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

[kievianrus]

I must say I find this assignment's view of the future disturbing, and not just because of the animals! I hate Eldred (in particular) and Rothwyn too. I also hate that they leave their baby unattended for long periods of time in its little bed. Instead of aging thirty years, it could have choked itself to death, and the parents wouldn't notice until its too late.

[sarlania]

It is a particular unpleasant vision of the future, isn't it?

There is just something very repulsive about Eldred and Rothwyn. I feel sorry for the child to have such people as parents.

[kickair8p]

This society sent families on a mission into the past in the smug certainty that it couldn't be dangerous to them! It's not surprising that Eldred and Rothwyn don't realize that the differences in childrearing tech should mean differences in child-rearing practices.

~

[eviltigerlily]

They don't seem to have a name for the baby either. They refer to it only as 'the child'.

[azdak]

Eldred and Rothwyn are really boring. I do find the grown-up baby disturbing, though.

Steel's speech at the end about the animals just makes me cringe. It's incoherent, for one thing, and it seems out of character for Steel that he should bother to lecture humans, let alone get all impassioned about it (and if sacrificing Tully is morally dubious, isn't letting a crazed killing machine loose on the future also a questionable act?)

I don't think there's any indication anywhere in the series that being time agents means they can travel in time themselves.

[sarlania]

It's incoherent, for one thing, and it seems out of character for Steel that he should bother to lecture humans, let alone get all impassioned about it

Hmmmmm I disagree. We know that despite his seemingly cold exterior, he certainly has a soft spot - and I think even he would be repulsed by what the humans of the future have done. After all, we know that Steel just loves to find fault with the human race.

Or maybe he just likes animals. =)

But as you say, his actions at the end is questionable at best, but since it isn't the first time he's made such a rash judgement, it certainly is within character. What surprises me is that both Sapphire and Silver agreed to it without question

I don't think there's any indication anywhere in the series that being time agents means they can travel in time themselves.

Well, maybe not travel in time in its most fundamental sense - we see that in Assignment 6; they had to use the chess set to travel to the past and back. But we know that they can go into other time periods - the Mary Celeste

[curuchamion]

these authorities who have the power to send their agents into certain time periods, any time period that is experience temporal anomaly, and that would include past, present and future.

I'm not so sure. I haven't seen any indication on the series that the elementals exist outside of time when they're not on assignment. All references to "past", "present", and "future" that I've seen so far (still need to watch Assignments 1 and 5) seem to be absolute rather than relative.

We're used to thinking of Time in a Doctor Who sort of way - a sea, or a ball of timey wimey stuff, where all past, present and future events already exist and one can bounce around and visit them without usually damaging anything.

I think Sapphire & Steel takes a different view of Time: that the past is a fixed and certain thing, almost unchangeable; that the future is mutable, always in motion; and that one changes to the other at a moving point called "the present", which neither the elementals nor anyone else can safely ignore. Sapphire can pull that point

[sarlania]

That definitely makes sense, and fits with Sapphire's description of TIME in Assignment One as a corridor and not how the Doctor describes it as a "ball" or a clump.

I think Sapphire & Steel takes a different view of Time: that the past is a fixed and certain thing, almost unchangeable; that the future is mutable, always in motion; and that one changes to the other at a moving point called "the present", which neither the elementals nor anyone else can safely ignore.
Like a piece of elastic! And Schrodinger's Cat. =)

[azdak]

But we know that they can go into other time periods - the Mary Celeste case, for example

I always assumed they just lived for a really, really long time - and dealt with various irregularities as they cropped up, rather than being sent back in time to resolve them.

[sarlania]

Now that's an interesting way to look at it, and explains a lot: why they always seem to be perpetually taking cases set in the 80s, for one.

[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.