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truepennyI don't think I'm going to shock anyone by admitting I'm a slavering David McCallum fangirl, nor by admitting that that's the reason I was interested in Sapphire and Steel in the first place.
This entry, however, is not about my slavering David McCallum fangirlness. We can all take that as read. Nor is it about how much I admire Joanna Lumley's acting chops. Nor even about the loveliness of the show's design, which takes its extremely low budget and makes it a virtue by essentially creating stage-plays for television.* I want to talk instead about the missing narratives of Sapphire and Steel.
Both Series 1, "Escape Through a Crack in Time," and Series 2, "The Railway Station," exhibit the phenomenon I've just labeled as "missing narrative." Let's see if I can explain what that is.
In "ETaCiT," the ostensible narrative is about how the Forces of Evil (never mind the skiffy handwaving, okay?) have stolen the parents of Rob and Helen Jardine using nursery rhymes and some rather jumbled history as their weapons. Sapphire and Steel (interdimensional enforcement agents, and no they're not human; Steel mostly can't even be bothered to pass) appear at the incredibly isolated Jardine house to put things right. And do, despite the sometimes willful and sometimes unwitting opposition of Rob and Helen themselves. Nothing too radical there.
But there's another story the series is almost telling. The beginning of the first episode has Rob (who's about 12) alone in the kitchen doing some sort of homework (my thematic spider sense tells me it's history) with approximately 5 BILLION clocks, all of them ticking. (We learn later that Rob's father repairs clocks as a hobby, and apparently never gives any of them away, either.) There is no other sound, just the ticking of the clocks. We get a slow pan away from Rob, alone and working in updated Dickensian fashion, through the house (more clocks), up the stairs, and more stairs (and more clocks), to the room at the top of the house which is Helen's bedroom. Helen is much younger than Rob (4, maybe?), and both her parents are in the bedroom with her, reading her nursery rhymes. There's a lot of laughter, and Helen is bouncing on the bed, and the eternal plea of, "Just one more, Mummy!" is indulgently acceded to.
Which, of course, is what causes the disaster, because Helen's second "just one more" is the rhyme that the F. of E. can use.
All the clocks stop, and when Rob, in a state of increasing anxiety, finally makes his way up to Helen's room, he finds her alone. The plot has started.
At the end, when Rob's parents are restored, they are restored to the moment before they were snatched in the first place. Rob's back in the kitchen, doing his homework. He races up to Helen's room (being stopped along the way so that Sapphire and Steel can return Helen's teddy bear Rebecca), overjoyed at this reunion with his parents ...
And it could not be clearer that Rob is not welcome in the family made up of his father, his mother, and his sister. He is not invited to join in the recital of rhymes; his parents' dialogue with him consists almost exclusively of why aren't you doing your homework, down in the kitchen where you belong. And it's a good thing he's got an excuse (in the form of Helen's teddy bear), because even that only barely mollifies his mother.
Rob doesn't seem to mind this harsh treatment, accepting his banishment good-naturedly, but it jarred me very strongly, and it made me, in thinking about the series, see a series of gaps where another strand of narrative ought to have been.
We are told that the nursery rhymes and the age of the house are what let the F. of E. in, but it's never very clear how that works. How much clearer and more powerful it would be if the triggers are nursery rhymes and the weight of history, but the cause is Rob's feeling of loneliness and resentment. It would be subconscious, but that would make the story even more convincing, because what Sapphire and Steel would be fighting would be, not these vague and characterless F. of E., but Rob's own conflicted psyche. The jumble of nursery rhymes and history through which the F. of E. work can't be blamed on Helen, because she's too young to have any sense of history at all. But Rob's mother--as we are explicitly told--taught Rob that nursery rhymes reflect pieces of history, and the history that we see, with its emphasis on Cromwell's soldiers and on death (and the very confused notions about the history of the house), is very much the sort of history that a boy of Rob's age might conceptualize. And the story the F. of E. is trying to mobilize deals very persistently with a threat to a "young girl." We may assume (since that's Sapphire's description) that what's meant is a girl of Rob's age, but near the end, trapped by the F. of E., Rob sees Helen in a coffin. (Rob clearly adores Helen, but she's also very frustrating for him, in the way that only a much younger, very spoilt sibling can be.) And Sapphire and Steel themselves, who are structurally thrust into parental roles ... Sapphire takes to it gracefully, and seems genuinely fond of both Helen and Rob. She also treats Rob like a responsible being, which he clearly appreciates. And Steel--titanium bitch that he is--even comes to treat Rob with grudging respect. Which is more than Rob's father does, if the F. of E.'s apparently convincing impersonation of him is anything to go by. So there's a story here about a boy resenting his younger sister, hating his parents, creating a situation in which the parents are gone and the sister is his to protect or abandon as he sees fit. And the surrogate parents who descend are better parents than the ones he had. That's a story about how dangerous resentment is and how powerful the story-telling impulse of the human subconscious can be.
