A boy's relationship with his mother is a complicated thing, and it's made all the more complicated when the adult son gets a glimpse into what his mother is really doing, unclouded by memory and nostalgia.

In this episode, Sam dreams of his mother wearing a red dress, singing a lullaby to his younger self, a prelude to a complicated dream, and a complicated episode.

Later, Sam sees into his mother on the street, and arrests the guy who is hassling her. She's in debt to a scumbag named Nick Profaci, who works for Elliott Casso, a gangster. Casso is connected to the murders of several young women, but the police can't -- or won't -- prove it. Casso keeps the local police on payroll, including Sam’s boss, Lt. Gene Hunt. Sam rejects the bribe Casso offers. As he leaves Casso’s club, Sam glimpses a guy in an iconic modern-day t-shirt and hears the beep-beep of the heart monitor, and for an instant he's not entirely in 1973.

As he tells his neighbor Windy the next morning, "I saved my mother from a gorilla named Niki. Saw Jim Croce, Joe Namath, and some dude in a Nirvana t-shirt. Got offered a bribe by the gangster who runs this part of town, and oh, yeah, I think a tiny robot crawled inside my ear while I was sleeping."

The next evening, Adrienne, one of the waitresses/hookers from Casso's club, shows up at Sam's door with a black eye, looking for sanctuary. Sam turns down her overtures but soon discovers that she has drugged him and left him in a compromising position.

Sam goes to his mom's apartment and offers her money to leave town, but she declines. He returns home to find a note from Adrienne, telling him how to bring Casso down. When a body turns up in the the river, he expects it to be his mother, but it's Adrienne.

Hunt tells Sam about a crooked cop he knew way back when, and the cop who ratted on him, and the coulda-woulda-shoulda moment that still gnaws at his guts. What's a cop to do? Bust in on Casso, of course. Sam and Gene find the evidence they need, and arrest Casso and Profaci. Rose is there, in the red dress, intending to "pay off the debt" and swearing she's "never done anything like this before." Sam sends her home, crying.

We come full circle, to the point where we began this episode, with Rose in a red dress, crying, and singing young Sam a lullaby. Sam, the adult, walks into the night, with a smile.

This show continues to astonish in its obvious homage to the BBC original, while asserting its independence and rooting itself firmly into the 1973 New York scene of cops, clubs, and gangsters.

The subtlety with which this show illustrates the parallels between 1973 and 2008 continues to be dead-on. This episode opens with a clip of then-President Richard Nixon saying, "we are a nation addicted to oil" -- a state which, sadly, we are still in today.

Jason O'Mara is clearly putting his own mark on the character of Sam Tyler. O'Mara infuses a sense of wonder in Sam that we didn't see in the BBC version. He's made Sam the kind of guy that can be both amazed and in awe of seeing his mother, and completely weirded out by his attraction to her.

So too is Harvey Keitel putting his own mark on the character of Lt. Gene Hunt. Keitel's take on Hunt is more subtle and world weary than that of the BBC's version.  The scene win which he burns the bribe money reveals much about his character -- it's the right thing to do, and although he does it of his own free will, he does it in private and he hates every minute of it.

Meanwhile, back to the puzzle of why Sam finds himself in 1973. As he struggles with the puzzle, the blonde women in his life personify the yin and yang of his subconscious.

Officer Annie Norris, with her psychology degree and business-like demeanor, represents Sam's left brain -- the logic and science. She analyzes his dreams, points out his obvious Oedipal conflict with Rose (his mother), and invokes Freud while interpreting the meaning Rose's red dress. 

Windy, Sam's free-spirit hippie neighbor, represents Sam's right brain -- intuition. "Sometimes, your wires get crossed and your worlds mix and things don't feel right. When you've got that kind of cosmic jambalaya, maybe the universe is trying to tell you something," she says.

The director really milked the suspense in this episode, but the writing and the performances were excellent.