Life On Mars has caused fevered speculation in Wilde HQ. Photograph: BBC/Kudos
Three episodes of Life On Mars to go and conversation in my home is strictly confined to the question of how the final episode will resolve the snarled-up fate of DCI Sam Tyler (John Simm). At Wilde HQ, the agony of waiting has reduced all inhabitants, spaniel included, to the state of shipwrecked sailors forced to live on a diet of lumps of salty driftwood, waiting to be plucked from our pitiful state of unknowing. At least we're not alone. Up and down the land, millions who've fallen under the time-warped spell of Life On Mars find themselves residing in the same suburb of purgatory. So helplessly hooked are we all that the thought of this magnificent show reaching its end is damn near unbearable. But no less unbearable than waiting to find out how all of its multi-layered threads will unknot.
Perhaps the most unendurable thing of all is the thought that it might end with the biggest anti-climax since Romeo climbed the wall to tell Juliet he was only there to unclog the downspout. This seems unlikely. When I interviewed Simm last November on the day that filming wrapped, he refused to give out any clues about the Life On Mars finale even when I threatened him with a Chinese burn. However, he did confide with a wink that the ending will, "Blow your fucking mind". Sweet music to my ears.
More recently, the show's executive producer Jane Featherstone has said: "Obviously, we will not be revealing in advance what eventually happens to Sam and we've even filmed two endings because we want to keep everyone, including the actors, guessing until the very end. All I can say is that there will be more revelations that will help Sam work out why he is in 1973, but there will also be some shocking surprises that will rock Sam's world - both in 1973 and 2007."
Therefore, we should take it as read that we're in for something more akin to a Verbal Kint/Keyser Soze thunderbolt than a lame "Bobby Ewing back from the dead" cop-out.
So let's rule out the idea of Sam Tyler simply being bonkers all along or that he has hallucinated the entire series. Briefly I have flirted with the idea that Tyler has been manipulated by malign forces to believe he was in a coma - before dismissing this ruse as way too cynical. Halfway through watching the fifth episode of the current series, I was boring family and friends witless with my latest far-fetched theory, which involves Tyler unwittingly caught up in a reality game show that concludes when he works out that he has been parading pointlessly through a The Truman Show meets The Sweeney scenario. Then my 18-year-old son stopped me in my tracks. If William's hunch is right we'll discover that Tyler hasn't gone back in time at all. His experiences of 1973 are all too real. In the final episode, it will be revealed that he slipped into a coma in '73 and has been unconscious ever since. When he wakes up in the present day, he finds he's a middle-aged man whose knowledge of the present has been culled from the conversations that have been going on around him.
Is my wise boy on to something here? Or does anyone have any more cunning ideas?
