Hell is Other People

Some days I wonder about the rest of humanity. The other day, while riding the Washington Metro to work, I found myself across the aisle from two women. They talked in an unfamiliar language and I ignored them. Then I heard a familiar throat-clearing sound, the phlegmy sound that one associates with heavy smokers. Surely she wasn't...?

But she did. The woman turned her head to one side and spat on the carpeted floor of the train. Then she blew her nose, wadded up the tissue, and blithely tossed it on the floor.

Although I held my tongue, that was one disgusting step too much for a man standing in the aisle, who politely suggested that depositing one's trash on the floor was socially unacceptable.

I'll have to say this for Metro: in a world increasingly filled with rules, Metro has stuck to six: no eating or drinking, no littering, no listening to music and such without headphones, no pets except service animals, no smoking, and one more I can't recall at the moment. Just six, and the number of people who can't be bothered - usually involving eating, drinking, or littering - is astounding.
Give them this, though: until that day, I never saw another passenger spit inside the train.

Ugh.

Unemployment Benefits, Minimum Wages, and Incentives

President Obama, in calling on Congress to once again pass legislation for an “emergency” extension of unemployment benefits, thinks greater benefits will lead to more jobs. Man, that guy is confused.

The discipline of economics doesn’t agree on much, but it does agree on a few things. Among those: demand curves (generally) slope downward and supply curves (generally) slope upward. A corollary to those two items is the adage that taxing something means people make less of it available and subsidizing something means people make more of it available. In addition, opportunity costs matter. The application to unemployment benefits is straightforward: an extension of benefits - up to 99 weeks, or nearly two years - decreases the incentive to find a new job quickly. This is not because the unemployed are lazy, or not interested in full-time employment, but because the cost of being out of work for an extended period is lower, and therefore people are rationally willing to wait longer to find a job that meets their expectations, rather than take what’s available. At the same time, unemployment insurance is a cost largely borne by companies, so an extension of benefits makes firms less willing to hire.

Writing in National Review Online, Jillian Kay Melchior describes some of the perverse incentives of the laws involving receiving unemployment benefits:

Tired of being broke, I decided to amp up my efforts at freelance writing while I applied for jobs. It would bring in some extra income, and it would let me demonstrate to prospective employers that I had some personal hustle, that those gap months between jobs hadn’t been a total waste.

But unemployment makes freelancing complicated. According to the rules, “each day or part of a day of work will result in a payment of [only] a partial benefit.” If I worked one day, my unemployment payment would be only $303; two days meant only $202.50. If I earned more than $405 in a week, I got nothing. 

That made freelancing costly for me, regardless of how much I wanted to spend my time productively. Say I earned $75 in one day of freelance work. I would then receive $303 in unemployment that week, and my total weekly haul would be $378 — less than the $405 in standard unemployment. In other words, if I couldn’t earn more than $100 in a day, I’d actually be losing money by working.

The unemployment rules also subjected me to a bizarre work schedule, because they stipulate that “you are considered employed on any day when you perform any services — even an hour or less — in self-employment, on a freelance basis, or for someone else.” In other words, taking two days instead of one to do an assignment meant I’d lose an extra hundred bucks. As a result, I tried to pack all my freelance writing and pitching into a single weekday, pulling the sort of late nights I’d once hoped I had left behind in college.

Moreover, the tough penalties made me think twice about sending out pitches. After all, though it might help me find permanent work faster, the unemployment rules defined work as “any activity that brings in or may bring in income at any time” (my emphasis). Sending out pitches could arguably be classified as work, even if an editor turned me down. And all work had to be reported, or I would be behaving fraudulently — which my unemployment packet warned “can lead to severe penalties, including CRIMINAL PROSECUTION and imprisonment” (their emphasis). So if an editor accepted my pitch, but said so in an e-mail sent the next day, was replying to him “work,” and was I risking stiff penalties if I failed to report it?

