Warning! This post contains a number of spoilers for shows and at least one book that are now so outdated on the pop culture calendar, you probably know how they ended anyway. But if you’ve not seen The Vanishing or Sapphire & Steel, or read Flicker, this is your official notice that their endings are revealed up front.
Before coming across Mark Fisher’s brief discussion of it,1 I’d never heard of the British sci-fi series Sapphire & Steel, which aired between 1979 and 1982. It’s not that the premise of the thing interested me; a pair of glamorous nonhumans ensuring time’s integrity sounded all too much like Dr. Who or shows of similar genre that I never got into. The intrigue lay instead in the fact that Fisher just skipped all the adventure and went straight to revealing how the series ended, with the heroes trapped forever in a single room floating in outer space, cut off from every other life form, every other thing, period, save a view of stars against darkness; cut off from all ability to tell anyone where they were or what had happened to them. Eternal, unfair incarceration: two people in the same room together for eternity. After devouring the entire series on YouTube, I fell into speculation on unfair endings—of the particular variety in which characters are tossed into the void, the rest of the world completely unaware of their fate.2
Two of the more notable, and disturbing, examples of this sort of wrap-up are the 1988 film The Vanishing and Theodore Roszak’s 1991 novel Flicker. Although I place both within the consigned-to-oblivion genre, that’s about where their similarity ends. The film involves the intense Rex trying to track down what happened to his girlfriend, Saskia, who disappeared three years ago from a crowded rest area without a trace. When he finally meets up with the guy who took her, said villain agrees to show Rex what became of her—but won’t allow the investigator to know where they’re going, or how. On his moral high horse and believing that learning the truth will make him a better man than the creepy kidnapper, Rex agrees to drink some sedative-laden coffee. The next thing we, or Rex, know is thanks to the feeble light from a match the hero has lit—inside his own coffin. Buried underground with no one the wiser, Rex now has the answer he’s been seeking, admitted to the ranks of secretly immured heroes from Poe’s Fortunato onward. A closing shot of a newspaper headline notes his disappearance, but we know his story will fade from public memory just as Saskia’s did.
Flicker provides what might seem a kinder variation on this theme, with film scholar Jonathan being kidnapped and permanently exiled to an inescapable island in the middle of nowhere, his abductors publishing a false account of his death. Having spent years of research on a particular film director, and discovering in the process the devious plans a secret Cathar sect has for humanity, the group simply removes Jonathan from the picture. Fed and clothed and provided with books and paper, newspapers and journals—but with no way to communicate with the outside world, no one to remember him, no one to know what really became of him except the aged film director he’s been researching all these years, disappeared to the same island by the same group. The two men get to live—but under these circumstances, does it really matter?
What kind of existence, Flicker has me asking, is human life when it’s been removed from active participation in, communication or interaction with, human culture/s? The difference, perhaps, between the novel’s ending and stories of shipwrecks on desert islands or winding up as the last person on earth is that in this book, everyone except the bad guys have been tricked. No one on Flicker’s earth will ever read the testament Jonathan has left behind; his keepers will make sure of that. No one will ever know what really happened to the director, or that neither Jonathan nor another key critic did not perish in accidents, as news outlets and high-profile eulogies have made known, or even perish (yet) at all. For the shipwreck, there’s the chance of attracting the notice of a plane or vessel, of investigators being able to place him, of some account stuffed into a bottle eventually reaching a populated shore and being read, even long after its author has died. And for the last person on earth, there’s simply no one left at all. But for Jonathan, the added pain is the fact that the world keeps on going, with no chance of his ever again being part of it. Neither his life nor his eventual, actual death will matter—in a world where it could have. Real death, plain and simple and out in the open, would certainly have been the better alternative.
