Sapphire & Steel - Assignment Three [TV] (1981)
Directed by Shaun O'Riordan

Film Review

Sapphire and Steel's third assignment (first broadcast on ITV in January 1981) moves away from the shadowy, claustrophobic ghost-infested interiors of their first two adventures and lands in the seemingly more mundane and familiar setting of a modern apartment block.  It's a dull setting for what is ultimately the dullest of the time-fixing duo's six stories, and the fact that is dragged out to six episodes and is let down by some laughably bad special effects merely accentuates its weaknesses on the design and writing fronts.  As a tightly scripted four-parter, Assignment Three would have worked far better, and this would have had the added bonus of freeing up two more episodes for the next, far better, story in the series.

It's not all bad, however.  For one thing, this is the adventure that marks the first appearance of Silver, the mischievous 'Specialist' whose special skills include melting metal in his bare hands, changing one object into another and aggravating all and sundry with his congenital smugness.  Silver's presence brings an interesting new dynamic to the relationship of the principals, with an unmistakable heightening of the sexual tension caused by some not-so-subtle allusions to an earlier relationship between Sapphire and Silver.  If Steel was brusque and irritable in his first two assignments, here he is an absolute sourpuss, bullying everything in sight apart from his own shadow.  With Steel playing the sulky teenager, vandalising elevator cables and such like to help relieve his pent-up aggression, you could easily forgive Sapphire (looking more exotic than ever) if she went off with Silver and left him to sort things out by his own surly self.  Precious thanks she gets for sticking around and dealing with the latest time-threatening entity.

The well-lit contemporary setting makes it harder for director Shaun O'Riordan to instil the same degree of menace into these six episodes as he had done, so magnificently, on the previous fourteen, but some imaginative camerawork takes him most of the way there.  The script makes even less sense than those of the previous two stories and seems to be riddled with internal inconsistencies.  (What is the point of a sociological survey if the participants are not able to interact with the world around them, or even eat the food of the period?)  There are, however, plenty of original concepts to mull over, some of which are genuinely freaky.  The idea that the human race will, at some time in the future, dispense with all other animal life is chillingly plausible, as is the possibility that 'animal parts' will be grown for use as components for bio-mechanical machines. Assignment Three takes a while (three episodes at least) to get into its stride but when it does finally get moving the viewer's patience is eventually rewarded.  The plot may give you the mother of all migraines if you try to unravel it but overall it's another entertaining excursion into the bafflingly weird, with plenty of cheap thrills and deadpan humour along the way.

Film Synopsis

In a typical urban apartment in the present day a couple are leading what seems to be a perfectly normal urban family life.  They are in fact participants in a sociological survey who have travelled back from the future to the 1980s via a time capsule.  The woman, Rothwyn, becomes concerned when she is unable to establish contact with similar capsules sited at two other locations.  The man, Eldred, assures her that there is no threat either to themselves or their baby son, provided they remain inside the capsule.  Sapphire and Steel conclude otherwise when they land on the roof of the apartment block, having detected dangerous temporal disturbances in the area.  They trace a powerful time source to the invisible time capsule on the roof but are unable to gain access to it.  Silver, an associate of theirs, appears and sets about finding a way into the capsule.  Just as he succeeds, Sapphire is whisked away and ends up in one of the other capsules, to find that its occupants are all dead...