Another oldie-but-goodie policy that Democrats are trotting out in an election year in an effort to distract from the debacle of the Obamacare rollout (and the slow-moving but more widespread debacle of Obamacare generally) is an increase in the minimum wage. Here, too, is another area of (near-)consensus among economists. As Walter Williams, in “Politics and Minimum Wage,” notes:

There's little debate among academic economists about the effect of minimum wages. University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark has examined more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage. He reports that 85 percent of the studies "find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers." A 1976 American Economic Association survey found that 90 percent of its members agreed that increasing the minimum wage raises unemployment among young and unskilled workers. A 1990 survey reported in the American Economic Review (1992) found that 80 percent of economists agreed with the statement that increases in the minimum wage cause unemployment among the youth and low-skilled. If you're searching for a consensus in a field of study, most of the time you can examine the field's introductory and intermediate college textbooks. Economics textbooks that mention the minimum wage say that it increases unemployment for the least skilled worker. The only significant debate about the minimum wage is the magnitude of its effect. Some studies argue that a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage will cause a 1 percent increase in unemployment, whereas others predict a higher increase.

And the effects of minimum wage policies are not uniformly distributed. Williams again:

Minimum wages have their greatest unemployment impact on the least skilled worker. After all, who's going to pay a worker an hourly wage of $10 if that worker is so unfortunate as to have skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value per hour? Who are these workers? For the most part, they are low-skilled teens or young adults, most of whom are poorly educated blacks and Latinos. The unemployment statistics in our urban areas confirm this prediction, with teen unemployment rates as high as 50 percent.

Of course, as with any policy, there are winners to go along with the losers. People who actually keep minimum wage jobs are better off, but so are "Higher-skilled and union workers” who don’t have to compete as hard with lower-earning employees, as Williams notes. He points out that there is another category of winner:

Among other beneficiaries are manufacturers who produce substitutes for workers. A recent example of this is Wawa's experiment with customers using touch screens as substitutes for counter clerks. A customer at the convenience store selects his order from a touch screen. He takes a printed slip to the cashier to pay for it while it's being filled. I imagine that soon the customer's interaction with the cashier will be eliminated with a swipe of a credit card. Raising the minimum wage and other employment costs speeds up the automation process. I'm old enough to remember attendants at gasoline stations and theater ushers, who are virtually absent today. It's not because today's Americans like to smell gasoline fumes and stumble down the aisles in the dark to find their seat. The minimum wage law has eliminated such jobs.

Finally, Philip Klein in the Washington Examiner, observes: 

To put things in perspective, when Obama wanted to downplay the number of individuals who had received cancellation letters due to his health care law, he portrayed the 5 percent who obtained their health insurance through the individual market as representing a small segment of the population.
In comparison, 1.6 million Americans earned exactly the federal minimum wage in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and another 2 million had wages below that due to certain exemptions. Combined, the 3.6 million earning at or below the minimum wage represented less than 3 percent of working Americans.

Well, anything to distract voters from other problems, even if, like so many Democratic proposals, many of the intended beneficiaries are actually victims.

Review - Veronica Roth's Divergent series

I find myself reading a fair amount of Young Adult fiction recently, only in part to see what the whuppersnappers are looking at these days. "Adult" novels (minds out of the gutter - yes, you in the corner, I'm talking to you - we're discussing mainstream fiction, not erotica*) are fine, and I read more than my share of detective/crime novels. But YA fiction often has a goodly amount of Adventure, often combined with a Message that is direct enough for me to understand. Furthermore, YA novels tend to be mercifully short. Sure, I could tackle Gravity's Rainbow, but at 10 p.m. I'm never really in the mood to wade into that.

