Characters appearing or mentioned in this episode

 

Steel/Cinderella's father

Ruby/Miss Havisham

Sapphire/Cinders/Cinderella 

Arthur Bunnings

audience

Fred (mentioned only)

master of ceremonies (unnamed)

Graham Lipscomb (mentioned only)

Arthur's sister (unnamed, mentioned only)

Nicholas Garner (mentioned only)

Petranella (mentioned only)

Salmonella (mentioned only)

Cinderella's stepmother (mentioned only)

 

Didja Notice?

 

As far as I can tell, the song sung by Ruby/Miss Havisham about being left in the lurch at the church on her wedding day is an original for the production.

 

Ruby tells Arthur that Holst wrote "In the Bleak Midwinter" in 1906. As pointed out in the study of "Water Like a Stone" Part 1, "In the Bleak Midwinter" was a Christmas poem by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) that Holst had set to music in 1906, so it's a bit of an exaggeration to say he wrote the song.

 

Ruby finds a copy of the script for a play performed in 1914 called The Pride of Miss Havisham. This is a fictitious play based on the character of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

 

Arthur describes a coffee commercial written by his sister in which a woman finds out her husband is having an affair with their plumber. I'm pretty sure this is a fictitious commercial, but I wish it were real!

 

    Ruby finds scripts in the theatre for plays of Cinderella, Of the Darkest Room, and Perfect Lives. Cinderella is a folk tale that has been told in various forms under various titles since early civilization; it has been performed as a play almost as long. The other two plays are fictitious as far as I can tell.

    Ruby then finds The Flood, a play about the Capital Palace theatre itself. This, of course, is a fictitious play, like the theatre itself. 

 

Cinderella names her evil stepsisters as Petranella and Salmonella. In most versions of Cinderella, the stepsisters go unnamed. Any version of a Cinderella play using the names Petranella and Salmonella appears to be fictitious.

 

Arthur identifies two songs from the Cinderella play, "You'll Do What I Say" and "Cinderella's Lament". I presume these are fictitious songs for this play, but there is a song written for the Cinderella variation play The Glass Slipper.

 

Arthur mentions a character named Baron Hardup. This was Cinderella's father in some stage versions.

 

Ruby realizes that her piano trick, intended to impress Steel, in "Water Like a Stone" Part 1 has opened up a fissure between fiction and reality and caused Sapphire and Steel to fall into it. How is it that her request for Arthur to play some Holst ("In the Bleak Midwinter") caused such a fissure to open up? Does she have a specific power to open fissures and her desire to impress Steel inadvertently opened said fissure? As far as we know, Sapphire and Steel do not have any such power, but it has been shown that different operatives (such as Lead and Silver) have different abilities.

  

Memorable Dialog

 

everything's explicable.mp3

nothing here about time travel.mp3

1817 Christmas Eve.mp3

a fissure between fiction and reality.mp3

I've killed Sapphire.mp3

 

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