I have never seen suicide as a 'happy ending' before.
Or him embracing what is essentially a delusion. Yay, he gets together with Annie (who doesn't exist).
Weird ending.
That's why it's such an amazing show. His "delusion" felt real to him. So he jumped to his death to have a better life. He died to live.
share[deleted]
Thank God it wasn't a typical Hollywood ending where Sam wakes up from his coma and there's a doctor/nurse who looks just like Annie! Yikes!
shareTo the OP Annie did exist she was a real person who had died and was existing in that realm along with the others. She was not a figment of sams imagination
shareWell we don't know if Annie was a real person. Even in Ashes to Ashes she is not mention as being a real person. It was left to the viewer to decide. I personally think she wasn't real. She was there for Sam. She didn't really have issues to resolve. She wasn't flawed or anything and especially if you go by Gene's explanation that coppers go there to sort themselves out. Even if you ignore Ashes to Ashes she's a bit one dimensional compare to the other characters.
shareI doubt that he intended to kill himself, he probably just wanted to get back into the coma (and make others pay for his continuing life-support for the rest of his life). Why would he intentionally kill himself to “get home”? He might not have ended up there for even a moment because he could have died instantly. He was either stupid enough to not realize that he would be more likely die or made the brash decision before he had a chance to think it through.
In the DVD interview about the finale, they keep saying that he wanted to “go home” and he made a promise to Annie and they wanted him to go back to the 70’s and stuff like that, but they keep forgetting that NONE OF IT WAS REAL!!!. All of their justifications for the ending are total hogwash because it was not real, all of that stuff, including Annie, was just figments of his imagination and subconscious. He did not actually “come together with Annie” as Cameron Roach and SJ Clarkson said, and he did not “save” anybody. He killed himself to save non-existent people. He would have to be stark raving mad to kill himself over something imaginary, in which case he desperately needed psychiatric help.
The scene with his mum where she says he always keeps his promises is very misleading because it does not imply that she was encouraging him to do what he felt was right; she had no clue what he was going on about. She never would have agreed for him to kill himself; she would have had him committed. That whole thing about keeping a promise to Annie actually made it seem like he was going to go and look her up to see if she is real and if so, see her old self (the creators actually pondered that idea).
Overall, the end was a big mistake both in terms of story closure, and in terms of believability.
In the finale, we were made to wonder whether Sam is not actually from 2006 and simply crazy in 1973, the truth is that he is crazy in 2006.
Claire Parker explains that it wasn’t an ordinary series, but they didn’t need to kill Sam, in a pointless way no less, to make it extraordinary, it was already interesting because of the reality mystery. I don’t know what Matthew Graham is talking about when says he hopes he gave a satisfying ending; there’s nothing satisfying about Sam unnecessarily dying for no good reason. Ashley Pharoah hoped that viewers weren’t disappointed, but many were.
But it's not for sure that they weren't real. The implication is that Sam was back for far longer than we actually saw. He could have researched if those people had actually existed (though that's just random speculation). I can see why it would be an unsatisfying ending but it's not as clear as 'Sam was crazy in 2006, everything was imagined and in the end he died' there's more ambiguity than that, that could be the answer, but so could many other explanations.
My interpretation is that the 1970 were something that existed (whether they were the real 70's, something else, some other dimension or 'cop limbo') and that Sam really was still alive in 2006 in a coma. In the end he either woke up and realized that the home he'd been fighting to get back to was no longer his home or where he wanted to be and so killed himself with the hope that he'd go back without any chance of going back to 2006 (though the radio at the end makes it ambiguous about whether he actually died). Or Sam never woke up at all and the entire ending was him either flat-lining or just coming to terms with his life in the 70's and choosing to stay in a coma rather than die/or live in 2006.
Sam learned from Frank Morgan, his surgeon, that they had been able to relieve the swelling, but not remove the tumor in his head. However, the tumor was benign.
My take is that the 1973 construct with Gene Hunt, Annie, Ray and Chris was caused by the tumor, while Sam's conscious mind was suppressed by the coma. So, I believe Sam tried to put himself back into the coma, to let the tumor control his reality once more.
I grant that a few commentors have it right, that jumping off the roof of a tall building was a bit of an extreme way to get there. However, this is television. That was a dramatic, unambiguous way to explain how much Sam wanted to return to his 1973 mental construct, and what he did to get there.
Now, I'll have to track down Ashes to Ashes to find out what new twists the script writers have put on the story. I hope they don't ruin it.
In Ashes to Ashes, series 3, we do find out about this world & everyone's place in it. I didn't feel it was ruined, but enhanced this world Sam (& in Ashes to Ashes Alex) are in.
Getting Ashes to Ashes is a bit difficult. It was never released for region 1 DVD & there's no bluray of it.
It was on Hulu (for prime members) in January, along with Life on Mars but is gone, now, sadly
You can buy the region 2 DVD's on amazon there's a box set of all three series that seems to go for over 100. If you can, ebay is the place to look. Found a set for $99 free shipping and brand new. But then they only play on a computer with VLC, or you'll need a region free DVD player
Someone on the A2A board wrote to Kudos to see if a US version would ever be released, and the answer was no, due to the music rights being too expensive so the region 2 is the only version available.
Multi-region/region-free DVD players aren't expensive. I just saw a brand-new Samsung one on Amazon for $34 (US).
I bought my A2A DVD set new for $40.
You should see "A Stop at Willoughby", a first-season episode of The Twilight Zone.
share