In this post I'll be talking about 'Life On Mars'. So if you haven't seen the final episode, look away now.

TVAbsolutely beautiful. For once a series has concluded on a style of full stop that actually matches the font used in the rest of the series, which actually makes you feel like you've seen its ultimate end. That actually gives you closure. That's what was wonderful about the final episode of Life On Mars - it actually seemed like the series had reached its conclusion, with most of its mysteries solved.

The story within the episode was classic Life on Mars stuff -- a breakneck chase through the back of terraces giving way a hair brained undercover operation based around a bank robbery staged to catch a cop killer. In some ways its shame that this was only the secondary story - the set up and mood meant that reams of potential comedy had to be cast aside. Was the use of what looked like Carnforth Station, the setting for David Lean's Brief Encounter supposed to be symbolic?

We're led to believe Sam Tyler was always in a coma. That he hadn't time traveled - not physically, he didn't have amnesia, he was mad but only in the way that most of us probably are and her certainly wasn't actually living on Mars (which was secretly my favourite idea - very Westworld).

In a genius move, this finale presented a double bluff - that he was in fact a man from 1973, an undercover officer working against a crooked system, trying to destroy this department he'd been transferred into. As the revelations developed you truly wondered if this was the twist, helped by John Simm's engrossing performance. He was convinced and therefore so were you.

But then as with everything else that's happened in the story it was revealed to be part of Sam's lucid dream - a way for his mind to cope with the world it had constructed for him. Part of me world have hated the creators if this had not been the case - it still would have straddled genres and made Sam horrifyingly unsympathetic. Plus it would have created a minefield of genre issues - it's a cop show, but is it still sci-fi? Psychological drama? Fantasy? Horror?

Well alright the final end it was inspired somewhat by Close My Eyes and particularly its remake Vanilla Sky - especially with the hurling from the building (paralleling the thing Sam attempted to do in the first episode) -- I almost expected Annie to inexplicably appear up there with him. But the difference is in those films, the hero was taking a leap of faith to return to the real world. Here, Sam was throwing himself back into the dream world, because it were he felt most alive.

Does that mean that ultimately the series is trying to say its better to live in a fantasy than deal with the grind of the real world? It depends on the interpretation; there were enough hints in the closing moments and throughout the series to suggest that there was still more going on, the glint in Dr. Frank Morgan's eye, the visitations to his bedside from older versions of people he was meeting in '1973', the fact that now and then he apparently changed something. Is he in fact still a time traveler?

Or is all this just wishful thinking?

A good question is how the Sam-less spin-off Ashes to Ashes is going to fit into all this. Was that a decoy to draw the audience away from the ultimate end of this story? If Hunt and the rest are a figment of Tyler's imagination, how can they exist if he's not there. That final, lovely moment when the test card girl broke the fourth wall and turned off out set reminds us though that this is just a television programme.

They can take these fictional characters and plonk them into an eighties setting if they want to - it doesn't have to make logical sense in relation to Life On Mars. Two different series. Same thing happened to the Basil Rathbone interpretation of Sherlock Holmes who went from investigating murder on his home decade to doing the same forty years later when the Second World War broke out without nary a suggestion that Mr Wells' machine was involved.

This has been a great series and even though this second and final year has been far grimmer than the first it's still retained all of those lovely period details and a real sense of joy. Most series would kill for a character like Gene Hunt and Philip Glenister has pitched him perfectly throughout. I've never taken to Ray or Chris but they're comic foils - perhaps if the series had continued we might have learnt more about them. But I'm really going to miss Annie and I hope Liz White gets more work soon.

Another character has been Manchester and Salford and it's been lovely watching familiar streets and places being used as a backdrop. Only the other week, the entrance hall for a courthouse was my course base at university - I handed my dissertation in at an office not a hundred feet from where Sam Tyler had was standing. In the first series, the café area of the architecture building, somewhere I fell in love, doubled as a place where the heroes were taken hostage.

Want to bet that Lost doesn't wrap itself up quite so succinctly?