Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

 

Tristan Pendleton

Catherine Pendleton

Pendleton family friend (unnamed)

Sapphire

Steel

Magisfard the Archklayne

Septurin

Time

Judaks

 

Didja Notice?

 

The story opens with brother and sister Tristan and Catherine Pendleton returning home aboard the sea ferry Thor Nilsson from a winter holiday with friends of the family from Gothenberg, Sweden to Tilbury, England. Tilbury is a small seaport town in the county of Essex. The sea ferry Thor Nilsson is fictitious as far as I can tell.

 

On page 1 of the story, the family friend invites the siblings to participate in a game of deck quoits on the ferry. Quoits is a game in which players must toss rings over a distance onto a pin; deck quoits is a variation played on ships.

 

The book of Scandinavian folk legends that Tristan and Catherine are reading is The Forgotten Ones by Angus Allan. This is a fictitious tome, but the author is the writer of the Look-In Sapphire & Steel strips!

 

Tristan refers to what appears to be a pan pipe he bought in Stockholm as a "sheepy pipe"! I've never heard it called that, but the pan pipe was known for being played by shepherds.

 

The time force sweeps Tristan and Catherine into the fairy land of Gronandyl, where they meet the dwarves of Elgisglayde. These appear to be fictitious terms, even in the context of Scandinavian folk legend. Page 3 of the story describes Gronandyl as having once existed where the North Sea now rages, populated by races now only dimly remembered in legend.

 

In this story, Sapphire and Steel arrive on the scene in clothing different from that worn at the start of every other Look-In adventure (the clothes they wore in the first televised adventure, "Escape Through a Crack in Time"). Here, they arrive on the ferry in tracksuits! I guess Sapphire and Steel were taking an occasion for leisure at the time, too!

 

Sapphire implies the children have been taken into the Closed Centuries, hundreds of years that have been erased from mankind's history. Pages 7 and 9 of the story say Gronandyl was a land of dwarves, elves, and wizards, magic and enchantment, sunken during the Dark Ages (which are considered to roughly be the years 400-1000 AD). But primitive human-like slaves called menyuls are seen in this story as if they are something similar to cavemen. During the Dark Ages we know, humans were already long civilized. For these menyuls to be so beast-like, the time would have to be hundreds of thousands of years ago.

 

Somehow, the dwarves of Elgisglayde seem to speak English, as they are easily understood by Tristan and Catherine! Later in the story, even the primitive human-like menyuls speak a basic, growling sort of English!

 

Somehow, Sapphire and Steel already know the names of Tristan and Catherine when they arrive on the ferry.

 

On page 4 of the story, Sapphire somehow knows that the pan pipe left behind on the ferry was found by Tristan in a Stockholm junk shop. I suppose she could have divined where the pipe came from through her power to read the history of objects.

 

Tristan and Catherine are treated kindly by the leader of the dwarves who serves Time until Time is ready for them to serve his dark purposes. Perhaps Time learned a lesson in "The Sorcerer", where the children Jason and Sarah fought back their human captor when they were immediately treated roughly and taken prisoner by Time and the sorcerer in that story. 

 

In this story, the entity of Time appears as a winged, cherubic demon, looking a bit like the character Gollum in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books.

 

On page 5 of the story, Sapphire demonstrates that she is quite proficient at hand-to-hand combat.

 

On page 8 of the story, the enslaved menyuls have a trap door leading to a tunnel and cave under their holding pen. Why would a tunnel be there? Did the menyuls dig it themselves? If so, why haven't they all escaped?

 

Earlier, Sapphire's power to travel back in time through the aura of Tristan's pan pipe is only enough to get her there; Steel was left behind on the ferry in modern time. Then, at the end of the fourth chapter of the story (bottom of page 8), Sapphire gets a telepathic message from Steel that he is about to join her back in time. The "next week" blurb at the bottom of the page even reads, "But how? See next week." Yet, the next chapter simply shows Steel alongside Sapphire without explanation of how he managed to get there!

 

On page 11 of the story, Catherine, still excited with their adventure, exclaims it's like being Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland is an 1865 novel by Lewis Carroll about a girl transported to Wonderland, a hidden, surreal, and semi-mystical world that does not run by the same rules the normal world does.

 

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