Entry tags:
ooc: ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
entranceway application
Name: Erin
DW username:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hughes
E-Mail: lacidiana[at]gmail[dot]com
IM: watchmodder
Plurk: LaCidiana
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Sam Tyler
Series: Life on Mars
Timeline: Toward the end of the final episode -- 2x08.
Canon Resource Link: Life on Mars | Wikipedia
Character History:
Sam Tyler was born and raised in Manchester, England, and as far as he was concerned, he led a good life. A by-the-book investigator obsessed with equality and justice, Sam worked his way up through his city's police force and eventually reached the rank of DCI, head of his district's Crime Squad in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). With a loving mother, a long-term girlfriend, and a successful career in law enforcement under the hand of a guiding mentor, the only deep emotional trauma Sam felt he'd endured during his life was the loss of his father, who had walked out on Sam and his mother when Sam was four years old.
Then along came a day in 2006. While investigating a series of murders, Sam had an argument with his girlfriend and fellow officer, Maya Roy, about how to continue the case. Sam ignored Maya's insistence about "following her gut," and told her to stand down from the case because of their differing opinions as well as their deteriorating relationship. Because Sam refused to trust her, Maya went into the field by herself. Because she went in by herself, she was kidnapped by the killer.
Sam was devastated. Tearful and guilt-ridden as he drove away from the crime scene, he forced himself to pull over and calm down. But, as he took a step away from his vehicle and onto the street, a speeding car hit him and slammed him into the tarmac.
He woke up in the exact same spot, in the exact same city -- in the year 1973.
Confused and disoriented by his impossible circumstances, Sam stumbled his way to his police precinct and discovered that in this version of Manchester, he was still a police officer and had recently been transferred into A-Division's Crime Squad in CID -- the 1973 equivalent of the unit that he headed in 2006. His angry outbursts and seemingly insane ranting to those around him didn't earn him any friends, and as a man of 21st century knowledge and principles, Sam immediately began chafing under the shoddy procedures, backwards ethics, and casual police brutality that the 1973 CID operated upon. This was all epitomized chiefly by DCI Gene Hunt, who occupied Sam's modern-day position as head of the department and proved to have no qualms about using intimidation, bribes, planted evidence, and even outright violence to get a confession.
Sam didn't know if he was mad, in a coma, or if he'd traveled back in time, but one thing was for sure -- he didn't know how to get back home. Thankfully, Sam did find someone to confide in: WPC Annie Cartwright (a Police Constable in the separate women's department), a psychology graduate who was willing to listen to his stories about the future and act as his moral support and lifeline despite her own doubts about what might be going on in Sam's head. And, as time passed, Sam began to believe that's exactly where he was -- in his own head. He regularly heard breathing tubes and heart monitors that no one else could, along with strange radio messages, television programs, and phantom phone calls -- all of people talking to him as if he was lying in a coma ward.
But despite all this, 1973 continued acting as if it was everyday life and Sam found that the only thing he could do was play along. He stuck stubbornly to his 21st century ideals despite getting knocked about and shunned because of it, but as cases mounted and he spent more time with the CID team (which included young DC Chris Skelton and obnoxious DS Ray Carling), some aspects of this new world began to reveal themselves as different than what they'd first appeared. Sam's self-righteous decisions weren't always the correct ones, Gene's violence had a set of morals behind the brutality, and 1973 wasn't isolating Sam from other people so much as Sam was isolating himself. Sam even began to break rules he never would have dreamed trespassing on before, and somewhere deep down, past denial and repression and belief that this was all some big dream, he was beginning to change.
On a more obvious level, so was CID. Sam's dogged one-man reform of the unit through emphasis on forensics and accountability gradually allowed the team to work more efficiently and helped them cast away their yoke of complacent corruption. And, perhaps the greatest irony was that even as Gene, Chris, and Annie began to respectively trust Sam as a partner, a role-model, and a friend, Sam couldn't return the sentiment. To him, this world and all of the people in it were most likely a figment of his broken mind -- even though he continued to react to situations around him as if he could make a difference and maybe even change the future.
