The protagonist of the series is Detective
Sam Tyler, assigned to the 125th Precinct Detective Squad of the
New York City Police Department. At the show's outset in 2008, he lives with his girlfriend who is also his NYPD assigned partner, Detective Maya Daniels. Maya, to Tyler's horror, is kidnapped by a murderer they are investigating. While responding to a radio call as he crosses the street, Tyler is distracted and hit by another responding speeding police car. He regains consciousness in the same spot in the year 1973, dressed in period civilian attire, carrying a period-accurate identity card with his badge, and equipped with a vintage automobile, a 1971
Chevrolet Chevelle — and, astonishingly, he is parked within sight of the Twin Towers of the
World Trade Center. He returns to his precinct house to find an unfamiliar early-1970s police squad, with contemporaneous equipment — rotary dial telephones, reel-to-reel tape recorders, typewriters — and culture which he likens to finding himself on a different planet. However, the detectives have been expecting him, thinking that he is a transfer from a place called "Hyde". His disorientation and frequent references to things from the future brand him as eccentric and he is labeled with the nickname "Spaceman", but he becomes a valued member of the squad. Later on in the series, with Sam supposedly in a coma in 2008, Maya decides to end the relationship. Several of the show's plots involve Sam looking into earlier versions of his cases from 2008, such as in "Out Here in the Fields" where he discovers the sociopath mentor of a future serial killer, and in "The Simple Secret of the Note in Us All" where Sam has the opportunity to stop a serial killer early in his career. Additional storylines are driven by the conflict between Sam's 2008 values and the more corrupt, almost
vigilante-style policing of the era he finds himself in, while others are driven by Sam's discovery of more personal information about his past in this era that radically reshapes his understanding of the life he has left behind. He engages in an ongoing struggle to figure out what has happened to him, torn between his developing relationships in 1973 and his desire to return to 2008. His 2008 reality frequently intrudes into 1973 through surreal, anachronistic visions and cryptic telephone calls. In one episode he sees a man in a nightclub wearing a
Nirvana t-shirt, in several early episodes he sees the face of
George W. Bush on the front page of the newspaper, and he frequently sees
Mars rover robots following him or attempting to enter his body. At other times, he also hints at his knowledge of the future to his colleagues; in a discussion of then-President
Richard Nixon he confuses them by asserting that Nixon won't be in office much longer, he makes a veiled allusion to the
September 11 attacks when advising them against engaging in
hate speech, and he uses then-future cultural references as undercover pseudonyms — sometimes giving his name as "
Luke Skywalker", "
Tom Cruise," or "Sam
Bono", and giving Gene and a female companion the undercover names "George and
Laura Bush". At the end of the series, it is revealed that Tyler's 2008 and 1973 realities were
both fictitious, created by the onboard computer of a spacecraft that is carrying Tyler, Hunt, Norris, Carling, and Skelton on the first-ever human mission to the planet Mars, in 2035. The crew he worked with in 1973 were just
virtual reality versions of his fellow spaceship crew members. His room number, "2B", is his sleeping unit; his old precinct, "Hyde", and his new precinct, the "125", are based on the name of the spacecraft — "Hyde 125"; his neighbor, Windy, is the name of the computer
A.I.; Frank Morgan, an FBI agent in the series, is the Mission Control flight director; and in a reversal from her struggle to be taken seriously as a police officer in 1973, Annie Norris is the ship's commander. To sustain the crew, their minds were routinely kept active while asleep using virtual reality "neural stimulation" programs of their own choosing, but Sam's choice of a scenario where he was a police officer c. 2008 was abruptly changed to a 1973 setting by a computer glitch induced by a
meteor-storm. The identity of Maya in 2035, however, is left unexplained. In a twist, Gene Hunt in 1973 turns out to be astronaut "
Major Tom" Tyler — Sam's father — in the conclusion. Just as Maria was estranged from Gene in 1973, Sam was estranged from his father until the very end of the series, when he reconciles with his dad before they step out onto the bare ground of the Red Planet. However, the final shot shows not an astronaut boot, but Gene Hunt's signature white loafer taking the first step onto the Martian surface, casting doubt once again onto the ending. == Cast ==