But this story isn't in what the show gives us, which leads to incoherence and confusion if you try to actually figure out what's going on.
I found the problem even more pronounced in "The Railway Station," partly because, whereas "ETaCiT" has an at least nominally happy ending, "TRS" has a deliberately nasty, bleak ending which--if one's suspension of disbelief is going to be successful--depends on the belief that the sacrifice of Tully will actually stop the Darkness. And, frankly, the show as written gives us no reason to believe this, no reason to think that Steel hasn't simply, cruelly, and arbitrarily made things worse, except that that's the end and there's no evident awareness that there is some lingering irony in the closural gestures. We're supposed to believe, but we are given no reason to do so.
In other words, whereas "ETaCiT" is merely kind of rocky on its pins, "TRS" is actively and painfully broken.
And what's really frustrating about it is that the fix would be SO EASY. All the elements are already there.
Just as the missing narrative in "ETaCiT" ought to focus on Rob Jardine, the only human among the protagonists (I'm not counting Helen as a protagonist), so the missing narrative in "TRS" ought to focus on George Tully, the lonely middle-aged self-appointed psychic investigator. There are hints, which the show NEVER FREAKING USES, that Tully more or less created the manifestations in the railway station by looking for them, that he's maintaining them and encouraging them ("It's Tully!" Steel shouts at one point, as if he'd come to this same realization, but it's never followed up); there could be, although there aren't, hints at the end that the Darkness was spawned from Tully's own resentment--and therefore it would make SENSE to give Tully to the Darkness, because it would be eating itself and therefore nullified, whereas the way things stands, it kind of looks like Steel has abrogated his own mission: surely the resentment of Time (which is what he promises the Darkness if it takes Tully five years before his death is supposed to occur) is far more dangerous and destabilizing than the resentment of wartime ghosts, no matter how many of them there are? This solution would also link the structural end--throwing Tully to the darkness--with the resolution of the emtional arc--the resentful ghosts' decision to go back to being properly dead instead of believing the Darkness's lies. And it would explain why the Darkness tells Tully he can leave, and then doesn't let him go. Because it needs him.
There's a thematic hole in the story, a missing axis. It's the same hole in "ETaCiT," the question of: Why is this human being on the site of this manifestation of evil?
The answers are there, but the show never picks them up, never wields them. And therefore it comes up on the edge of brilliance, but does not fall over.
---
*By which I mean there are three or four principal actors, the special effects are almost all done with light and sound (and some crazy contacts for Lumley), and the episodes feel like stage-plays. The action happens far more through the dialogue than any other medium.
This entry, however, is not about my slavering David McCallum fangirlness. We can all take that as read. Nor is it about how much I admire Joanna Lumley's acting chops. Nor even about the loveliness of the show's design, which takes its extremely low budget and makes it a virtue by essentially creating stage-plays for television.* I want to talk instead about the missing narratives of Sapphire and Steel.
Both Series 1, "Escape Through a Crack in Time," and Series 2, "The Railway Station," exhibit the phenomenon I've just labeled as "missing narrative." Let's see if I can explain what that is.
In "ETaCiT," the ostensible narrative is about how the Forces of Evil (never mind the skiffy handwaving, okay?) have stolen the parents of Rob and Helen Jardine using nursery rhymes and some rather jumbled history as their weapons. Sapphire and Steel (interdimensional enforcement agents, and no they're not human; Steel mostly can't even be bothered to pass) appear at the incredibly isolated Jardine house to put things right. And do, despite the sometimes willful and sometimes unwitting opposition of Rob and Helen themselves. Nothing too radical there.
But there's another story the series is almost telling. The beginning of the first episode has Rob (who's about 12) alone in the kitchen doing some sort of homework (my thematic spider sense tells me it's history) with approximately 5 BILLION clocks, all of them ticking. (We learn later that Rob's father repairs clocks as a hobby, and apparently never gives any of them away, either.) There is no other sound, just the ticking of the clocks. We get a slow pan away from Rob, alone and working in updated Dickensian fashion, through the house (more clocks), up the stairs, and more stairs (and more clocks), to the room at the top of the house which is Helen's bedroom. Helen is much younger than Rob (4, maybe?), and both her parents are in the bedroom with her, reading her nursery rhymes. There's a lot of laughter, and Helen is bouncing on the bed, and the eternal plea of, "Just one more, Mummy!" is indulgently acceded to.
