Connections Featured in Screenwipe: Episode 1. User reviews 36 Review. Top review. A fantastic show I'll never forget. I'll admit it; I'm not the biggest fan sci-fi television. I'm not a Star Wars or X-Files fanatic. MST stands for Mystery Science Theater , read my comments about it if you've never heard of it before To my surprise, I didn't need to use my fleeting talent for mocking films.
I was intrigued by the premise of the entire show. I was wrong to write this show off as another X-Files. Sapphire and Steel is much more thought provoking, mysterious, and different from all the other shows floating around out there.
The series finale was one of the best ends to a television show I've ever seen! It's a definite guilty pleasure of mine. FAQ 1. What does the ending mean?
Details Edit. Release date July 10, United Kingdom. United Kingdom. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 30 minutes.
Related news. Jul 21 Den of Geek. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. The unseen threat is palpable, even more so when it isn't represented as circles of light.
Though far from perfect, this first outing for the time detectives is compelling stuff. The abandoned railway station is giving him a lot to investigate. Flowers are appearing out of nowhere, there is the sound of whistling and of a man moving about carrying heavy things. When Sapphire and Steel arrive, he takes them for fellow ghosthunters and is suspicious of their motives. Sapphire picks up on a change of season and is caught out on the platform when summers suddenly comes and a marching band is heard approaching.
Sapphire senses that he is not the threat, but there is a darkness that is using him. Steel checks Tully's tapes and finds sounds from a sunken submarine in World War 2. There are more figures appearing on the platform with the soldier. One of them is an airman and Steel is suddenly forced into reliving that man's death.
He rigs up the lights and gets Tully to start singing the soldier's favourite tune in the hope of stinging a reaction out of the soldier. What he gets is machine guns, grenades and both Sapphire and Tully choking to death in a corridor. He then decides to take up Tully's suggestion of a seance with Sapphire as the medium. She is contacted by the spirits of the submariners and then possessed by a schoolteacher when Steel forces her to go back into the soldier's past.
EPISODE 5 - The schoolteacher was the soldier's lover and tells many of his secrets before the soldier retaliates, setting the darkness upon them. The circle of the seance is broken, leaving Sapphire in a catatonic state.
EPISODE 6 - The soldier parades what appears to be Sapphire's spirit as one of his recruits on the platform whilst her body remains dormant in the waiting room.
Steel gains access to the figure and learns from her that the ghosts represent no threat and neither does the darkness that is behind them. The darkness moves in and Tully is given the chance to leave, abandoning the still recumbent Sapphire. Steel rejects the false Sapphire and is also allowed to leave, but runs into a barrier of barbed wire.
Sapphire is returned to health and Steels barbed wire turns to spiderwebs. The threat seems to have passed, but they have moved 12 days into the future. Steel is not willing to lose and forces Sapphire to summon the darkness back offering it a deal. Steel gets Sapphire to jump them out after 11 to give him freedom to act. He shows the soldier what the future will really be like and how it can be avoided and then strikes his bargain, a deal that will require betrayal and sacrifice in equal measure.
Gone is any vestige of the children's show that it seemed the first time out and in comes full-blooded adult fantasy. No quarter is given to the audience to explain what is going on. The set up is revealed slowly towards a climax that is positively shattering in its bravery. Along the way there is some very serious and disturbing imagery including Steel strung up on barbed wire, the death of an airman and the submariners choking to death, all of them acheived with great lighting and sound and nothing more.
The threat to all of the participants is very real and nobody comes off unscathed. There is a very real sense that the heroes are not in control of events and that they could very easily lose.
There is a fine central performance from Gerald James as Tully that makes the events of the last ten minutes of episode 8 all the harder to bear. Joanna Lumley continues to be excellent as the gifted Sapphire, but is overtaken by David McCallum as the implacable Steel, a being driven to succeed and willing to do anything at all in order to win.
Neither of these are conventional heroes, but they are brilliantly written and superbly played. The direction is magnificent, making the most of the limited sets and money, creating again the sense of claustrophobia and threat that permeated the first adventure. This is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the greatest pieces of television fantasy ever transmitted.
They have come from the future to carry out a historical experiment, living like the present-day folk, but sealed away from them. Communications are down and strange things are happening.
Meanwhile, Sapphire and Steel have arrived and discovered an invisible pod on the top of a building. Whilst exploring the edges of the pod, dangling over the edge of the roof, Steel is attacked. Sapphire makes closer contact with the inhabitants of the pod, but they are no closer to entering.
In the meantime, the adults within begin to worry that they can't contact either their home base in the future or the other research centre in the present. An apparent foetus in the wall, possibly a crystal of pure time, has turned their baby into a man and seems at the heart of the attack on the pod's occupants.
His name is Silver and he is an expert in machines. His job is to get them into the pod. He tells Steel that there are two other pods, but that they are no longer a worry. Sapphire reappears in one of the other pods and discovers why this is. Eldred and Rothwyn, the pod's inhabitants, discover their baby, now in the body of a man and with the power to turn things to sand.
Silver immediately decides that it is a machine and attempts to disassemble it, but is touched and vanishes. When it breaks its bonds and enters the pod proper, enough energy is released for Silver to send the pod back to its proper time, along with the threat it contains. REVIEW - Following on from the sheer genius that was Assignment 2 , this was always likely to be a disappointment and it is, but only because of the standard set so far. That Sapphire And Steel is remembered so vividly now is a testament to its blazing originality.
Many fictions, fondly recalled from our childhoods, prove a crushing disappointment when revisited as grown-ups. But not Sapphire And Steel. It may have been produced on a threadbare budget, but little has dated from its 34 episodes and six broadcast stories. What remains beguiling and fascinating about it is its proud, strutting opaqueness, its stubborn desire not to explain.
Even before we discovered that the Doctor was a Time Lord, we knew he was an alien, we knew he was years old or thereabouts , and that he lived in this box called a TARDIS. But Sapphire And Steel never ever offered us those crumbs. That Peter J Hammond could storm his way through those 34 episodes without ever caving in to pressure to illuminate his two enigmatic leads is kind of admirable.
Indeed, it never told anything at all. Even if star Joanna Lumley believed that Sapphire and Steel were aliens, that was nothing to do with Hammond. Sapphire And Steel took its small screen bow on 10 July Luckily ATV was a company that thought big. As an almost totally studio-bound show only one story took them into the open air, and even then it seemed strangely wrong , Sapphire And Steel made a virtue of its lowly production values.
0コメント