The funny thing about last night's series finale of LOM was that, if it had been a season finale instead, I would have been totally hooked. All of that stuff with Sam finally visiting the mysterious town of Hyde, only to find it an eerie ghost town, was really interesting and grabby. And the bit where Sam decides he doesn't want to go back to 2008 after all seemed to be going somewhere really cool.

If they'd gotten a second season, this episode would have ended with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger, right after the part where Sam slams down the phone and says he doesn't to go back after all. And I would have been like, "I can't wait to see where this is going!"

Instead, we know where it was going. The producers were very clear that this is the ending they always planned, and if the show had ended after five episodes or 200 episodes, this is the ending they intended to give us. Which is... interesting.

At first I felt incredibly cheated — it turns out that Sam and the gang are all astronauts on their way to Mars, and they're in a virtual reality simulator that gives them whatever dream they want. (Ray spent the two-year trip believing he was on a deserted island alone with an army of Darryl Hannahs, and a retinue of castrated men.) For some reason, Sam wanted to spend the time dreaming he was a police officer in 2008, but the program went wrong due to a meteor shower.

The more I think about it, the more I think this isn't quite as pointless as it first appears. The whole show, retroactively turns out to have been about Sam's daddy issues. So he's working out his issues with his fictional 1970s father, who's an abusive crook, as a way of working through his issues with his real dad, Major Tom (Harvey Keitel). For some reason, his 1970s dream also included Keitel, but as a father figure rather than as an actual father. Both the 1970s fictional dad and the 2030s real dad have the same snake tattoo, which is meant to reinforce that one is a proxy for the other.

How does this play into the whole business where Sam (aka Luke Skywalker) is going over to the dark side? I'm not honestly sure... there's a hamfisted thing in the clip above where the random old guy with Baby Maya makes a comment about how she "missed 'er Hyde." ("Mister Hyde!" Get it? Get it? Nudge nudge.)

Of course, the British version was sort of about Sam's daddy issues as well — both shows did the episode where Sam and his dad play sports together, and then Sam realizes his dad is a wrong gee. But if I remember correctly, Sam's dad drops out in the second British season, and it's much more about Sam and Gene.

In the end, I'd say this American version of the series will end up being a bit of a footnote to the British one. This version didn't have quite as much to say about society, and how it's changed since the 1970s, and especially what we expect from the police. The themes of abuse of power, and how that abuse can be a powerful fantasy for a "civilized" man from 2008, got muted quite a bit as well.

Instead, what we ended up with was an odyssey towards father-son reconciliation. The main problem with that, as with all things about this show, was really Keitel, who's been the show's weakest link since day one. Just look at this episode, where he spends the whole hour being a teddy bear and offering fatherly advice to people. (I did get a bit choked up when Annie got her promotion though.) Just imagine if they'd actually gotten someone with Philip Glenister's brass to carry that role instead! (And I hate to say it, but I don't think Colm Meaney would have worked either.)

So yeah, it was an extended holodeck episode. But it was also more than that. I'm still trying to decide how much more. What did you think?

In general, most of the changes from the British version clean up the story a bit and remove ambiguity.

As you can see from the clip, the Pignatos are built up to be a much bigger deal — and then we're told in no uncertain terms that there are no Pignatos, there's just Sam's dad, freelancing. There are a lot less scenes of Sam bonding with his dad and being goofy, and Sam acts a bit more like a professional police officer throughout. Instead of just sort of intuiting that his dad is a scumbag, he actually starts to remember stuff from his childhood which confirms it. (In the British version, he acts shockingly unprofessional at many points after meeting his dad.) The kidnapped baby feels a bit more urgent than just "someone is making crappy porn."

The one big change from the British version that wasn't for the best was the much-reduced role for Gene Hunt. Gene and Sam butt heads — understandably — over Sam's dad's involvement in the dirty business in the British version, and it adds a bit more drama and realism to the whole affair. In the U.S. version, Gene is mostly AWOL.

Which makes me wonder: first Harvey Keitel seems bored by his role as Gene Hunt, and now he's barely even showing up. Is Harvey bowing out already? Or just needing a less intensive schedule?

