Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: David Warner, Susannah Harker, Mark Gatiss, Hugo Myatt, Jackie Skarvellis, Neil Henry, Claire Louise Connolly.

Guilt, or the shouldering of blame and responsibility, even if by all logical deductions incapable or culpable of the crimes committed, is a disease of the soul that will keep eating away at your mind until there is nothing left to be devoured. We should accept the blame, we must feel the remorse of actions that we undertake which has caused someone pain, inflicted misery, affected their life, or even taken it, however, there comes a time when the feeling and effects of guilt, especially when innocence is forced to accept or adapt to the cognitive association to which our own inner desires may not yet have asserted themselves.

It could be argued that guilt comes from Time, rather than the collective stamp of popular and damning opinion; Time spent in the purgatory and damaged thoughts of those we may have loved and respect is more of a deterrent than the spoken after words of the nation force fed their views by the trial of media and opinion architects of the day.

The original television series of Sapphire and Steel may have come to an untimely end in the early 1980s, but the fans of the science fiction programme had never forgotten the darkness of the show, the sense supplied and placed at the fear centres of the mind, that Time itself was an entity not to be trusted, to be wary of and to respect for what it was able to do to, to peel you like an apple, slowly, piece by piece until there is nothing left, just a memory of what was once living.

Big Finish, the guardians of all that was once holy and shrouded in love by fans of many a fictional science fiction programme, brought Time and Sapphire and Steel back to life in 2005 with Steve Lyons’ The Passenger, and it was a reintroduction to the pair made famous by Joanna Lumley and David McCallum that had all the hallmarks of how great the programme was, and what it could have been if it hadn’t beset by delays and abandonment caused by technician’s strikes during its run.

The Passenger is classic Sapphire and Steel, the sense of foreboding strikes home repeatedly, guilt, used as a hammer, is unrelenting, and asks the listener to understand the nature of compulsion when it comes to those who take on the conscience of other’s mistakes and actions.

With a first for the series taking place, the introduction of the character Gold, played menacingly by Mark Gatiss, The Passenger sees Time mercilessly infect one person’s perception of guilt, and the array of characters involved eat away at his innocence. The moment of need of compassion is replaced by the acquiring of self-hatred and fuelled by the ghosts of those sins.

An excellent reintroduction to what was a superb science fiction staple,

Ian D. Hall