It also seems like the more merciful option for Sapphire and Steel, if perhaps for an entirely different, or maybe additional, reason. Even though they made a great team, and obviously respected each other—maybe more—you could see in that final episode the possibility of their fate turning into something more like Sartre’s No Exit, in which a few strangers are assigned to the same room in hell for eternity, each knowing exactly how to push the others’ buttons. The sadness and terror creep in, as the final credits roll on Sapphire & Steel, thanks in part to the fact that spending forever in one room with the same person could indeed lead to No Exit’s Garcin declaring that “Hell is other people.”3
That’s precisely why I couldn’t shake the ending of this particular series: not because the duo has been defeated, because the bad guys have actually won—but due instead to the knowledge that, thanks to their inability to get out of each other’s way, each will surely grow to hate the other, to resent the other’s presence, to spend the rest of eternity irritated at the sound one of them makes when eating, or exasperated with a verbal tic, or trying to pinpoint where their unwilled partner in forever made the mistake that got them here. And then, too, they’ll have to live with their own petty reactions to the person they once admired and relied on. They will have forevermore to deal with the reality of their own stupid spite, devolving from a secure understanding of their own capabilities and worth into nothing more than The Honeymooners redux, carping in useless blame for their own inescapable fate. It’s not, in other words, that evil wins, but that love, the grand force supposed to outlast us all, dies.4
Original viewers of the series spent a few years watching these two work together, often in tension but always in admiration—and now suddenly there’s nothing left for these superhuman detectives but the other’s unremitting presence and the sight of empty space outside their window. How in the world could their pre-prison esteem endure? If these singularly strong beings can lose their love and respect for each other, how could any normal schlub maintain noble, or even patient or tolerant, feelings in similar situations? As the early days (months? years?) of COVID made apparent, we probably couldn’t. How meaningful are the ties that bind us; how securely is any love able to sustain the adversity, not of outside upheavals or anything that intrudes upon our daily routines—but of the reality that comes with the constant, simple presence of the beloved other? Sapphire and Steel have been disappeared—but they remain alive, in a new reality that will undoubtedly be more challenging, and more so for its very monotony, than any nail-biting assignment they’ve ever undertaken. The especially sadistic nature of their enemies is evident in the fact that it would have been far more merciful to have killed these time cops, allowing them to die in the fullness of their good feeling for each other, respect for themselves, and for any greater force or meaning they may have felt was able to sustain it all. Allowing them to die, that is, with some sort of faith in anything at all.5
Of course, there’s always the baseline infuriation that this isn’t hell—a place of supposedly legitimate punishment—as in Sartre. Here, and in The Vanishing and Flicker, evil has simply prevailed. Sapphire and Steel were imprisoned by rogue elements—the sci-fi equivalent, it seems, of Lucifer and his rebellious angels. At some point in the past, the baddies had tried to recruit the pair to their side. Both had refused, and the team comes to the determination that the villains hate them for their independence. Their relegation to a floating room in space isn’t any case of justice being served, or divine purpose being achieved—but instead, of agents of order being done away with, without any repercussions for the crime—and confined in a way designed to mock the very autonomy that pitted them against their jailers. Two innocent individuals have vanished: and for the purposes of the universe, it doesn’t matter. The universe doesn’t even notice. That unswerving service to time’s integrity probably doesn’t feel all that worthwhile in their new situation; time itself is unable to do anything at all, even to acknowledge its loss.
What does any of this matter for us, then, living here in our frustratingly intertwined, constantly connected lives? For most viewers, it may mean nothing more than general disappointment encompassed in the assertion that life’s not fair—or on the other hand, appreciation for a “realistic” ending: bad things happen to good people, and you’ve got to face up to it. No more of these treacly happy wrap-ups.
And then, too, what was Fisher doing, cutting straight to the chase and starting with a sudden conclusion, leaving us with nothing but the end of a show that most of us, at least outside of the UK, had never even heard of? Assuming we’d be too bored with more detail, or not bother to deal with something so ancient in pop-culture terms? Hardly; Fisher had a great deal more respect for his audience than that. In so many ways, the ending is where it all starts, at least where what matters has its beginnings. The ending is the inception of a long battle against madness and spite and the loss of the slightest shred of faith in anything at all to hold onto. It’s a conclusion that’s merciful for the viewers—because unlike scripted reality shows that throw ill-suited roommates into each other’s temporary vicinity, I can’t imagine us being able to bear the crumbling monotony, and the bitter beings that would emerge because of it.
The thing is, Sapphire was allowed to get a glimpse of her future: a plain picture of stars against a vast darkness. “Hours will become days and months,” she says upon seeing it, “and years will become thousands of years. There is nothing but space.”6 But there was no time for her to ponder further on what it could mean—maybe it was only a vision, she might have hoped, of the fate that awaits us all, returned to pure matter once our bodies have shut down, still participating in the universe as unseen bits of all those constellations, or of the grand void itself. She may have gone forth in assurance, then, with what she thought she already knew. And maybe that error was for the best, even if another fellow agent warned Sapphire that it was in fact “best not to know.” Because it can mess with your head to go any further than that: to scrutinize your own mental resources, the strength of your feelings for others, the endurance of theirs for you. Remain in blessed ignorance; or leave it at the shocking recognition of your own demise, but leave it. There might be all too much time later to measure yourself against the schemes of an indifferent eternity.
Mark Fisher, “The Slow Cancellation of the Future,” in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014).
Contrast this variety of being cast into space with the death of astronaut Frank in 2001: A Space Odyssey: it’s known what happened to him, and even witnessed. Frank’s fate will be recorded; he will be mourned, and remembered by those left behind.
In the original French, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” The entire play is available at archive.org.
Pick your favorite source of the assertion, from the Bible—1 Cor 13:8, 13: “Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end…. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love”—to the marketing slogan that’s surrounded Dracula ever since its ‘90s film version. “True love never dies” is still being asserted about the tale in ballet (!) format.
There’s also the consideration about those who will go on searching without clue or answer for the ones who have disappeared—whether like Rex in The Vanishing, or the descendants of Holocaust victims, or the families of all the young people disappeared by the regime in Argentina’s Dirty War.