Review: GHTTB: LoM 2.3 and 2.4

Life On Mars, Series Two, Episode Three 

Red? Or Yellow? Sam fights mental indecision.

Episode Three is quite a potent hour whose central theme runs constant throughout and never lets up, as well as pulling the nostalgia strings on a common terror of the Seventies. It's the first episode to really make us both connect with Sam and the opposite: the first episode to show us Sam's more fallible side. Protagonists are like scientific theories; they're only valid and correct if we can see them being falsified.
     Sam's "falsification" came when he misjudged a suspected IRA bomb attack that led a cocky Ray to end up in hospital. In the real world, the coma was beginning to alter Sam's sense of judgement and decision making skills - presenting him with exaggerated dilmemmas like choosing which wire to defuse a bomb with. His internal struggle actually overshadows (and compliments) the main plot of the episode, which sees Sam struggle with an Irish-hating Gene and a distrusting department. This sort of thing was what 1.2 was aiming for, and a second round has made the format much sharper.
     If there's anything negative I have to say, then it's that Ray's lack of sympathetic characterisation makes it more likely for the viewer to side with the over-confident Sam, who in the end turns out to be right that the bombers weren't IRA. It seems a tad pointless that in an episode showing our protagonist's weakness he is proven right anyway. Otherwise, the episode is very strong and a sign that Series Two knows what it's doing with its characters. Good character drama and a chilling callback to a more dangerous age.
    

 Life On Mars, Series Two, Episode Four
 Gosh. Life On Mars dives into the other main Seventies preoccupation, with an episode designed to look at... crappy parties? The script is crude; a long line of sex jokes and cultural references, with the only connection to reality being a vague appearance by Sam's beloved Auntie Heather (Katherine Kelly, currently Becky in Coronation Street) who hasn't been mentioned before this episode and will never be mentioned again.
     A woman is found and Sam recognises her distinct perfume, identifying her as a Boudoir Lady (of which Sam's Aunt was). They get info from Boudoir lady Denise Williams (Georgia Taylor, currently playing insane doctor Ruth in Casualty) about the activities of local car-dealer Roger Twilling, who holds private sex-parties and "employs" the girls to hang out.
     After a lot of faffing about using Surveillance (cueing a barrage of future-related jokes), Sam and Annie infiltrate one of the parties as "Tony and Cherie Blair". After they bust the sex party, they discover that the real murderer is Roger's jealous wife Carol (played chillingly by Eva Pope, of Waterloo Road fame). The plot itself is basic crime-show fare, and the things that both help and hinder it are the character fuzz around it.
    Not the most awful episode in the series (no episode is truely awful, just a little dull) by far, but the entire plot's reliance on corny seventies nostalgia really isolates a lot of viewers from the party. On the positive, the "fuzz" as I call it is quite funny most of the time, even if it slowly dates as we edge ever further away from 2007.

Thanks.