Several years ago, I read The Hunger Games, and thought it was a brilliant book in its grim, dystopian future. The sequels lost a little of the first book's luster, as sequels tend to do, but the characters were well-drawn, the pace was quick (some dragging in book two, but it's hard to keep up the action for hundreds of pages at a go), and the story was gripping. Similarly, Philip Pullman's Golden Compass series had two compelling lead characters and a set of incredible adventures, all tied together with a terrific story and a heartbreaking ending that made me nearly forgive his militant anti-religion stance. (Too bad that first movie wasn't very good.) In contrast, while I managed to choke down Twilight, its breathless "Oooh, isn't he so dreamy" heroine and turgid writing dampened my enthusiasm for the rest of the series, and while I did read the next two books I drew the line at the last.

Are Veronica Roth's Divergent books more like The Hunger Games or Twilight? While they share some of the former's strengths, sadly, they also share some of the latter's weaknesses.

The setup is a good one: a community has divided into five factions, each based on one desirable aspect of personality. The Abnegation are selfless, the Dauntless are courageous, the Amity are friendly, the Erudite seek knowledge, and the Candor value honesty. Tris, our heroine, grew up in an Abnegation household but chooses Dauntless as her faction. Most of the first book involves her initiation into the faction, learning how to fight and to engage in reckless stunts for the hell of it. She falls in love with her trainer, Tobias, makes friends and enemies, and is prepared when the inevitable violent conflict with another faction arises. Subsequent books develop the inter-faction conflict and then show us the broader world, with its own set of internal conflicts. Like The Hunger Games, there's a lot of teen-on-teen violence, with the added benefit of teen-on-adult and adult-on-teen violence.

While the basic plot is engaging, the characters are less so. Tris and Tobias spend a lot of time kissing, feeling up one another, feeling conflicted about everything, and having other teen emotions, but not much time considering the situation and trying to think their way through problems. Tris is betrayed by someone close to her and has to find a way to forgive him, and Tobias eventually resolves his issues with his parents, but the two never really grow as characters. Even the plot, which features various conflicts and back-stabbing, has an expeditious resolution that Doctor Who fans might call the Big Red Reset Button.

The trilogy is an engaging read, and the ebook prices I paid were low enough that I felt I received good value. I couldn't help but think that some minor adjustments to the books would have yielded substantial improvements. The way the series has sold, however, I seem to be in the minority.


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* I did download the free sample of Fifty Shades of Grey from iBooks. Sad to say, the sample ended well before anything tawdry occurred - hell, the female protagonist was still a virgin, which I am led to believe was not the case by the end of the book - but the writing might have been the worst I’ve read in any published book though, to be fair, the competition in that department is pretty intense.

Calas Galadhon in Winter

I strolled the wintry landscape of Calas Galadhon, constructed and tended by Ty Tenk & Truck Meredith.

I’m not a big fan of winter weather. Cold is bad, snow is worse, and ice is an excuse to stay indoors. However, the wintry touches in Calas Galadhon almost - almost, I emphasize - made me forget my dislike of the season. Snow glistens but is, for once, not slippery. I can explore on foot, so there are no problems driving. Best of all, I don’t have to shovel the snow and clean up the slushy mess.










Calas Galadhon Park - all 11 sims - will be closed during February, but that still leaves more than two weeks to experience the good side of winter.

Review: "The Time of the Doctor"

"Everything ends." So the Doctor says to Clara, and so it does.

I don't follow the logic of having regeneration episodes on Christmas (Easter, sure, if one doesn't mind a little obvious Christian symbolism), which is supposed to be a festive time of year and a program may be watched by family members who don't normally follow the show. Those who watch are left either depressed or bewildered, depending on whether they fall into the camp of regular or casual viewers. Nonetheless, once again we have a Doctor's swan song placed in an episode shown at Christmas.*

Continuing the story line from "The Day of the Doctor," in which Gallifrey was not destroyed but instead placed in a pocket universe, the episode opens with the TARDIS in orbit around a planet - along with Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, and more - trying to identify the meaning of a signal sent from the planet. The Doctor's old friend, Tasha Lem, Mother Superioress of the Church of the Papal Mainframe, with its cadre of Silents as confessors, has put a force field around the planet to prevent anyone else from landing there, and she sends the Doctor to find out what is going on.