This contradiction became especially apparent when, while cracking down on the vicious leaders of an up-and-coming gang, the CID team encountered Vic Tyler -- Sam's father -- who soon became a prime suspect. Desperate to protect his family and change the events of 1973 so that Vic never left Sam and his mother, Sam willfully blinded himself to the evidence piling up against Vic. Sam turned on his teammates and his own ideals to this end, convinced that solving the trauma in his past would be the key to waking up in 2006.
But it wasn't. Instead, Sam finally realized the significance of a set of recurring images he'd seen ever since he first woke up in this world. In 1973, on the day his father had disappeared, four-year-old Sam had watched his father murder a policewoman in cold blood. That policewoman was Annie, and the powers that be had taken Sam back to this year so that he could protect her and his younger self by finally confronting the memory he'd buried for his entire life. Sam stopped Vic, but couldn't bring himself to imprison him because of the consequences it would bring upon his mother and his younger self. Instead, he let Vic leave his family -- Sam's family -- and dealt with the horrible revelation that his idolized, absent father had always been a criminal.
But even after coming to terms with the truth and going back to his usual state of affairs -- usual for a delusional time-traveling copper, anyway -- Sam didn't feel any closer to getting home. Indeed, as time wore on and 2006 slipped further and further away, Sam finally began to trust and truly care for the people around him despite the continuing indications that this was all one big dream. Further undermining his comfort were cryptic phone calls that he could actually interact with, as well as encounters with people who would one day be a part of his life in the future -- a crime lord he'd put away, his mentor, his aunt, and Maya's mother to name a few. Although each one left him with a faint connection to 2006, he was still far away from home, and each person's discomfort with his familiarity only served to make him feel more and more isolated from his previous life.
Then, Sam found his loyalties truly put to the test when Gene was put under suspicion of murder and DCI Frank Morgan took over A-Division during the course of the investigation. Morgan was from Hyde, the same division from which Sam had supposedly transferred when he'd woken up as a DI in 1973, and he seemed to mirror Sam's modern-day professionalism to an eerie degree. However, despite his own initial doubts, Sam realized that he'd come to trust Gene enough that he believed his claim of innocence, and after some pseudo-illegal teamwork, they managed to clear Gene's name.
But that was only the beginning of Sam's ordeal. After the case, Morgan revealed to Sam that he'd been "transferred" to A-Division in the first place in order to gather intel about Gene's corruption and expose his team to the public. If Sam did that, Morgan said, then he could go home.
Clinging desperately to Morgan's comparison of DCI Hunt to a "tumor" that needed to be "removed," Sam concluded that Morgan was his surgeon in real life and renewed his personal determination to perceive his teammates as nothing more than side-effects of his mind's disease. He re-hardened his attitude to Gene's dangerous methods and tried to initiate intimacy with Annie in one last effort before he left 1973 forever, but both of these attempts backfired. Sam felt more alienated from 1973 than ever before and so handed over the evidence of Gene's corruption to Morgan, thinking it'd finally get him home.
But it didn't. As it turned out, Morgan wasn't aware of Sam's futuristic origins, and told him instead that he'd been sent undercover and he'd forgotten about his life in Hyde as "Sam Williams" due to head trauma from a coach collision. Despite Sam's initial disbelief, Morgan presented a compelling and terrifyingly accurate summary of Sam's surreal experiences, leaving Sam confused and horrified by the realization that he might have been mad all along -- and he might have sold out his very real friends to a very real danger.
Despite Sam's betrayal and the intense emotions riding on it, the team had no choice but to continue with plans for a sting operation that Gene had organized, in which Sam participated due to a promise from Morgan that they'd have backup from Hyde in case anything went wrong. Sam and the team all found themselves in mortal danger, and Sam left them in order to call for backup, promising to Annie that he'd come back and help them. However, when he left and ran into Morgan nearby, Morgan revealed that there'd never been any backup; Gene's botched operation and its fallout would be all the proof they needed of his incompetence, and if his team died in the process? Good riddance.
As Sam turned around to see his friends fight for their lives and fall to the ground under gunfire, he heard a crescendo of medical equipment and saw a white light...
[UH. One thing to ask you mods -- the point that I want to take Sam from is one of the only times in the series he's not wearing his usualanime character outfit, and in fact he's in this... really hideous brown overall uniform thing. I was wondering if it might be possible for him to wake up in Eway with his usual canon outfit instead? I'm not shallow, no no way.]
