end it without really tying up the storylines.
So sad to see this great show over. I enjoyed every bit of it until the last 10 minutes that seemed to be pasted in. Terrible ending. Sam deciding that maybe he didn’t want to go back, him and Anne getting together and then, what happened!?! Hope another network picks up this great show and makes the final sequence a dream or vision or something and goes on from there.
Did you notice that they left themselves an out if someone else decides to continue the show? The last image, of a foot hitting the Martian soil, is not a space boot but Gene Hunt’s white loafer–which can be taken as symbolic *or* could indicate that this, too, is not full on reality.