Once on the planet, which, naturally, turns out to be Trenzalor (in an earlier time than "The Name of the Doctor"), the Doctor and Clara find themselves in a picturesque town called Christmas. The signal is emanating from our old friend, the crack in the universe. Translated, the signal turns out to be from the Time Lords, asking the "one question that may not be answered," the Doctor's true name. (Pause for another "Doctor Who? joke") If he speaks it, the Time Lords will take that a signal that it's safe to return from their pocket universe. If he does so, however, the combined forces in orbit will attack, resuming the Time War. If the Doctor leaves, the forces will also attack the planet to prevent the Time Lords from ever returning. To prevent this, the Doctor stays on Trenzalor, stopping any invaders but unable to leave.

Centuries pass. The Doctor ages. Clara, sent away in the TARDIS for her protection, only to return 300 years later (by the Doctor's timeline; only minutes, one presumes, by Clara's). He tells her he can't regenerate, as this is his 13th and last incarnation; Ten regenerated into the same form and the War Doctor counted as well. The Daleks attack the Papal Mainframe and convert Tasha Lem into a humanoid Dalek (a la Oswin Oswald in "The Dalek Asylum"), then trick the Doctor into leaving the planet to visit Lem. She fights off the Dalek inside her just long enough for the Doctor and Clara to escape and return to Trenzalor. The Daleks remove the force field around the planet and attack. The Doctor appears withered and beaten, ready to accept his death. Clara pleads through the crack for the Time Lords to help the Doctor, and they respond by giving him another set of regenerations. He uses the regeneration energy to destroy the Dalek fleet before retreating into the TARDIS. Clara finds him, he says his farewell to her, then regenerates.

This was no "Day of the Doctor" in terms of plot, either in terms of the big picture (why did the Time Lords appear where they did (or why did the crack appear where it did)? couldn't the Doctor have used the TARDIS to relocate the town of Christmas, leaving the Time Lords where they were until he could find another way to liberate them? and since when did regeneration energy have the ability to destroy a Dalek fleet?) or in terms of the details (the holographic clothing joke had no plot purpose; the brief appearance of the Weeping Angels was pointless; the relationship with Tasha Lem seemed to come out of nowhere; the Cyberman head "Handles" had no purpose other than to provide information at convenient times; and the pacing of the episode seemed off).

Still, there was much in the episode to like. The fable-like narration of the story, set in a fairy-tale-like town called Christmas, set the tone for the Doctor's epic wait. How bored must he have been, waiting for centuries on a primitive planet, the man who couldn't wait around with his friends Amy and Rory for a few days in "The Power of Three"? Clara begging the Doctor to come to Christmas dinner with her family as her boyfriend and the Doctor, naturally, behaving entirely inappropriately was terrific, and I enjoyed the ongoing gag with the Christmas turkey. Seeing Amy in the TARDIS, even as merely a hallucination, was satisfying, and continued the tradition of Doctors seeing visions of old companions (or, in the case of Ten, seeing the companions themselves) before a regeneration. And, in a nod to the classic series, the Doctor helps Handles translate the Time Lords' code by producing the seal of the High Council of Gallifrey, something he "nicked off the Master in the Death Zone" in "The Five Doctors" (and something I hadn't recalled until someone with a sharp memory pointed it out afterward).

Matt Smith, as usual, was amazing, portraying not only a resolute young (-ish) Doctor but also the Doctor as an old man. Foreshadowing his death, he tells Clara sadly that "Everything ends," but at the end he also tells her that he will remember every moment.

Although I'm looking forward to seeing what Peter Capaldi's Doctor will be like, I'm more than a little sad at the end of the tenure of Smith. His portrayal of the Doctor as someone both young and unfathomably old, playful and naive yet a commanding presence, was marvelous in every episode, even ones, like "Time of the Doctor," where the material didn't always measure up to the actor.