Abilities/Special Powers:
Sam is technically a perfectly normal human being. However, after waking up in 1973, his life has definitely taken a turn for the weird, and he's found himself capable of many things that he would have thought impossible in his old life. For one, he often has visual or audio hallucinations of people and events from the "real world" bleeding into 1973, such as hearing his doctors talk on the radio or seeing his mother speak to him through a character on the television. His surroundings will also often play a part in his awareness of his "dream-world," such as lights suddenly going off or telephones ringing -- both of which only Sam can see or hear.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, Sam has also had vague premonitions of events from his immediate future, and he has seen visions into his teammates' recent memories and watched their actions from a television set when stuck a deeper level of coma, though these cases only seem to happen when something is physically affecting him in the "real world," such as a drug overdose or deliberate torture. In one case, his visions actually led him to believe that he had affected the events of the future due to his actions in the past, though it is unclear whether or not this actually happened or if it was just another delusion. There's also one character specific to his hallucinations -- the "Test Card Girl," who will often visit him in his nightmares and terrorize him by mocking his faults and insecurities.
In the context of this RP, I was wondering if it would be possible for Sam to continue experiencing these audio and visual hallucinations from time to time. Of course, none of them would be premonitory or magical -- they'd only show/tell Sam things based on his own canon knowledge or parallel with events he's currently going through. Their only purpose would be to confuse and disorient him so that he had a harder time acting, uh, sane, with nothing that would actually help him in-game.
Third-Person Sample:
Sam Tyler woke up in 1973.
Again.
Sam shot straight up in his bed and it creaked under him just like before, just like it had the day of his accident and all the months after. His hands clenched into the same rough sheets; he sucked in the same dusty air. From the other side of the room, his measly kitchenette stared back at him. The dim glow of Manchester street lamps drifted in from his grimy window.
No white walls. No Wonderland.
Sam pressed a hand to his mouth. Had it-- No. It hadn't been a dream, not the usual sort, anyway. The grass underneath him had been dewey, the ground hard. It had felt as solid and real as the dirt at the highway construction site, and that...
Sam shook his head. He slid off his covers, moved to sit on the edge of his bed. He ran his hands down his face.
"How far are you down the rabbit hole?"
Sam jerked, fell. His shoulder slammed into the floor. He held it with one hand as his head snapped up at her, the face of her, the red and eerie glow.
"I don't know," he breathed. "Do I ever know?"
"Oh, Sam," she laughed. She clutched her clown doll to her chest. "Of course you know! You know how far to fall, don't you? Get back to your Wonderland..."
Sam's shoulder throbbed. "What are you on about?"
She smiled, teeth small and white. "Have to be careful, Sam. Wonderland makes you forget. It makes you want to stay."
Sam's blood ran cold. Around him, the room seemed to shift, vibrate. Wind rushed past his face.
"Which one?" he whispered.
She slid toward him.
"Can't go back to yesterday, Sam. You were a different person then."
The wind blew harder, louder. The furniture rattled. Sam skittered backward to his knees, his feet.
Everything went red. She giggled, a little titter. "Can't go back."
"Stop--"
"Can't go back. Can't go back. Can't go back."
Sam's hand grabbed the shuddering doorknob. He yanked it open, stumbled out--
You must me mad, or you wouldn't have come here.
White. Blinding him. He fell to his knees, felt his palms hit the floor. He heaved in breaths.
Silence settled around him like a blanket, heavy and thick. He shut his eyes and then opened them again. When he raised his head, he saw doors and long white walls.
The hallway. From the mansion.
Sam stood to his shaky, aching feet. He turned around to face the door he'd come out of and saw his flat beyond the threshold, tiny, dingy. The window had disappeared.
Sam closed his eyes. He leaned his head against the door frame.
First-Person Sample:
[A face fritzes in, a bit near to the screen. Cropped brown hair, creased brow. His flared collar and leather jacket scream "seventies."]
Um. [He taps the lens. Pulls away from it.]
Hello. My name is Sam Tyler. I... [British accent -- specifically, Manc. He leans back from the screen, takes on a more professional air.] I'm a police officer. D-- DCI. I was told this "network" would be the quickest way to get information -- where I am, what I...
