Sapphire & Steel (TV Series) Assignment Four: Part 1 (1981) User Reviews

Assignment Four: Part 1

[Prismark10 · 7/10 · 5 October 2020]

Well picture this. This is the Sapphire & Steel story that many people remember. The one with the faceless man.

It is back to the claustrophobic studio setting. An old antique type shop with bric a brac and with some upstairs flat.

Sapphire and Steel find that time has leaked and so have small children stolen from photographs and they can be glimpsed in the shop.

They also find Liz a modern girl living in the flat but she cannot remember what the new landlord looks like.

It is notable that the children are photographed in sepia. Like they have walked out of a photograph. The appearance of Liz is the only indication that the setting is in the current day.

A spooky and slightly unsettling story. You have umbrellas attacking, both Sapphire and Steel being captured in a photograph. I still remember the image of Steel jumping over the counter when I first watched this back in 1981.

Creepy tale of 'photographs and memories' (a 4 part assignment)

[jamesrupert2014 · 7/10 · 22 March 2022]

The elemental investigative couple find themselves in a building apparently haunted by the spirits of children who have been summoned from old photographs by a featureless entity who is powerful enough to be a real threat to the usually unflappable agents. After the pure sci-fi of assignment 3, this series returns to the show's earlier feel of closed-in supernatural horror with a vague 'rational' underpinning. The villain, in all his/its manifestations, is quite good (you need to be a bit forgiving about the makeup, given the show's budget) and the central premise, the blending of the reality of the present with that of the photographed past, is intriguing. Unfortunately, the end is a bit of a contrived letdown. At four only episodes, this assignment moves along quickly and is generally a good entry in the strange, cryptic quasi-sci-fi-fantasy series.