Which, of course, is what causes the disaster, because Helen's second "just one more" is the rhyme that the F. of E. can use.
All the clocks stop, and when Rob, in a state of increasing anxiety, finally makes his way up to Helen's room, he finds her alone. The plot has started.
At the end, when Rob's parents are restored, they are restored to the moment before they were snatched in the first place. Rob's back in the kitchen, doing his homework. He races up to Helen's room (being stopped along the way so that Sapphire and Steel can return Helen's teddy bear Rebecca), overjoyed at this reunion with his parents ...
And it could not be clearer that Rob is not welcome in the family made up of his father, his mother, and his sister. He is not invited to join in the recital of rhymes; his parents' dialogue with him consists almost exclusively of why aren't you doing your homework, down in the kitchen where you belong. And it's a good thing he's got an excuse (in the form of Helen's teddy bear), because even that only barely mollifies his mother.
Rob doesn't seem to mind this harsh treatment, accepting his banishment good-naturedly, but it jarred me very strongly, and it made me, in thinking about the series, see a series of gaps where another strand of narrative ought to have been.
We are told that the nursery rhymes and the age of the house are what let the F. of E. in, but it's never very clear how that works. How much clearer and more powerful it would be if the triggers are nursery rhymes and the weight of history, but the cause is Rob's feeling of loneliness and resentment. It would be subconscious, but that would make the story even more convincing, because what Sapphire and Steel would be fighting would be, not these vague and characterless F. of E., but Rob's own conflicted psyche. The jumble of nursery rhymes and history through which the F. of E. work can't be blamed on Helen, because she's too young to have any sense of history at all. But Rob's mother--as we are explicitly told--taught Rob that nursery rhymes reflect pieces of history, and the history that we see, with its emphasis on Cromwell's soldiers and on death (and the very confused notions about the history of the house), is very much the sort of history that a boy of Rob's age might conceptualize. And the story the F. of E. is trying to mobilize deals very persistently with a threat to a "young girl." We may assume (since that's Sapphire's description) that what's meant is a girl of Rob's age, but near the end, trapped by the F. of E., Rob sees Helen in a coffin. (Rob clearly adores Helen, but she's also very frustrating for him, in the way that only a much younger, very spoilt sibling can be.) And Sapphire and Steel themselves, who are structurally thrust into parental roles ... Sapphire takes to it gracefully, and seems genuinely fond of both Helen and Rob. She also treats Rob like a responsible being, which he clearly appreciates. And Steel--titanium bitch that he is--even comes to treat Rob with grudging respect. Which is more than Rob's father does, if the F. of E.'s apparently convincing impersonation of him is anything to go by. So there's a story here about a boy resenting his younger sister, hating his parents, creating a situation in which the parents are gone and the sister is his to protect or abandon as he sees fit. And the surrogate parents who descend are better parents than the ones he had. That's a story about how dangerous resentment is and how powerful the story-telling impulse of the human subconscious can be.
But this story isn't in what the show gives us, which leads to incoherence and confusion if you try to actually figure out what's going on.
I found the problem even more pronounced in "The Railway Station," partly because, whereas "ETaCiT" has an at least nominally happy ending, "TRS" has a deliberately nasty, bleak ending which--if one's suspension of disbelief is going to be successful--depends on the belief that the sacrifice of Tully will actually stop the Darkness. And, frankly, the show as written gives us no reason to believe this, no reason to think that Steel hasn't simply, cruelly, and arbitrarily made things worse, except that that's the end and there's no evident awareness that there is some lingering irony in the closural gestures. We're supposed to believe, but we are given no reason to do so.
In other words, whereas "ETaCiT" is merely kind of rocky on its pins, "TRS" is actively and painfully broken.
And what's really frustrating about it is that the fix would be SO EASY. All the elements are already there.
Just as the missing narrative in "ETaCiT" ought to focus on Rob Jardine, the only human among the protagonists (I'm not counting Helen as a protagonist), so the missing narrative in "TRS" ought to focus on George Tully, the lonely middle-aged self-appointed psychic investigator. There are hints, which the show NEVER FREAKING USES, that Tully more or less created the manifestations in the railway station by looking for them, that he's maintaining them and encouraging them ("It's Tully!" Steel shouts at one point, as if he'd come to this same realization, but it's never followed up); there could be, although there aren't, hints at the end that the Darkness was spawned from Tully's own resentment--and therefore it would make SENSE to give Tully to the Darkness, because it would be eating itself and therefore nullified, whereas the way things stands, it kind of looks like Steel has abrogated his own mission: surely the resentment of Time (which is what he promises the Darkness if it takes Tully five years before his death is supposed to occur) is far more dangerous and destabilizing than the resentment of wartime ghosts, no matter how many of them there are? This solution would also link the structural end--throwing Tully to the darkness--with the resolution of the emtional arc--the resentful ghosts' decision to go back to being properly dead instead of believing the Darkness's lies. And it would explain why the Darkness tells Tully he can leave, and then doesn't let him go. Because it needs him.