[He glances off. Scowls.] I mean, "Wonderland," really.
[He looks back to the camera.] Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
DW username:
hughesE-Mail: lacidiana[at]gmail[dot]com
IM: watchmodder
Plurk: LaCidiana
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Sam Tyler
Series: Life on Mars
Timeline: Toward the end of the final episode -- 2x08.
Canon Resource Link: Life on Mars | Wikipedia
Character History:
Sam Tyler was born and raised in Manchester, England, and as far as he was concerned, he led a good life. A by-the-book investigator obsessed with equality and justice, Sam worked his way up through his city's police force and eventually reached the rank of DCI, head of his district's Crime Squad in the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). With a loving mother, a long-term girlfriend, and a successful career in law enforcement under the hand of a guiding mentor, the only deep emotional trauma Sam felt he'd endured during his life was the loss of his father, who had walked out on Sam and his mother when Sam was four years old.
Then along came a day in 2006. While investigating a series of murders, Sam had an argument with his girlfriend and fellow officer, Maya Roy, about how to continue the case. Sam ignored Maya's insistence about "following her gut," and told her to stand down from the case because of their differing opinions as well as their deteriorating relationship. Because Sam refused to trust her, Maya went into the field by herself. Because she went in by herself, she was kidnapped by the killer.
Sam was devastated. Tearful and guilt-ridden as he drove away from the crime scene, he forced himself to pull over and calm down. But, as he took a step away from his vehicle and onto the street, a speeding car hit him and slammed him into the tarmac.
He woke up in the exact same spot, in the exact same city -- in the year 1973.
Confused and disoriented by his impossible circumstances, Sam stumbled his way to his police precinct and discovered that in this version of Manchester, he was still a police officer and had recently been transferred into A-Division's Crime Squad in CID -- the 1973 equivalent of the unit that he headed in 2006. His angry outbursts and seemingly insane ranting to those around him didn't earn him any friends, and as a man of 21st century knowledge and principles, Sam immediately began chafing under the shoddy procedures, backwards ethics, and casual police brutality that the 1973 CID operated upon. This was all epitomized chiefly by DCI Gene Hunt, who occupied Sam's modern-day position as head of the department and proved to have no qualms about using intimidation, bribes, planted evidence, and even outright violence to get a confession.
Sam didn't know if he was mad, in a coma, or if he'd traveled back in time, but one thing was for sure -- he didn't know how to get back home. Thankfully, Sam did find someone to confide in: WPC Annie Cartwright (a Police Constable in the separate women's department), a psychology graduate who was willing to listen to his stories about the future and act as his moral support and lifeline despite her own doubts about what might be going on in Sam's head. And, as time passed, Sam began to believe that's exactly where he was -- in his own head. He regularly heard breathing tubes and heart monitors that no one else could, along with strange radio messages, television programs, and phantom phone calls -- all of people talking to him as if he was lying in a coma ward.
But despite all this, 1973 continued acting as if it was everyday life and Sam found that the only thing he could do was play along. He stuck stubbornly to his 21st century ideals despite getting knocked about and shunned because of it, but as cases mounted and he spent more time with the CID team (which included young DC Chris Skelton and obnoxious DS Ray Carling), some aspects of this new world began to reveal themselves as different than what they'd first appeared. Sam's self-righteous decisions weren't always the correct ones, Gene's violence had a set of morals behind the brutality, and 1973 wasn't isolating Sam from other people so much as Sam was isolating himself. Sam even began to break rules he never would have dreamed trespassing on before, and somewhere deep down, past denial and repression and belief that this was all some big dream, he was beginning to change.
On a more obvious level, so was CID. Sam's dogged one-man reform of the unit through emphasis on forensics and accountability gradually allowed the team to work more efficiently and helped them cast away their yoke of complacent corruption. And, perhaps the greatest irony was that even as Gene, Chris, and Annie began to respectively trust Sam as a partner, a role-model, and a friend, Sam couldn't return the sentiment. To him, this world and all of the people in it were most likely a figment of his broken mind -- even though he continued to react to situations around him as if he could make a difference and maybe even change the future.