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* It's true that the Ninth Doctor regenerated in "The Parting of the Ways" in June 2005, and the Christmas episode was the first to feature the Tenth Doctor, though the show recapped the regeneration at the beginning of "The Christmas Invasion." And the end of the David Tennant era came not in the Christmas episode, "The End of Time, Part 1," but a week later, on New Year's Day 2010. Pish-tosh, I say. Both are associated with Christmas.

Happy New Year - and Old

For reasons that I can’t possibly figure out, I tend to remember the unhappy episodes in my life more than the happy ones. This might be some form of loss aversion, or it might just be that I’m a little kooky. Either way, there it is.

Yet when I think about it, 2013 had a goodly number of happy times. Good meals and good drinks. A lengthy vacation to places I’ve never been. Car replacement. Some good colleagues to go with the stinkers. Et cetera. (Yes, that’s a euphemism.)

So here’s to remembering more of the good stuff in 2014.

The Christmas Hangover

There's a lot I like about the Christmas season. Festive decorations. Guilt-free gatherings of friends and family, complete with foods and beverages that are, strictly speaking, not good for one's body. The sense of excitement in the air. And, for Christians, a celebration of a Very Important Event.

Despite this, the season is one that generally fills me with dread. Let me count the ways: first, there's more to do and yet no additional time in which to do it, which increases stress. Second, repetition of seasonal songs, in a mind-numbing number of versions, usually performed in a perfunctory manner, inflicted on an unwary public. (One of our discussions this year was "Holiday songs I never want to hear again," which occasioned a great many variations on "Wonderful choice!") Preparing for guests to stay over. Preparing to drive, usually through heavy traffic, to visit relatives. The hassle of shopping for people who either have everything they need or want nothing more than the universal gift certificate. (Watching people open gift cards is a dull activity, matched only by receiving such a card when there's no way to spend it until the next day at the earliest.)

Lost in all the shuffle are the normal things one would do over the course or a week or two. Most of those things are not important, but some require a certain amount of sacrifice. To wit: as I type this, I have yet to see the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, "The Time of the Doctor." I have had to avoid all discussion of the episode. I'm told some guy named Capaldi shows up in it, but I have no direct knowledge of this. The things I sacrifice for the sake of the season!

Lest anyone think this is merely a litany of complaints, I hasten to add that I genuinely enjoy the company of my relatives. If any of said relatives are reading this, yes, I mean it, and I'm not just saying so for the sake of smoothing some feathers come next Christmas.

Christmas is also the time when, over a few drinks, friends and relatives are liable to share the more interesting, not to mention embarrassing, pieces of gossip. Items that would never be forthcoming over the telephone or via mail (electronic or otherwise), and certainly never hinted at in the Christmas letter that stays resolutely chipper, come lightly off a tongue loosened by liquor. Little Bobby's close encounter with law enforcement after running that red light, or the explanation for why Uncle Fred is not with us this year (still in rehab). One is reminded of the foibles of one's nearest and dearest. My stepmother, a genuinely warm-hearted person, is also increasingly deaf and staunchly unwilling to do anything about it, so she'll take opportunities to turn up the volume on to the point of distraction on the television, and is unaware that the Christmas tree that plays nothing but a tinny version of "Jingle Bells," over and over, is a seasonal version of water torture. My uncle mercilessly baits the woman. And so it goes.

Which brings me to the Christmas Hangover. Oh, you thought the title was a metaphor for the post-holiday letdown? Perhaps it is that as well. But the CH is a genuine phenomenon. Extracting gossip requires not only plying others with drink, but keeping up as well. I'm also convinced that trying to pay attention to multiple conversations, all held at high volume, causes alcohol to be absorbed more quickly into the bloodstream.

