... and provides critical clues that ties together crimes and mysteries old, new, and yet to be. Glance away from the screen for just a moment at the wrong time, and you WILL miss something important. What's more, everything is connected to everything else, so nothing can be disregarded as trivial.

This episode opens with Sam Tyler writing on a chalkboard (and you just know he wishes it were a whiteboard), listing all the reasons possible and impossible for waking up in 1973. Coma? Drug trip? Virtual reality, alien abduction, or multi-dimensional travel? Insanity, heaven, hell, and purgatory are also on the list. But what scares Sam the most is the big question mark that represents the unknown.

The action begins with a visual borrowed from its BBC predecessor: Sam and the squad, dressed in swimwear, chasing a Speedo-clad suspect through the park. As expected, Sam tackles the suspect, but Lt. Gene Hunt knocks him in the water "for making me run" he says. The squad is investigating a triple homicide at a check cashing store. Although Lt. Hunt wants to handle it "in the usual way" with planted evidence and a good thrashing, Sam and the DA talk him into letting the suspect walk so they can gather more evidence.

In the course of this episode, we meet three new characters. June, a young precinct secretary, asks an awful lot of questions and turns up in the darnedest places. Lee Crocker, from the district attorney's office, has an eye for Annie "No Nuts" Norris. Windy, Sam's sweet but ditzy blonde nudist hippie neighbor, who reads his palm and pronounces that his fate line is bisected, “like when you bump the record player and suddenly you're groovin’ to a new tune” she says.

As the investigation proceeds, a stakeout leads to a shootout, June becomes collateral damage, suspicion runs rampant, a mole is uncovered, a little old lady provides a clue, and Lt. Hunt shows that there really is a heart under his gruff exterior.

Sam has a series of intriguing encounters with his reflection, most significantly in the squad room. He sees visions of  the 2008 squad room reflected in the glass, including a glimpse of his girlfriend Maya. But the fact that the reflections aren't real leads him to a crucial clue that cracks the case. Sam also has a series of encounters with robots large and small, which are strikingly out of place and out of time, but which also figure in the resolution of the case.

We see several characters develop dimensionality in this episode. There is more to Lt. Hunt than just fists, flasks, and faked evidence -- there's family, too, and anyone who works at the precinct is family. The fight between Sam and Lt. Hunt in June's hospital room is played for laughs, but it is a distinctly character-building encounter. We also learn that Ray blames Sam for losing out on a promotion, and that he works a second job as security for the check cashing company involved in the investigation.

This episode feels fresh and well written, weaving a complex, interconnected web of clues to the current case as well as the case of why Sam might be "here," wherever here actually is. This episode also makes a solid effort to give the series its own identity, unique and different from the BBC series on which it was based.

“Life On Mars,” which airs on ABC on Thursdays at 10 pm ET., stars Jason O'Mara, Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli, Gretchen Mol, and Lisa Bonet. The series follows Detective Sam Tyler, a modern-day NYPD detective who mysteriously finds himself in 1973 following a car accident.