This contradiction became especially apparent when, while cracking down on the vicious leaders of an up-and-coming gang, the CID team encountered Vic Tyler -- Sam's father -- who soon became a prime suspect. Desperate to protect his family and change the events of 1973 so that Vic never left Sam and his mother, Sam willfully blinded himself to the evidence piling up against Vic. Sam turned on his teammates and his own ideals to this end, convinced that solving the trauma in his past would be the key to waking up in 2006.
But it wasn't. Instead, Sam finally realized the significance of a set of recurring images he'd seen ever since he first woke up in this world. In 1973, on the day his father had disappeared, four-year-old Sam had watched his father murder a policewoman in cold blood. That policewoman was Annie, and the powers that be had taken Sam back to this year so that he could protect her and his younger self by finally confronting the memory he'd buried for his entire life. Sam stopped Vic, but couldn't bring himself to imprison him because of the consequences it would bring upon his mother and his younger self. Instead, he let Vic leave his family -- Sam's family -- and dealt with the horrible revelation that his idolized, absent father had always been a criminal.
But even after coming to terms with the truth and going back to his usual state of affairs -- usual for a delusional time-traveling copper, anyway -- Sam didn't feel any closer to getting home. Indeed, as time wore on and 2006 slipped further and further away, Sam finally began to trust and truly care for the people around him despite the continuing indications that this was all one big dream. Further undermining his comfort were cryptic phone calls that he could actually interact with, as well as encounters with people who would one day be a part of his life in the future -- a crime lord he'd put away, his mentor, his aunt, and Maya's mother to name a few. Although each one left him with a faint connection to 2006, he was still far away from home, and each person's discomfort with his familiarity only served to make him feel more and more isolated from his previous life.
Then, Sam found his loyalties truly put to the test when Gene was put under suspicion of murder and DCI Frank Morgan took over A-Division during the course of the investigation. Morgan was from Hyde, the same division from which Sam had supposedly transferred when he'd woken up as a DI in 1973, and he seemed to mirror Sam's modern-day professionalism to an eerie degree. However, despite his own initial doubts, Sam realized that he'd come to trust Gene enough that he believed his claim of innocence, and after some pseudo-illegal teamwork, they managed to clear Gene's name.
But that was only the beginning of Sam's ordeal. After the case, Morgan revealed to Sam that he'd been "transferred" to A-Division in the first place in order to gather intel about Gene's corruption and expose his team to the public. If Sam did that, Morgan said, then he could go home.
Clinging desperately to Morgan's comparison of DCI Hunt to a "tumor" that needed to be "removed," Sam concluded that Morgan was his surgeon in real life and renewed his personal determination to perceive his teammates as nothing more than side-effects of his mind's disease. He re-hardened his attitude to Gene's dangerous methods and tried to initiate intimacy with Annie in one last effort before he left 1973 forever, but both of these attempts backfired. Sam felt more alienated from 1973 than ever before and so handed over the evidence of Gene's corruption to Morgan, thinking it'd finally get him home.
But it didn't. As it turned out, Morgan wasn't aware of Sam's futuristic origins, and told him instead that he'd been sent undercover and he'd forgotten about his life in Hyde as "Sam Williams" due to head trauma from a coach collision. Despite Sam's initial disbelief, Morgan presented a compelling and terrifyingly accurate summary of Sam's surreal experiences, leaving Sam confused and horrified by the realization that he might have been mad all along -- and he might have sold out his very real friends to a very real danger.
Despite Sam's betrayal and the intense emotions riding on it, the team had no choice but to continue with plans for a sting operation that Gene had organized, in which Sam participated due to a promise from Morgan that they'd have backup from Hyde in case anything went wrong. Sam and the team all found themselves in mortal danger, and Sam left them in order to call for backup, promising to Annie that he'd come back and help them. However, when he left and ran into Morgan nearby, Morgan revealed that there'd never been any backup; Gene's botched operation and its fallout would be all the proof they needed of his incompetence, and if his team died in the process? Good riddance.
As Sam turned around to see his friends fight for their lives and fall to the ground under gunfire, he heard a crescendo of medical equipment and saw a white light...
