young boy doing his homework in a downstairs room is terrified when his parents disappear while reading his younger sister a nursery rhyme. He calls the police, but before they can show up, another pair of visitors show up at his front door: a beautiful woman named Sapphire (Lumley) and a cold, stern man named Steel (McCallum). They have been drawn to the house by a disturbance in the fabric of time.
It soon turns out that Sapphire and Steel are two agents of a sort of chronological police force dispatched to certain crisis points that threaten the space-time continuum. They are not human, and their agenda has more to do with repairing any incipient damage than it does with protecting innocents caught up in such phenomena. Sapphire sometimes manages to show the humans around her a little sympathy, but Steel has little patience for them, or for the assistance of his more congenial agents, Lead and Silver, who have a way of showing up whenever the eponymous pair prove unequal to the task of unravelling the local paradoxes.
Fortunately for the budget's bottom line, the crises always oblige our heroes to hang around small, cramped sets. Only one arc, which takes place on a rooftop, features extended location filming. (That one juxtaposes the troubles of a pair of time travelers from the future, living inside an invisible capsule conveniently built to resemble a contemporary urban flat, and the increasing frustration felt by Steel, as he inches along unseen walls trying to find his way in so he can talk to them. This goes on for, literally, hours.)
Beyond that, the stories are confined to places like the interior of a large coastal home, an abandoned railway station and a roadside cafe and gas station. In each of the six arcs, Sapphire and Steel spend episode after episode mulling over the nature of the various phenomena, as trapped in their circumstances as any human beings who happen to be trapped in there with them. The tone is always claustrophobic. The pace is always glacial, up to the final arc, which culminates in a twist that might have been intended as a cliffhanger, if further episodes were planned, but, as it stands, leaves the heroes in a hellish limbo, with no chance of escape.
Frankly, we know how they feel
The creators of Sapphire and Steel deserve credit for driving their show with claustrophobic, intelligent and literate situations. The major problem, and I say this in full knowledge of the dedicated cult audience that loves every minute of this thing and will no doubt come after me for uttering such heresies, is that the two main characters are, themselves, woefully dull. This is no real slight against Lumley and McCallum, whose inherent charisma renders them interesting even when they're standing still, doing nothing. They're both enjoyable indeed when they play characters with more depth than sheets of paper. But the characters they play here are both one-note.
McCallum's Steel reacts to everything with a determination that borders on pique, and in moments of extreme stress sometimes ventures into the uncharted realm called annoyance. Lumley's Sapphire enjoys a wider range of emotion, in that she actually seems to enjoy the company of Lead and Silver, and often smiles knowingly at her partner's constipated ways. But that's it. They're the Gannon and Friday of the time-traveling set, all business, no angst, a certain comfortable familiarity between them, a certain sense that they care about one another and that Steel, in particular, would express deeper feelings if he weren't such a prat, but that's it. Granted that this was intended to emphasize their alien nature, it still renders them both little more than animated mannequins. It's difficult to care about 15 hours of nearly static dramatics when the characters at the center are such incredible voids. (Which is, incidentally, one reason why it's such a relief when their fellow agents Lead and Silver show up: They're not much deeper, but at least they're permitted to show their own level of charm, amping the energy considerably.)
The final story arc, "Assignment VI: The Trap," offers its own odd frustrations. All the Sapphire and Steel adventures oblige the characters to amble back and forth among an increasingly claustrophobic collection of sets, piecing together clues at a slow crawl until, two to three hours of methodical frustration later, they finally resolve the crisis in a less-than-exciting climax. But even at only one hour and 48 minutes (marking a tie with "Assignment IV" for shortest running time), the extended nature of the crisis makes no dramatic sense. In this tale, Sapphire, Steel and Silver find themselves trapped at a diner with a number of people who seem to have been transported there from various 20th-century time periods. They stride from static set to static set, questioning everybody again and again, running their little experiments and gradually coming to the conclusion that this crisis is not typical. It gradually turns out that their fellow prisoners are time-traveling enemies who intend to gang up on Sapphire and Steel and banish them to limbo. Which, it turns out, they actually succeed in doing. At the arc's close, which turned out also to be the fadeout of the entire series, our eponymous heroes do find themselves imprisoned, in a timeless void, for what threatens to be eternity.
Avoiding any obvious comments about how that duplicates what they've put the viewers through, their fate remains an interesting twist, but if that was the plan, why do the bad guys spend so much time sitting around with irritated expressions on their faces, and act only as Sapphire and Steel start to figure out what's going on? Just what benefit did they derive from not springing their trap 30 minutes, or an hour, of screen time earlier, when the heroes were still unsuspecting? The only possible answer: that if they acted earlier, the story would be over. (Fans can come up with any number of geekspeak reasons why the baddies had to wait so long, involving chronal energies and the precisely synchronized calibrations of this and that, but it's all B.S.: By any dramatic measure, they strike with the speed of molasses.) Now, "The Trap" may not be the only thriller driven by secret villains who continue to bide their time long after they have any practical reason to do so, just to ensure that the story itself reaches its desired length (indeed, the TV series 24 has had a number of them), but the deliberately paced, claustrophobic format of this series brings the reticence of these particular bad guys into sharp relief and calls attention to the padded nature of the show in general. Because the sad truth is, all of these stories spend at least half their running time on treadmills.
The set includes commentary tracks for all episodes, as well as Lumley and McCallum biographies, press clippings and other materials.
