Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: David Warner, Susannah Harker, Louise Jameson, Ian Hallard, Robert Maloney, Timothy Watson, Joannah Tincey.

It is with good reason that as a species are both repelled and somehow fascinated by the threat of nuclear war; there is after all no middle ground when it comes to the shadow that has loomed large over us since the reports and pictures came from Japan of the first explosions over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We are caught in the fire of expectant and imminent death, so much so that until the threat is finally dismantled and the last remains of the sickness that guides the ultimate force of humanity’s desire for destruction is a long distant memory, we shall forever be enthralled by what damage it can cause to our planet.

Of all the places in which Time as an entity can find in which to crack open the walls of reality and plague us with nostalgia and fear, it is perhaps in the moment that hasn’t yet happened, that has been threatened but never quite materialised. It is understandable to feel anxiety and fear over the eventual shadow that death provides, but to see it as a well of fire, a Wall Of Darkness consuming everything within its shell, that is the dread of the existential threat we live with between the tick and tock, the moment of no return.

A final chapter for Sapphire And Steel, a reckoning that stands in the shadow of the bomb, and yet we know San Francisco wasn’t destroyed in 2004, and yet the evidence before the pair’s eyes suggests otherwise. There is also the suspicion that all is not what it seems below the surface either, and with a tremendous performance by Louise Jameson, as Sally, the nexus point to Time’s fracturing and wicked way becomes all the more entangled, all the more embroiled into what amounts as the greatest threat the pair have ever faced.

Nigel Fair’s script brings all the elements together, all the strands of time that have been weaved intricately and through the hours and minutes that the three series have been working towards, and leaves the listener craving more; and yet the end of the road is finally reached, from now on until the end of Time itself, or unless someone ever manages to convince the original creator  of Sapphire and Steel that the world still owes him huge thanks and a large debt for bringing it to the television screens in the first place, a Wall Of Darkness has fallen upon the audio drama world; one that was filled with the excellent ticking of the clock of time supplied by a fertile imagination.

Ian D. Hall