Sapphire and Steel: Favourite Moments Assignment 3
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 ( Read more... )
I did love this scene. I get the impression that Sapphire and Steel don't necessarily think of humans as more important than animals; earlier in the assignment Sapphire said that if they blew up the building they'd be sacrificing the lives of "97 people and 15 animals" (something like that). It's also not the first time Steel showed empathy with an animal; he seemed pretty concerned about Mr. Tully's cat. :D
I don't think Sapphire and Steel are capable of actually travelling to different time periods. Frankly, I think this is for the best; that way the show manages to avoid all the headache-inducing continuity problems and plot holes that afflict most time travel stories. 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? Unless they don't exist 1500 years in the future, in which case that should be a big red flag for their present selves that something bad is going to happen to them (such as getting trapped in a cafe)?
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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 future has many different possibilities (like Schrodinger's Cat). S&S can only travel along their own timeline, but there were present at past events because of their longevity. So they won't know anything about the future since it hasn't happened for them.
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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.
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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.
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