Did you know that gay-bashing was wrong? And that gays are people too? If not, then maybe you'd be interested in being brow-beaten by Jason O'Mara and Harvey Keitel about it. The scene where Keitel lectures Michael Imperioli about how it's still wrong to kill people even if they're gay was the worst, mostly because Keitel looked narcoleptic as usual. If I'm going to be lectured on tolerance, I'd like my lecturer at least to be half-awake.

Just in case you actually did doze off during this episode, here's what happened. The gang from the 125 found a dead Vietnam Veteran in the park, and Harvey Keitel went ballistic (well, sort of. He twitched in his sleep) about solving the crime. At first, the crew thought the dirty anti-war hippies had done it, which was our cue for lots of scenes of people dancing in hotpants and Sam having weird acid-y flashbacks even though he hadn't dropped any acid. And then Sam met the dead guy's faggy accountant (this show is subtle!!) and had to be told in very simple words that the dead guy was probably gay. Eventually, Sam convinced Harvey of this fact, and then they sent the prettiest of the young cops out to the park to serve as "bait" for the gay bashers. They caught the gay-bashers, but it turned out the dead guy's squad leader had actually done it, because the squad leader was all closeted. In the end, Sam didn't have the heart to tell the dead guy's wife he was actually gay.

Basically, someone reached in a bag of Topical 1970s Issues, and found "Vietnam," "hippies," "gurus," and "gay-bashing." And they sort of threw them together in a random order.

And the humor? Erk. The whole business where the pretty cop realized his uncle was gay, because he met a guy in the park who looked sort of like the uncle? The way Sam kept saying he believed in the whimsical culicues of fate? And my personal pet peeve, the prison-rape-is-hilarious scene? ("Major sodomy" involves kissing! Ha ha ha ha!) This was the first time I felt as though my worst fears about this U.S. remake were justified.

Actually, there's a bigger problem with the show at this point than the whole "show we're more enlightened than those 70s trogoldytes" motif. And that's the cheese factor. The big fear, with the U.S. Life On Mars, was that it was going to play up the kitschy aspects of the early 70s, and the producers have gone out of their way to insist they're not going to do that. "No lava lamps," they told reporters, including me. And last night's episode, with the random Maharishi and silly hippies, came a bit close for comfort.

I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on it. It did have occasional moments of charm. And I was really liking this show until now. What did you guys think?

It's Wall-E! OMG! The plucky trash-compacting robot from the distant future wheeled himself into 1973 in order to console the unfortunately trapped future cop Sam Tyler. And Wall-E has gained the ability to beam images of 2008 directly into Sam's eyes/brain, while playing David Bowie to him. Awww... Wall-E will come in handy when they invent the Rubik's cube, since he's already had lots of practice with those. Okay, so it wasn't really Wall-E, it was some kind of range-rover toy. But it was certainly Wall-E-esque...

The other big new element last night, of course, was the blackboard scene where Sam lists all the possible explanations for why he's stuck in 1973. Besides the usual ones, possibilities included Purgatory, "drug trip," "virtual reality" and "alien abduction". Supposedly the show is going to delve into all of these possible explanations, so I really hope we get some good exploration of the VR and alien mind probe possibilities.

Is it horrendously wrong that I'm still enjoying this show? Maybe because I'm not hugely attached to the original British version, or maybe because the unaired pilot really was horrible, this new version is still kind of clicking for me. Am I insane? Am I being mind-probed by aliens who want to harvest my intellect?

In any case, it seems I may be on my own. Last night's episode lost 17 percent of its debut audience, falling to 8.5 million viewers. Meanwhile, the naughty-science show Eleventh Hour saw its ratings increase, to 12 million.

I honestly think I'm grading on a curve here. Maybe that was the strategy all along: leak a pilot that's so horrendously scalp itchingly awful, you'll be overjoyed at whatever the finished product turns out to be. But actually, I think firing David E. Kelley (Boston Legal) and bringing on a new team really did help somewhat. As did firing almost all of the cast and bringing in A-list replacements Harvey Keitel, Lisa Bonet, Michael Imperioli and Gretchen Mol. Most of all, the new pilot was better simply because it was closer to the original British version.

