azdak

I've been ill for the past couple of days - genuinely ill, with throwing up and lying stricken in bed and everything! - which would normally mean that I got a good chunk of reading done. However, now that we are firmly in the Age of the Internet, I curled up with the laptop instead, and discovered that some kind soul has put the entirety of Sapphire and Steel up on youtube. Sapphire and Steel is ideal for watching when one is ill. It's slow-moving and spooky and gives you lots to think about, and the general weirdness is greatly enhanced by a slight temperature. I liked Assignments 1 and 2 the best, partly because I find old nursery rhymes and the Great War totally fascinating in their own right, so any spooky story spun around those themes automatically has my attention; and partly because they didn't seem to suffer quite so much from what you might call "delaying tactics" as the later Assignments (Assignment 3, about the travellers from the future who are unkind to animals - oh noes! - is just plain embarrassing, both in terms of truly awful special effects and a truly awful morally-muddled rant about scientific experimentation on animals. This would have been bad enough whoever delivered it, but since it was given to Steel, who we have just seen blatantly ignoring the emotional needs of Mr Tully's cat in the preceding Assignment, I can also declare it OOC.)

I thought I detected a sub-text to Assignment 2 (no, not that kind of sub-text. This is me. Get your heads out of the gutter), which I shall thoughtfully place behind a cut, in case any of you feel inspired to rush over to youtube and get yourself a dose of S&S '70s skiffy strangeness.



The story, powerful though it is, with all those grim deaths, doesn't quite make sense. Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Sapphire and Steel, so it's not supposed to make sense. But even so, it doesn't. The problem is that the Darkness, judging by Steel's final piece of exposition to Sam Pierce, is not actually that much of a threat to anyone but the ghosts. I thought, given the way the airman almost forced Steel to share his death, that the Darkness might be giving the ghosts power to go out and take revenge for the way they died by forcing those deaths on random citizens, but it turns out that it's just planning to keep them there in an endless temporal loop, enjoying their resentment. Sounds to me as if you could just leave them alone to get on with it, without doing too much damage to the fabric of space/time (though I concede it's not impossible, ever since the submarine scene, that Steel has developed some pity for the ghosts and just wants to free them from the trap, whatever the cost). But giving the Darkness Tully seems like a really stupid idea, since this not only increases the Darkness's power, it also creates a temporal anomaly (Tully isn't supposed to die for another 5 years), and pisses off Time and Things in High Places (I don't imagine Steel's immediate line manager was all that thrilled with his solution, either. I can just see the mission report...). It only really makes sense to pay such a high price for such low returns if Tully is actually responsible for the problem in the first place; in other words, if destroying Tully, not just some random human who happens to conveniently be to hand for sacrificial purposes, is the only way to defeat the Darkness.

The text does in fact hold quite a few hints to this effect (quite aside from the otherwise inexplicable moment when Steel comes under machine gun fire ánd shouts "It's Tully!" And then proceeds, in a classic S&S delaying tactic, to do absolutely nothing about this insight). For one thing, Tully himself tells us that the ghosts didn't arrive until he did - he picked the old station as a likely sort of place for spectral activity, not because there'd been any sightings there. Then there's the curious fact that the Darkness tells him he can leave, as long he goes on his own, but then stops him just before he gets outside. Why does it change its mind (aside from that being the usual way of juggling fiends, the word of darkness not being worth the paper it's written on etc etc)? Well, Tully's given permission to leave just as the Darkness is about to triumph - Sapphire is trapped between worlds, as a consequence of the botched seance, and Steel is caught on barbed wire, about to relive another death (and we know from his experience with the RAF pilot that going through that death will kill him for real). Yet in the very next scene we see the two of them waking up, entirely unharmed, with no explanation for how it happened - yes, the darkness shunted them 12 days forward in time, but why? Why did it not simply kill them when it could? I suspect the answer is that Tully was the true source of its power, and when he left, or was on the threshold of leaving, the Darkness suddenly found it hadn't got the necessary oomph to kill, and opted for a quick Plan B of putting Tully to sleep, shunting all three of them forward in time, and then pretending it had buggered off, so Tully wouldn't take to his heels in terror as soon as he woke up.

Even the question of why Tully should be a source of power is sort of answered, during the long, distinctly ungripping monologue he delivers to Sapphire while she's unconscious (and, also, of course by his entire character). Tully is a loser. He's always been a loser. Even as a teenager, when other boys had girlfriends and a social life, he cycled round churches making brass rubbings (shades of the RAF pilot, I feel, who was so unpopular he couldn't persuade ANYONE to fly a mission with him, not even teams who were two men short). He has no-one who loves him, no family, just a cat, who is quite happy to be fed by the neighbour. And he feels he's never, ever been useful in his life; he's never been needed. By anyone.

There's your source of resentment, right there. That's what powers the Darkness. And the Darkness, in turn, gives Tully what he wants, a ghostly manifestation.

But that isn't what Tully really wants. Tully wants to be needed, wants it really really badly. His first words to the ghost, the opening lines of this Assignment, are "I want to help you. Let me help you." He bangs on and on about wanting to help the ghosts, about how they're his and Steel should just bugger off (he doesn't tell Sapphire to leave. Indeed, his reactions to Sapphire tell us a lot about what a sad, inadequate little man he is). And in the end, he does manage to help, he does manage to save the ghosts. He has to be half-tricked into it, because like all losers, he's a coward. He can't do it of his own free will, he's too scared for that, but he's the one who can free all the poor, suffering spirits to return to where they should be, to find the peace he wants for them.

I don't know if Steel realises the implications of this. He must know, I think, that Tully is the source of the Darkness's power, and that therefore he isn't really giving it more than it's already got (though you'd think the Darkness would know that as well). But if Tully goes semi-willingly, as he appears to (the ironic parting conversation with Steel about "Are we winning?", plus the little handwave, suggest he isn't entirely clueless) then maybe the self-sacrifice cancels out the resentment. Tully finally got to be a hero, to prove to himself that his life hadn't been entirely useless, to save the spirits he felt so sorry for. Maybe once the Darkness swallowed him, it found there wasn't any resentment left at all.

Of course, that still leaves Time and the Powers That Be, who are likely to be as pissed off as Steel suggested. But in that case that also explains where the time box came from in Assignment 6...