Sapphire and Steel: Favourite Moments Assignment 3

[sarlania]

Continuing my little picspam this week with Assignment 3, commonly regarded as the "worst" S&S story. I agree with popular opinion, and so it really wasn't difficult at all to find my favourite moment for this story

Comments

[kurozukin_a]

This assignment is actually one of my favorites. :P It's just so weird and different from the others

[sarlania]

This assignment is actually one of my favorites.
That's interesting. I think I might've liked this episode better if those two couples weren't so annoying (and the "animal piece" didn't look so great either). Let's just say that Silver makes it watchable for me and that's enough. =)

It's also not the first time Steel showed empathy with an animal; he seemed pretty concerned about Mr. Tully's cat. :D
Oh yes! Even if he didn't know the meaning behind the naming, he did seem curiously more worried about it than Tully himself. And if you allow me a bit of self-pimping, I wrote a drabble about the conclusion to Assignment Two HERE as part of this multifandom thing I did for Trafalgar Day. =)

What does bug me in this case is that surely Sapphire and Steel or their cohorts in the future should have known about the problem and dealt with it before it went back to affect the past?Maybe I'm thinking to deeply about this, but as others have pointed out, perhaps time in the S&S universe is absolute up to the present. History is fixed, but the

[kurozukin_a]

The present Sapphire and Steel wouldn't know about the future, but because they're long-lived they should still be around in the future in order to handle the problem in that time before Rothwyn and Eldred could come back to cause problems in the 1980s. Wouldn't the present-day Sapphire and Steel wonder "Why didn't our future selves take care of this?" Oh well, one should never try too hard to apply logic to time travel stories. :P

[azdak]

Their future selves don't have a problem to take care of, because their 1970s selves had already fixed it.

[kurozukin_a]

Except they didn't; they only sent the problem back into the future because it didn't belong in the 1980s. Besides, I was thinking more along the lines of future!S+S (or their colleagues assuming they're still trapped in the cafe) preventing people from travelling back in time in the first place.

[azdak]

they only sent the problem back into the future because it didn't belong in the 1980s

I got the impression they didn't regard the murderous rampaging animal parts beastie as their problem - their job is to fix temporal anomalies, not to save humankind from its cruelty and stupidity. The animal parts beastie belonged in the future, so once it had been returned there, along with the humans, S&S's job was over. What it got up to once it had been returend was the humans' problem, not theirs. And since S&S know that the temporal anomaly was fixed in the 1970s, there's no need for them to do the job all over again in the future by preventing the future people from travelling back in time in the first place.

[kurozukin_a]

I got the impression they didn't regard the murderous rampaging animal parts beastie as their problem
Not the vengeful animal thing itself, but didn't they mention something about it being powered by "a crystalized unit of time"? Hence the prematurely aged baby and the weird voice going on about solar time, sidereal time, etc. It's still a temporal problem, they just sent it back to its point of origin.

And since S&S know that the temporal anomaly was fixed in the 1970s, there's no need for them to do the job all over again in the future by preventing the future people from travelling back in time in the first place.
But future!S&S would have known about the anomaly sooner since it originated in their time... not that "sooner" has much meaning in this context... Obviously I've been thinking about this too much.