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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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Date: 2006-09-13 07:44 pm (UTC)