Characters appearing or mentioned in this episode

 

the girl

Sapphire

Steel

Mary

Silver

Professor Fleming

Dr. Webber

Anton Webern (mentioned only, first name revealed in "All Fall Down" Part 3)

Mary's mother (mentioned only)

 

Didja Notice?

 

In this episode, Sapphire remarks she can take time back seconds or minutes, not decades or centuries. This was established in the TV series. Yet, she was able to take time back several years in "Daisy Chain" Part 3...perhaps only because Time itself was using her to do it.

 

Silver, upon learning that Professor Fleming is working on the day's crossword in the Times, which he remarks is quite a tricky one today and that 5-down had him rather stumped for a moment ("crustacean fills dance card", nine letters) commenting, "worthy of Lewis Carroll, some might say." Lewis Carroll (1832-1989) was the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Since Silver mentions Carroll and the crossword clue "crustacean fills dance card" with nine letters, the word needed to fill 5-down may be "quadrille", a dance fashionable in 18th and 19th Century Europe. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "Lobster Quadrille" was a song sung by the Mock Turtle as part of a dance.

 

Mary mentions Boxing Day. This is a holiday generally celebrated the day after Christmas in Britain and many of its current and former colonies.

 

To play back the old wax cylinder recordings, Mary says she borrowed a graphophone from the Victoria and Albert Museum.

 

Professor Fleming says that Webern took his photos of insane patients at Bethlehem Royal. This is Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in London; it was nicknamed Bedlam almost from its founding as a priory in 1247 (it began housing the insane in the late 14th Century). Fleming remarks that Bethlehem Royal was amalgamated into another unit in 1948; this is when the hospital was absorbed into the National Health Service.

 

    Professor Fleming says that Webern collaborated with a French inventor to develop the graphophone in or after 1892. This is a fictitious version of the invents leading to the invention of the device. In reality, the graphophone was developed at the Volta Laboratory in Washington D.C. under Benjamin Hulme, Harvey Christmas, Charles Sumner Tainter, and Chichester Bell around 1888.

    In "All Fall Down" Part 4, Webern is revealed to be an earlier incarnation of Webber.

 

Fleming mentions that Webern was to present his theory of using a graphophone to treat insane asylum patients to Queen Victoria at the Royal Society before his disappearance. Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the ruler of the United Kingdom from 1837-1901.

 

When Sapphire finds that Steel has developed ring-shaped rashes on his forearms, she remarks that it is considered one of the first symptoms of black plague. This is true. Headaches are also a symptom, as also mentioned by Sapphire later. The fact that Steel catches plague suggests that he (and his fellow agents of a higher power) has a human body, despite him referring to the people of Earth as "humans" as if he were removed from the species. Maybe the agents are beings who have had their spirits placed in human bodies that were prepared for them at some time in the past.

 

The audio series uses a pulsing sound to indicate when Sapphire uses her special powers. A more subtle sound, plus her eyes lighting up bright blue, was used in the TV series.

 

Memorable Dialog

 

a hundred years too late.mp3

did you charm it away?.mp3

it was talking to me.mp3

thank you for that insight.mp3

I was wondering if he had given you fleas.mp3

no such thing as coincidence.mp3

for such a rude man.mp3

we work for a higher power.mp3 

 

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