Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Four- The Man without a Face, Part 4

 "A few cheap tricks to impress the ladies!"

"Well, at least he bothered to impress them..."

And so the serial ends; there are a few fantastical leaps of logic, but the concept makes this appropriate, and it's a satisfactory conclusion. The faceless baddie even gets a final monologue intended to scare us, P.J. Hammond-style, as the evil spirit is trapped in a container until the day it is released. It's episodes like this that remind you that Sapphire & Steel is really horror fairytale fantasy with scientific trappings. It's about exorcists and evil spirits.

The stuff about how Williamson's trickery summoning the spitit makes little sense, but it doesn't have to. It works, odd though it is in 2021 to see such a focus on analogue photography. The whole episode drips with atmosphere and dread, yet there's time for a heartbreaking couple of lines from Liz where she realises her lot in life will never improve. 

This is the best conclusion so far, and easily the best serial. Let's hope the high standards continue.

Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Four- The Man without a Face, Part 3

 "Perhaps you could tell them that. When you join them..."

This third episode may echo earlier stories, very much indicating that P.J. Hammond is a writer who ery much likes his favourite tropes. The old-fashioned rhymes made to feel creepy. The prospect of being trapped in an image. Yet it all feels fresh, and this episode adds a lot of tension in advance of the conclusion.

A surprising amount happens here. The faceless man has a civil but creepily threatening parley with Sapphire and Steel, toying with them as a cat toys with a spider. We learn that Liz's old landlord, as well as her friend Ruth, have been trapped in a photograph from the 1890s. And Liz finally gets to understand the true nature of those creepy children. We learn a bit more, if nothing concrete, about what is going on. And it'sll rather nostalgic to see scares that reflect the anxieties of pre-digital technology.

This is superb, and the cliffhanger- the faceless man sets fire to a photo with two people trapped in it, one of them conscious- is uniquely horrifying.

Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Four- The Man without a Face, Part 2

 "It's like a cupboard that's been shut for two hundred years..."

Second episodes, by their very nature, are unlikely to be as crammed with awesome ideas as first episodes. It is to be expected. Yet the amount of creativity here is impressive. The faceless man is able to make a face appear where needed. And, of course, we begin to understand the nature of the phenomenon after Sapphire turns back time a bit: "I can only borrow time", she says. "I can't keep it."

Brilliantly, the suggesrion is that something got into the very first photograph in the 1820s and is somewhere within every photograph- either partly seen or completely hidden. This is an ingenious and very P.J. Hammond concept.

What isn't very P.J. Hammond at all is a character like Liz, very demotic, earthy and normal and a nice contrast in a very conceptual series like this. 

So far this is holding my attention and enthralling me, and we are already halfway through.

Sapphire & Steel: Assignment Four- The Man without a Face, Part 1

 "Would you like to play with these children? Shall I bring them?"

Wow. I've criticised Sapphire & Steel in the past for its glacial and plodding pace, which goes way beyond the generally slower pace of television drama circa 1980 into some very poor sttucturing. Yet the ideas have always been awesome to the point of genius, and it's clear that the programme could have been great if P.J. Hammond as the ideas man had had an experienced writer as a collaborator- a Gerry Davis to his Kit Pedler, if you will. 

That said, it must be said that this episode can't be faulted on pace, although perhaps first episodes generally don't, precisely because of their place in the narrative. I know that Hammond, like Steven Moffat, has his favoured tropes- and both Assignment One and, indeed, Hammond-penned episodes of Torchwood have shown his fascination woth individuals within images coming to life. Yet the opening teaser of Edwardian(?) children stealing other children from old photograths to play with is eerily effective, however much the nursery rhyme treads old ground.

The cool stuff then keeps coming thick and fast. An old pawn shop is full of memories, which Steel calls "triggers". Time breaking through again. A distinction between "specialists" and "operatives" like Steel (and implicitly Sapphire, with "specialists" being the likes of Silver?) and some amusingly banal-sounding workplace whingeing.

And then, suddenly, we get a real person, a young woman, who speaks of ghosts, a missing friend and a mysterious new landlord. And then we see- he's the pied piper for all these kids. And his face is just blank.

This is amazing. More please. And please, please, please stay this good.