This year, my best efforts were destroyed by the confluence of two kind gestures. Back in June, Uncle J__ bought his brother a bottle of Sauternes for the latter's 80th birthday. Said bottle was saved until Christmas, when all of legal drinking age assembled could have a glass of the sweet dessert wine. A temporary madness descended on me, and I forgot my vow forsaking all sweet alcoholic beverages after an unfortunate episode involving Rusty Nails. (To this day I cannot look at a bottle of Drambui without feeling slightly ill.) One glass and - bam! - the next morning was a sad occasion. In fact, I missed most of December 26. If I could have regenerated, I might have done so.

So let this be a cautionary tale to young people with strong constitutions and poor judgment: one day, that strong constitution will be gone, leaving only the poor judgment. When that day arrives, woe betide you. Until then, I envy you.

And now another Christmas has come and gone. For now, only the cleanup remains, itself another form of post-holiday hangover in which decorations return to their cramped little boxes, furniture is moved back to its normal location, and the trash and recycling bins bulge under the onslaught of wrapping paper, boxes, and the remains of that casserole that no one really liked. And in just 51 weeks, we do it all over again.

Victorian Fantasy: "La Belle Dame sans Merci"

This month’s meeting of the Victorian Fantasy discussion group addressed John Keats’s “pocket epic” poem of 1819, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” Sir JJ Drinkwater coined that oxymoron, and what an appropriate term it is!

Despite its brief length, a mere twelve stanzas of four lines each, the poem relates a tale in which a traveler encounters a knight, “alone and palely loitering” in a place where “the sedge has withered from the lake, and no birds sing.” The knight then tells of meeting a lady - “full beautiful - faery’s child” - who, “in language strange,” declared her love for him. The lady induces the knight to sleep, where he dreams of “pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all” who were similarly seduced by the fae lady. He awakes, alone, on the hill where he met the traveler.

Left to right: Dame Kghia Gherardi, Mr. Simeon Beresford, Miss Sanchia Bumblefoot

The Poetry Foundation describes the poem as follows:

This dialectical probing of enchantment, of the always-threatened artifice by which imagination seeks its fulfillment in the world, initiates Keats’s most profound meditations in the spring of 1819. The dangers of enchantment deepen in the haunting, beautifully suggestive ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” written 21 or 28 April 1819, and published in a slightly altered version by Hunt in his Indicator of 10 May 1820. Here a knight-at-arms is seduced by a strange, fairylike woman, reminiscent of Morgan Le Fay or Merlin’s Niniane, and in the midst of this enchantment a warning dream comes to him from other lost princes and warriors. But his awakening from her does him little good; he wanders “palely” on “the cold hill’s side,” where “no birds sing,” a world as empty of charm as the fay’s was empty of real life. The poem has been seen as allegorical of Keats’s ambivalent feelings for Fanny Brawne or for poetry itself. More fundamental, though, is Keats’s growing sense, here and in his letters, of the dark ironies of life, that is, the ways in which evil and beauty, love and pain, aspiration and finitude, are not so much “balanced” as interwoven in ways that resist philosophical understanding. The more we imagine beauty the more painful our world may seem—and this, in turn, deepens our need for art.

Back row: Miss Janet Rhiadra, Miss Zanicia Chau; Front row: Miss Morgan Trevelion, me

Our group discussed the nature of the knight and of the lady; how much time passed when the knight was with the lady; whether she was seductress or whether it was merely her nature that men fell in love with her; and Keats’s influence (folk ballads) and others who may have been influenced by the poem (Tolkien was one suggestion).

Miss Ravenstask Bayr and Miss Galiena  De Tourney

Sir JJ Drinkwater, Miss Herndon Bluebird, Miss Thuja Hynes, Miss Ellie Mink

Other interpretations of the poem may be found here and here, both apparently part of a syllabus from a Citiy University of New York English class.

