IN THIS ONE... A deaf-mute girl is possessed by a painting.
REVIEW: If everything old is haunted, why doesn't everyone succumb to the "evil on the other side of time"? Well, it's like a recipe, see? There are lots of ingredients, but they can't break reality alone. Old house need nursery rhyme and so on. In this case, a "deaf and dumb" girl - something they say WAYYYYY too often, even beyond the need to recap every couple pages - is given two pieces of snake-motif Victorian jewelry for her 14th birthday, but it's all well and good until they come into range of a painting of a lady traipsing through fairy-filled woodland. Somehow, this cocktail allows the captured(?) evil to jump out and possess her, make her talk, etc. Sapphire and Steel are on the scene within seconds.
The author again shows a preference for Sapphire, and Steel once again gets zapped into limbo momentarily, and even screams for help while he's in there. The witch of the painting can send people into the girl's imaginary mind palaces, allowing Ranson to draw some beautiful natural spaces. Meanwhile, the face in the painting is disappearing, in sync with the girl's possession. The solution is for Steel to mentally travel back and watch the artist do her thing while sending back an image of every line so Sapphire can redraw it, and that does the trick. Or rather, punching the completed picture does. It's plenty weird, but very much in the holistic vein of the show.
Even so, what the story needs is a tangible connection between all these elements. Besides being of Victorian origin, couldn't the jewelry be shown to belong to the original artist? Or might the jeweler be shown to be some agent of evil? Or the artist knowingly trap the evil in the picture? Or some mention that drawings of fairy folk actually trap the souls of such? It's not unlike the show to leave things unexplained, but there's ambiguous, and then there's random. It holds together better than the first story, but I wonder if the page count isn't keeping these strips on the shallow end of the pool.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VORTEX: If the previous story predicted the duo's fourth mission on TV, there was also something of the first mission in its DNA. Even more so with this one, with a little girl sending her parents into a time fracture. To be fair, Allan didn't have a lot of televised material to work from in divining the program's parameters. As for a Doctor Who connection, I'm reminded of the Torchwood episode with the fairies.
REREADABILITY: Medium - A proper Sapph&Steel story, but the art is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
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