"Life on Mars": The End

Yeah, screw you too. . . . It's just--it's just--that ending. Did you see that? Did you fucking see that shit? . . . Y'know. Sweet zombie jesus, it's right there, it's looking at me . . . That's. How the writers. Ended things. I spent the last five minutes of the episode trying to, to justify this colossal goatfuck of a conclusion. Okay, it explains most everything, right? Sort of. And it's got sort of a Philip K. Dick, we-read-Maze-Of-Death-twenty-years-ago-and-want-to-rip-it-off vibe. And there really was no way the ending was going to make everybody happy. They did the best they could with what they had. Hey, it wasn't even that good of a show to begin with! . . .

I didn't think it was possible, but the Mars people managed to somehow find whatever small speck of investment I had in the series and beat it to death in about ten minutes.
--Zach Handlen

WTF?

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sam has been an astronaut in suspended animation on a mission to Mars (I guess the "creative team" took the title a bit too literally) being fed a Philip K. Dickian neural stimulation program that had him dreaming he was a 1970s cop (after first dreaming he is, I guess, a 2008 cop?), which included falling in love. His crewmates are, of course, Ray, Chris, and Annie. Windy was the computer. ("And you were there, and you, and you!") The mission they are on in research into DNA--a "gene hunt" so to speak," and the Keitel Gene Hunt turns out to be--his father, aka "Major Tom!" And they don't want to fight any more. This explains, I guess, why so many of the actors (especially Keitel) seemed to be sleepwalking in episode after episode.

Worst series ending. Ever. Forever. Perhaps they should have just had him come out of the shower after one television season away. Going full Duffey/Dallas would not have been any less hokey.

Handlen's recap of the episode of a series "Too unconventional to attract a mainstream audience, too heavy-handed and cliched to earn much of a cult following" on Onion TV Club here.