As one can see from the pictures, we had quite a number of people (plus a few stragglers not pictured), many of whom were familiar with Keats in general and this poem in particular. That made for a good, lively discussion, which is always a treat.

The next meeting is scheduled for January 16, where the topic will be the 1850 novel The King of the Golden River, by John Ruskin.

The Station and the Dead City

A new(-ish) Steampunk build and RP area, I first learned of The Station from the inimitable Honour McMillan. Above the ground, it’s a floating Steampunk city, with a high-speed train, a Fun House, the Orpheum theater, and more.

The central area of The Station

The entrance to the Fun House

The Orpheum

On the ground is the Dead City - an older, disheveled part of town, so to speak, but a misnomer because the city isn’t dead at all. To get there, one can take the civilized route - a balloon - or the Fun Ride, a wild, careening shot through a series of tubes. Naturally, I chose the latter.

Below there are a number of other places to visit, including the hotel (with Chev’s Attic, a nightclub, and a ground-floor casino), an amusement pier, and the old Orpheum theater.

The hotel, where rooms by the week are available

The entrance to the amusement pier

Shopping in the Dead City, with a passing trolley

The two cities constitute an RP area. Fortunately for my ability to take pictures, but unfortunately for the continued viability of the area, no one else was there during my visit. It’s an intriguing setup, so I hope it catches on.

Review: Sapphire and Steel

Reading about Doctor Who, I saw a number of references to another British television show, Sapphire and Steel, which ran on ITV from 1979 to 1982 and is now available on DVD.

The show follows two “elementals,” Sapphire (Joanna Lumley of The New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous fame) and Steel (David McCallum, from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and currently in NCIS). As Sapphire says, “It’s our job to safeguard the structure of time.”* Each story - an “assignment,” in the show’s language, is made up of multiple half-hour episodes. The agents arrive on scene with a vague idea about what’s wrong, and spend the assignment investigating and resolving the issues. This site provides a more thorough description of the series.

Steel is generally grim-faced and, yes, steely, demanding answers from those around him and generally playing the heavy. Sapphire has certain powers to analyze objects and rewind time, and knows about the habits and customs of humans. They are occasionally aided by other agents, namely Lead (a large man who can knock down doors with a single blow) and Silver (a “technician,” rather than an “investigator,” who can manipulate metals and machinery when not flirting with Sapphire).

The show seems to have been shot on a budget of about $25 per episode. There is generally a single set, whether it’s a house (assignments one, four, and five), a train station (assignment two), an apartment building (assignment three), or a gas station-cum-diner (assignment six). The number of speaking parts is limited, and the combination of the single set and limited number of roles gives the show the feel of a staged play.

In Assignment One, creatures are using children’s nursery rhymes to enter the corporeal world. In Assignment Two, a man in a disused train station is attempting to make contact with the spirit world and finds soldiers killed in battle trying to return to life. In Assignment Three, time travelers from far in the future come to 1979 to understand the period - but they with them a force that can influence time. In Assignment Four, Sapphire and Steel investigate a man with no face who can take children out of photographs. In Assignment Five, a 1930-themed dinner party creates a shift in time so that the guests find themselves actually in 1930, where guests are murdered one at a time. In Assignment Six, the time agents are in a gas station in 1981, where a couple from 1948 has arrived in their car. The last two stories are the best, most coherent ones of the series.

 One difficulty with the show is that it’s too mysterious for its own good. We never learn what these “elementals” are - certainly not human, despite their form, but also capable of being killed - or who they work for, or how time can get out of whack. We never seen any underlying logic to the show’s universe, so that much of the peril for Sapphire and Steel, and many of the resolutions, seem to come out of thin air. The two leads, Lumley and McCallum, are accomplished actors who try to overcome the often-weak material. The show deserves credit for creating something out of the mainstream, with an intriguing premise, but is ultimately let down by its scripts and its incomplete vision of its own universe.

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*No, neither sapphire nor steel are elements.