[UH. One thing to ask you mods -- the point that I want to take Sam from is one of the only times in the series he's not wearing his usual
Abilities/Special Powers:
Sam is technically a perfectly normal human being. However, after waking up in 1973, his life has definitely taken a turn for the weird, and he's found himself capable of many things that he would have thought impossible in his old life. For one, he often has visual or audio hallucinations of people and events from the "real world" bleeding into 1973, such as hearing his doctors talk on the radio or seeing his mother speak to him through a character on the television. His surroundings will also often play a part in his awareness of his "dream-world," such as lights suddenly going off or telephones ringing -- both of which only Sam can see or hear.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, Sam has also had vague premonitions of events from his immediate future, and he has seen visions into his teammates' recent memories and watched their actions from a television set when stuck a deeper level of coma, though these cases only seem to happen when something is physically affecting him in the "real world," such as a drug overdose or deliberate torture. In one case, his visions actually led him to believe that he had affected the events of the future due to his actions in the past, though it is unclear whether or not this actually happened or if it was just another delusion. There's also one character specific to his hallucinations -- the "Test Card Girl," who will often visit him in his nightmares and terrorize him by mocking his faults and insecurities.
In the context of this RP, I was wondering if it would be possible for Sam to continue experiencing these audio and visual hallucinations from time to time. Of course, none of them would be premonitory or magical -- they'd only show/tell Sam things based on his own canon knowledge or parallel with events he's currently going through. Their only purpose would be to confuse and disorient him so that he had a harder time acting, uh, sane, with nothing that would actually help him in-game.
Third-Person Sample:
Sam Tyler woke up in 1973.
Again.
Sam shot straight up in his bed and it creaked under him just like before, just like it had the day of his accident and all the months after. His hands clenched into the same rough sheets; he sucked in the same dusty air. From the other side of the room, his measly kitchenette stared back at him. The dim glow of Manchester street lamps drifted in from his grimy window.
No white walls. No Wonderland.
Sam pressed a hand to his mouth. Had it-- No. It hadn't been a dream, not the usual sort, anyway. The grass underneath him had been dewey, the ground hard. It had felt as solid and real as the dirt at the highway construction site, and that...
Sam shook his head. He slid off his covers, moved to sit on the edge of his bed. He ran his hands down his face.
"How far are you down the rabbit hole?"
Sam jerked, fell. His shoulder slammed into the floor. He held it with one hand as his head snapped up at her, the face of her, the red and eerie glow.
"I don't know," he breathed. "Do I ever know?"
"Oh, Sam," she laughed. She clutched her clown doll to her chest. "Of course you know! You know how far to fall, don't you? Get back to your Wonderland..."
Sam's shoulder throbbed. "What are you on about?"
She smiled, teeth small and white. "Have to be careful, Sam. Wonderland makes you forget. It makes you want to stay."
Sam's blood ran cold. Around him, the room seemed to shift, vibrate. Wind rushed past his face.
"Which one?" he whispered.
She slid toward him.
"Can't go back to yesterday, Sam. You were a different person then."
The wind blew harder, louder. The furniture rattled. Sam skittered backward to his knees, his feet.
Everything went red. She giggled, a little titter. "Can't go back."
"Stop--"
"Can't go back. Can't go back. Can't go back."
Sam's hand grabbed the shuddering doorknob. He yanked it open, stumbled out--
You must me mad, or you wouldn't have come here.
White. Blinding him. He fell to his knees, felt his palms hit the floor. He heaved in breaths.
Silence settled around him like a blanket, heavy and thick. He shut his eyes and then opened them again. When he raised his head, he saw doors and long white walls.
The hallway. From the mansion.
Sam stood to his shaky, aching feet. He turned around to face the door he'd come out of and saw his flat beyond the threshold, tiny, dingy. The window had disappeared.
Sam closed his eyes. He leaned his head against the door frame.
First-Person Sample:
[A face fritzes in, a bit near to the screen. Cropped brown hair, creased brow. His flared collar and leather jacket scream "seventies."]
Um. [He taps the lens. Pulls away from it.]
Hello. My name is Sam Tyler. I... [British accent -- specifically, Manc. He leans back from the screen, takes on a more professional air.] I'm a police officer. D-- DCI. I was told this "network" would be the quickest way to get information -- where I am, what I...
[He glances off. Scowls.] I mean, "Wonderland," really.
[He looks back to the camera.] Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.