Monday 25 January 2021

Sapphire & Steel: Assignment One- Escape Through a Crack in Time, Part 2

 "So nothing's safe."

This is the second episode, not the first, so it has a different job to do. Last episode blew me away with the gloriously weird concept of essentially doing horror with time, and using its relative nature to make it creepy. That's a genius concept.

This episode was never going to have the same effect, developing and exploring these ideas rather than introducing them. The cliffhanger gets resolved with, er, the sacrifice of a doll. The cliffhanger at the end of this one is pretty cool- Goosey Goosey Gander and cool-looking ghosts of the Roundheads the rhyme is about- but it's another version of the same concept.

Similarly, it's reinforced that old things are dangerous- Steel insists on using the oldest room in the house, and is careful not to include any old things. Meanwhile, Sapphire traps an annoying policeman in a time loop while Steel seems to do Jedi mind tricks. Their powers are cool enough to intrigue but the explanation from Sapphire for her time loop- a deliberately vague analogy- carefully limits the scope. We can't have our mysterious protagonists be over-powered.

Not much happens, plot-wise, but that's not important at this stage, where we just want to spend time exploring the concept and these two aloof, mysterious characters. I'm still hooked.

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