Starcat and Scary Cat Have Been Assigned

Introduction by Big Gay Longcat

My friend Scary Cat wants to review his favourite scary TV series Sapphire & Steel, just like when I review Blakes 7 and so on. But Scary Cat does not have as much experience as me in reviewing things on the internets so he asked his best friend Starcat to help him. This is their review of the first six episodes of Sapphire & Steel, which together make up the story known as Assignment One.

Starcat and Scary Cat review Sapphire & Steel: Assignment One

By Starcat and Scary Cat

If you do not know what Sapphire & Steel is about then you should watch the title sequence. Here it is, and don't worry because it is hardly scary at all:



Now you have watched that you know about as much about Sapphire & Steel as any cat who has watched it.

"It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

-- Winston Churchill describing Sapphire & Steel in 1939.

Sapphire & Steel was first shown on TV in 1979. You may be confused as to how Winston Churchill could describe it 40 years earlier, or even a little bit scared, but you needn't be. Things being out of their proper place in time is part of Sapphire & Steel.

Rob and Helen's dad and mum disappear, and they are scared by this. This is not too surprising. Starcat thinks that he would be scared if his dad and mum disappeared, except that he is made from socks. Scary Cat wouldn't be scared because he is the bravest of all cats, and is also made from socks.

Sapphire and Steel arrive to investigate what has happened. Some TV series take a while to get going, because they take their first episodes to establish the main characters and setting or format. Sapphire & Steel spends only seconds out of its first 25 minutes to introduce the two regulars - cleverly doing so by presenting them as outsiders to Rob and Helen.

What the first part spends its time on instead is establishing the atmosphere. The three key scenes that do this are the pre-titles sequence, the scene where Sapphire and Steel recreate the parents' disappearance and conjure up... we don't know what, but we do know it is something scary, and, of course, the final scene where, no matter how ambiguous the events have been so far, we are left in no doubt that there is peril here so the cliffhanger is terrifically effective in making us want more.

The no-nonsense acting of David McCallum and Joanna Lumley as Steel and Sapphire set about their task makes us take the drama seriously throughout and prevents the scary threat from ever seeming ludicrous. They are backed up by the absolutely wonderful ambient sound effects of the old house, and the clocks ticking - or not ticking - better than any background music.

All this makes for one of the great first episodes of any TV series, and Scary Cat's favourite of all.

You don't get any real answers in part 2. For all that Sapphire demonstrates her power to "take time back", she steadfastly refuses to explain how she does this. Meanwhile Steel manages to be even more of an enigma than her - he seemingly relies on Sapphire entirely for the supernatural abilities in their partnership, and yet he humanises himself more by saying the word "please" to Rob than Sapphire manages by being constantly charming. In fact she comes across as distinctly sinister in places. We know they're the goodys but at this point they're almost as scary as the baddys!

So the main - or rather the title - characters are only marginally closer to Rob, and thus any cats watching, than they were when they first turned up in part 1. Rob is still the character we can relate most closely to (there aren't any cats in this story). The attachment we are obviously supposed to feel to him is then tested brilliantly by the closing scenes when his 'mother' (who is obviously not actually his mother) calls to him from the boarded up room. You can't help but go

and are desperate for Rob to not be such an idiot. It makes for a second great cliffhanger ending, and is suitably different from the first.

The house is given its own character by the great direction, including a scene that is - at first - just shots of the interior of the house, with the ticking of the clocks the only sound. Then the 'buzzing' background noise - which we are being trained to associate with the scary supernatural force - fades up as the shots rise up the floors of the house until we see the boarded up room - with a scary white light coming out from under the door.

The 'buzzing' is a lot like the sound that accompanied the manifestations of the ghostly (and very scary) Tall Knight of Dark Towers.

The room that Sapphire is trapped in in part 3 is brilliantly directed, with the rope in the background and the cleaver in the foreground making it scary from the first time we see them, and combines with Lumley and McCallum's acting to create the tension in these scenes. Once again the threat is so... abstract... that we buy it only because of the strength of the acting and direction.

Steel is forced into taking obviously supernatural action for the first time, somehow freezing himself using a chest freezer that looks quite a lot like the one that lives in the kitchen and is the servant of Hoover.

Steel says "I know my history." It's a great line to create the impression of 'the other' or 'the outsider' in Steel (and by implication in Sapphire too) and comes at the point in the story when this is needed - with Rob now trusting them, this one line is all that is needed to help keep them at a distance by reminding Rob (and hence the viewers) that they are still mysterious.

Big Gay Longcat thinks the reason Steel doesn't know much about the English Civil War is because he's Scottish. Starcat thinks it is because Steel was around in the time before internets.

In part 4 Steel saves Sapphire from the picture and disposes of the Roundhead ghosts but at some sort of cost to himself, but fortunately there is then a respite: a significant difference between episodic TV pacing and movie pacing, in a movie you would expect the pressure to be kept on the goodys constantly from this point on.

During the respite night turns to day and then we get the arrival of Lead, who joins in with the already established characters - we don't need to go through the same process with him as we have already been through with Sapphire and Steel, i.e. for him to come in as an outsider and earn the trust of Rob and Helen.

We probably get more name-dropping of Sapphire and Steel's friends in this episode than anywhere else in the whole series outside the main title sequence: not only does Lead show up, he references Jet, Copper and Silver, and Sapphire gives their total number as 127 (from which Steel would like to exclude the Trans-Uranics - "they're unstable" - to make 115). Very little is explained by this, but much mystery is added.

Day turns to night again and the scariness level rises towards the end, with much of this being created just by wind in the rooms, and the light and shadows being cast. Simple but effective, expertly judged by the director, and makes for another suspenseful cliffhanger.

After starting with a moment of action following the reprise of the end of part 4, most of part 5 is concerned with the building of tension as we know that Sapphire and Steel (and Lead)'s opponents are up to something, but have no idea what. Neither, it seems, do our heroes - they are still on the back paws even in the penultimate part of the story.

Rob's scary fake 'dad' appears to fool Rob like his scary fake 'mother' did back in part 2, and then the story moves up another gear when 'dad' and Rob go into the parallel house, one where the kitchen is still tidy and the clocks are all working, which is amazingly effective when we get to the parallel scenes contrasting them against Sapphire and Steel in the wrecked kitchen, and Sapphire sensing something is wrong but not knowing precisely what. It gives the antagonists a real sense of menace that they have abilities like this to counter the supernatural powers of Steel, Sapphire and Lead, and conveys that Rob is in real danger.

The episode ends abruptly, with Lead knocking down the door to the basement. Not a cliffhanger at all, but it does leave us with the impression that the goodys are finally taking some action.

In part 6, we feel that the goodys earn their victory even if we can't understand exactly what they did. This is conveyed by a combination of the acting powers of the leads - they sell the ending with the same brilliance that they sold each of the earlier installments - and the use of pacing, moving from slow when ratcheting up the tension to sudden short bursts of action at crucial moments. We have to give credit to the director for this. The use of Helen's slow nursery rhyme leading up to the climactic moment is a triumph of building suspense.

The minimal SFX are used to great effect here, particularly the fake mother's eyes as the trap is sprung on Rob - this is one of the scariest scenes in the whole story and is a favourite of both Scary Cat and Starcat (even though Starcat got scared by it).

Scary face!

Assignment One concludes as it began, with the focus on Rob, but when Sapphire, Steel and Lead appear to Rob on the stairs, their presence indicates that it will be Sapphire and Steel that return next time, not him.