Night Terrors
Sep. 15th, 2011 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI've seen Night Terrors compared to Sapphire and Steel and, in many ways, the comparison is very apt. It thrived on a creepy atmosphere and non-specific wierdness and, if I'm brutally honest, had an ending which was both abrupt, somewhat random and relied on strong performances from its recurring cast to carry the whole.
And yet I found it ultimately rather unsatisfying while I love Sapphire and Steel to bits. Now it's always difficult to compare something viewed in adulthood to something dimly remembered from childhood (even when you have viewed that something many times since) because the memory not only cheats but encourages us to overlook faults that were not apparent to our childish eyes.
So with the big caveat that Sapphire and Steel is probably not as good as I think it is, I'm going to go on a limb and say where I think Night Terrors failed. Ultimately the problem may be that Doctor Who demands a scientific (and I use the term extremely loosely here, maybe I should say scientific-seeming) explanation for anything while Sapphire and Steel occupied a unique space somehwere much closer to on the border between science fiction and fantasy. In so far as Sapphire and Steel ever offered an explanation for anything it was couched in terms that suggested it was being vastly simplified. We were expected to make do with tenuous connections and symbolic links. If the wierdness was all about photographs then we would accept any explanation, pretty much, that involved a camera and be happy that the previous wierdness was, somehow, important to the plot and not just filler. In Night Terrors a lot of the wierdness, in retrospect, looks like filler and contributes nothing to the final figuring out of the problem. Now I suspect that there was considerably more random filler in your average episode of Sapphire and Steel (let's face it, when you've stretched your haunted railway station story out over four hours, a lot of it is going to be filler!) but fundamentally most of the wierdness in Night Terrors doesn't even pretend that it's pointing to the solution (e.g. the people turning into dolls), its just creating atmosphere and that is where the whole finally falls apart at the end.
Which is a shame because halfway through I was pretty gripped.
And yet I found it ultimately rather unsatisfying while I love Sapphire and Steel to bits. Now it's always difficult to compare something viewed in adulthood to something dimly remembered from childhood (even when you have viewed that something many times since) because the memory not only cheats but encourages us to overlook faults that were not apparent to our childish eyes.
So with the big caveat that Sapphire and Steel is probably not as good as I think it is, I'm going to go on a limb and say where I think Night Terrors failed. Ultimately the problem may be that Doctor Who demands a scientific (and I use the term extremely loosely here, maybe I should say scientific-seeming) explanation for anything while Sapphire and Steel occupied a unique space somehwere much closer to on the border between science fiction and fantasy. In so far as Sapphire and Steel ever offered an explanation for anything it was couched in terms that suggested it was being vastly simplified. We were expected to make do with tenuous connections and symbolic links. If the wierdness was all about photographs then we would accept any explanation, pretty much, that involved a camera and be happy that the previous wierdness was, somehow, important to the plot and not just filler. In Night Terrors a lot of the wierdness, in retrospect, looks like filler and contributes nothing to the final figuring out of the problem. Now I suspect that there was considerably more random filler in your average episode of Sapphire and Steel (let's face it, when you've stretched your haunted railway station story out over four hours, a lot of it is going to be filler!) but fundamentally most of the wierdness in Night Terrors doesn't even pretend that it's pointing to the solution (e.g. the people turning into dolls), its just creating atmosphere and that is where the whole finally falls apart at the end.
Which is a shame because halfway through I was pretty gripped.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-15 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-16 08:19 am (UTC)