There's a thematic hole in the story, a missing axis. It's the same hole in "ETaCiT," the question of: Why is this human being on the site of this manifestation of evil?
The answers are there, but the show never picks them up, never wields them. And therefore it comes up on the edge of brilliance, but does not fall over.
---
*By which I mean there are three or four principal actors, the special effects are almost all done with light and sound (and some crazy contacts for Lumley), and the episodes feel like stage-plays. The action happens far more through the dialogue than any other medium.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 07:50 pm (UTC)There is no Evil in Saphire and Steel. It is Time trying to break through, and Time is indifferent, which is why the desires of Rob and George are utterly irrelevant and why Steel can choose (with Saphire's acquiescence remember) to pay Time a danegelt.
A pyschological twist such as you propose would give the stories meaning, but their very effectiveness, their devastating nature is rooted in the essential meaningless of human desire and anguish in a very cold universe. As a kid I found them terrifying because they told me that *i didn't matter*.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 08:29 pm (UTC)That's my complaint--insofar as it is a complaint, rather than a meditation on building thematic narratives: that the story, as it is given to us, does not make sense. We are given no reason why the sacrifice of Tully should work, why it effects any kind of closure on the events at the railway station. I hypothesized a psychological reason, but I don't necessarily "want" one.
I don't, in other words, object to Steel sacrificing Tully. I object to him doing it for no reason. And it isn't just that there's no reason from Rob or Tully's point of view. We aren't in their point of view exclusively. We get Steel's point of view, and Sapphire's. If it's supposed to be that Steel's reasons are beyond the comprehension of mere mortal viewers that (a.) is first of all a gross and blatant handwave in a television series written by an equally mere collection of mortals, and (b.) isn't handled very well.
You may still think I'm wrong, and that's fine. But don't assume my wrongness is based on solipsistic emotionalism.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 09:45 pm (UTC)I always found the way that 'The Railway Station' played out was deeply unsatisfying (although poignant and interestingly non-cliche) but a lot of which I blamed on the fact that the first screening of the series - which I and my friends were avidly and terrifiedly watching - was interrupted for WEEKS! by the ITV strike. After the dispute was over they rescreened the first two epoisdoes I think and then hoped ahead to where they had left off. On later rewatching of other Sapphire and Steel arcs leads me to believe that that might not have been the only reason I felt that I was missing something.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 06:18 am (UTC)I think this is clearest in what may be the last episode (mine are in work) with the people in an apartment powered by meat.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 04:07 pm (UTC)I've clearly failed to explain myself properly, and I'm not sure I have the energy to try again. But I'm not talking about psychological flaws--because I think actually that the psychology of the characters, Sapphire and Steel as much as Rob or Tully or those poor ghosts, is extremely well drawn and convincing. I'm not complaining that the psychology of the series doesn't work. (It makes perfect sense to me that Steel would sacrifice Tully in perfectly cold blood and feel not a shred of remorse, just as it makes sense to me that Sapphire would object, and regret deeply, but not stop him, either.) I'm saying that structurally, the narratives are flawed, and furthermore, that there are these odd artifacts scattered through the episodes that can be put together into a third narrative strand, and that doing so creates a story that makes (to me) structural sense.
I can build a different third narrative strand for "The Railway Station," in which Tully truly doesn't matter, that it's just his bad fortune to be in view when Steel needs a victim. (And please notice, I still think that strand has to be built, that the series, whatever its intentions, has not managed to put that reading into the story. It may be that other people see that strand with perfect clarity as the story stands. But I don't. Personal reaction.) But the thing I was trying to talk about was the ways in which that's not the story the series is telling, these strange aborted gestures toward a different story.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 04:12 pm (UTC)And I suspect that's exactly what it is in this case. They feel drafty.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 11:49 pm (UTC)You are completely right, though, about the idea of humans being unimportant in the great scheme of things- it's almost a little Lovecraftian in its outlook, and making the psychologies of the human characters more important would, to be honest, rid it of the stream-of-consciousness sense of threat and confusion that makes the series so gloriously befuddling. The psychological reading of Adventure One is very interesting (I always thought it was interesting the way the surrogate family formed by Sapphire, Steel Rob and Helen is semi-reflected by the 'family' of the pieces of light), but I think it is seeing patterns that aren't actually there (It doesn't explain why, directly after seeing his sister in a coffin, Rob immediately seems to perceive this as a clue to what really happenned in the house, but never gets to explain what he means). I think that P.J. Hammond was making up a lot of Sapphire and Steel as he went along, and it's that which gives it its creepy, unconscious power. The fact that the stories don't have fully satisfying endings, that they leave massive questions unanswered, means that the stories have a dream-like sense that they wouldn't have if everything was tidily explained. I can't help feeling that there's a serious abscence of family-aimed drama that is deliberately weird, and doesn't make sense, and forces you to try and make your own interpretation.