As in the British version, Sam Tyler is a detective in the present day, whose colleague and (ex) girlfriend Maya has just been kidnapped by a psychopath who strangles women. Then he's hit by a car and suddenly finds himself in the early 1970s. Is he in a coma, or did he really travel back? We're not sure, despite hints that he really is in a coma. And a serial killer with uncanny similarities to the one who snatched Maya in the present starts grabbing women back in 1973. So Tyler has to learn to work with the troglodyte-esque cops of 1973 to catch the serial killer in the past, hoping this will change Maya's fate in the present.

So here's the scene featured above as it played out in the original British version. You'll notice the flow of the scene is pretty similar. A disoriented Sam Tyler wanders into his office at the police headquarters, meets his new colleagues, and then starts yelling at them about his missing desk. And then he wakes up Gene Hunt, who kicks his ass. It's a great scene, and it works quite well in both versions.

And then here's the same scene from the original unaired pilot, where Gene Hunt is played by Star Trek's Colm Meaney instead of Harvey Keitel. (Sorry for the dark picture, I don't know how that happened.) You can see it's basically a mess. O'Mara isn't channeling John Simm's portrayal nearly as much, and that turns out to be a bad thing. Also, they rewrote the scene so that Sam Tyler looks like a raving lunatic way more than in the British version. And he tells everyone in the room that he thinks it's 2007. There's no way these cops would ever take him seriously after the way he behaves in this scene. The original, and final, versions of the scene are a little more subtle, and establish that Tyler is stuck in 1973 without burning any bridges.

The new version of the pilot made some changes from the Brit version that actually made sense. Like instead of trying to do the whole business where some random bit character tells Sam Tyler to kill himself and he climbs up on a roof, we have a nice simple scene where the serial killer threatens him at gunpoint and he decides to let the guy shoot. That actually works pretty well. Maya is no longer Sam's ex-girlfriend, she's his girlfriend, which adds a nice bit of urgency and sets up a love triangle involving Lisa Bonet and Gretchen Mol. Not a bad thing really.

Also — and I know this is blasphemous — but I actually liked Gretchen Mol's version of Annie a bit more than the original. she brought a nice fire to the character. And the way she was pissed at Sam for putting her in the spotlight felt real and honest. Making her a "closet feminist" totally makes sense and gives the character someplace interesting to go over the next season.

A few changes are absolutely hideous, but won't affect the show going forward that much. Like the weird and convenient way some guy shows up to tell us Colin Raimes has a twin brother. It feels very plot-hammery. And the sudden announcement at the end of the episode that Maya is okay. As if it would have killed us to have a little suspense here.

But the real huge issue, of course, is... Harvey Keitel, OMG. The big time movie star in a supporting role on a time travel cop show! How did he do? He did okay. It honestly felt like he was dialing it in a lot of the time. He looked a bit bored. Maybe because he was just copying Philip Glenister's performance, and he'll get more original material soon. But it felt as though he was literally doing this in his sleep at times.

Large chunks of the episode were copied note-for-note from the British version, and I actually felt like Jason O'Mara was doing a John Simm impression in a lot of scenes. Which was way better than what Jason O'Mara did in the original pilot — but it makes me wonder what he'll do when he doesn't have a Simm performance to crib from. His scene towards the end where he tries to lecture the kid version of Colin Raimes about how "fear keeps us honest" was pretty hammy, but at least it was fun to watch.

Really, you can't judge this show until next week, or maybe a few weeks from now. All this first episode had to do was live up to the British version, and it was going to be fine. The real challenge will come when the show tries to turn a show that lasted 16 episodes into an ongoing series that can sustain seven seasons worth of plots and character development. Based on last night, I'm at least optimistic that the show's producers have their hearts in the right places. But it really remains to be seen if their heads are in the right locations as well.

Oh, and I don't really have anything to say about the Twin Towers showing up a couple of times. It didn't bug me, but it also didn't seem wow-gosh-important either. What did you think about it?