Us Martians are used to a steady diet of cliches, so the sight of a politician making time with a prostitute in the opening of "Home Is Where You Hang Your Holster" seems like one more item ticked off the list. Oh, you crazy, horndog councilman! Will you ever learn? But surprisingly, things are actually much more complicated. Bobby Prince may have looked like one more in a long line of barely two-dimensional walking jokes, but when he tells Sam, "I don't know how I got here," and starts ranting about getting hit on the head in 2009 and waking up in 1973—just like our hero—the situation takes a turn for the slightly more interesting. And when Prince is shot mere minutes after confirming his time travel ("We have a black president." "He won?"), you can remove the slightly.
After Prince is shot, Gene throws the whole station into lockdown, which gives us a standard scenario: there's a killer, a limited number of suspects, a time-limit (not even Gene will be able to hold everybody for that long), and a series of discoveries that fall forward like a line of dominos. Not the most original idea in the world, but at least there's a solid edge to it—there are stakes, Sam's invested in what happens next, and so, to an extent far greater than I was expecting, was I. At this point, I couldn't honestly tell you what a successful episode of Life On Mars should look like. I don't know what this series is striving to become. But "Home" is definitely a step in the right direction; given that next week will almost certainly be a five foot leap in the reverse direction, I'm going to take what I can get for now.
While Gene and Sam run through various interrogations at the station, Annie and Ray have a team-up. The flashier developments were focused largely on Sam, which is as it should be, but the Annie and Ray stuff is terrific character, some of the best we've seen yet. Ray has always been the loud-mouth id of the 1-2-5, and having to spend the whole day working with "No-Nuts" Norris seems like a perfect chance to show his softer side. Sure, he's dismissive of Annie's abilities as a policewoman at first, but once he sees her working and risking her own neck to get the case solved, surely he's got to come around, right? And hey, he even takes her home to meet the wife. Finally, a chance to see Ray outside his native element.
It's to Mars'sinfinite credit that, once you dig past the surface, Ray turns out to be an asshole all the way down. He dimisses his wife's interests (she's a talented seamstress, he doesn't get the point of sewing; she wants to cut her hair, he won't let her), he browbeats Annie every chance he gets, and when the climax of the episode finally gives him a chance to learn his lesson—Annie saves him from getting a knife in the gut—he uses the opportunity to deliver his harshest lecture yet. As Annie notes, Ray's clearly scared of her, and of what she represents. While making the chauvinist deep down terrified of an empowered woman isn't hugely original, it's a strong choice for the show, because it gives us an on-going conflict that can't be easily resolved. Michael Imperioli is great, and having him force Annie into a corner in the last scene created the kind of tension that Mars desperately needs. It had nothing to do with the mind-fuckery over Sam's predicament. It was just two people running up against each other, all jangled nerves and short tempers.