The idea of the human characters being irrelevant in the great scheme is great- and I find it interesting to look at it versus the new series of Doctor Who (especially considering how heavily New Who is hi-jacking the basic format of Sapphire and Steel- most particularly in the 'Fear Her' episode), where the ordinary humans are celebrated for their wonderfulness and uniqueness at the expense of virtually everything else.
(Or maybe that's just me getting annoyed...)
Ilya!
Date: 2006-09-13 08:08 pm (UTC)I was just always saying, "Ilya!"
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 12:38 am (UTC)The handwaving is a little bit more than handwaving Forces of Eviltm because it explains that you have Time... which is a million miles big where a human's life is an inch so not particularly interested in individual humans... and it steals things and breaks through etc. You also have the creatures that can traverse the big dangerous river of time... ones that come from the beginning and the end of Time and want out into the 'present' (whatever present they can get into). And then you have whatever sends S&S around, and S&S themselves -- who can manipulate time in the present.
There's also a coming-of-age story in that Rob is facing up to time as well... the way everyone has to face up to time stealing our lives. He's been sent down from reading nursery rhymes in Helen's room to get on with his homework (and in the UK at that time most kids only started having serious homework in secondary school... or as they were approaching their teens)... his childhood is coming to an end and his relationship with his parents will be changing. When S&S arrive they call Helen 'The Child' but treat Rob as an adult (Sapphire even flirts with him a fair bit). Helen turns immediately to obeying the replacement authority figures, most of Rob's problems come from obeying his parents (or the things pretending to be his parents) and he expects S&S to forgive that obedience.
But Rob's mother--as we are explicitly told--taught Rob that nursery rhymes reflect pieces of history, Only it's *not*-Rob's-mother says that, in response to Rob saying he's too old for nursery rhymes... and when the seductive voice changes tack to his mother having always said they were bits of history Rob says 'No' and to Sapphire he later says about it sounding like his mother but getting things wrong.
With Tully, of course, it isn't that the ghosts are wartime ghosts but that they died when they shouldn't have (for certain values of shouldn't) and the creature concerned feeds on that. It also manipulates time to do so which makes it a problem (see Adventure Three for a 'thing which isn't evil but needs to be stopped'). IIRC The problem is solved by giving it Tully because having the darkness feed on Time's resentment means it isn't manipulating time in the present anymore.
Of course, I like writing stories about non-human characters so a series of stories that centre on non-human characters engaged in a cold war with other non-human forces, where the humans are game tokens suits me fine. Really that was the thing about S&S... the humans are like Pakistani hill tribesmen during the Cold War... mostly irrelevant to the players, sometimes inconvenient, and now and then used as pawns and squabbled over.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 11:33 am (UTC)And yeah, I think the narratives are broken. They have a meandery first-draft feel, where you can pick out what the writer meant to do, but it's incompletely successful. (I have this problem with The Prisoner, too; it's trying so hard to be weird that it doesn't pull off an arc, even a thematic arc. But saying that is REALLY pointing out that the Emperor, with the clothes, not so much.)
I tend to watch the show with the same filters installed by which I watch The Man From UNCLE, because I'm not, let's be honest, watching it for the storytelling; I'm watching it for the characterization(*). And because it's quite ambitious in some ways, I can forgive it its failures.
Which is not to say that it does not have any. *g*
(*)
Date: 2006-09-14 11:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 08:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 06:35 pm (UTC)I had almost this exact reaction to The Night of the Hunter (1955). Without spoilers: there seemed to be a relationship between two of the characters that was thematically resonant, mythically balanced, and perfectly obvious to me and the friend with whom I watched the film—except that, in the end, it didn't exist. We'd assumed it. And we were both a little nonplussed, because the film made so much more sense with that assumption in place; it wasn't a plot hole, precisely, because the movie's events still held logically together, but it really did feel like there was just a piece missing. And we couldn't figure out why there should be.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-02 02:17 am (UTC)