IN THIS ONE... A magic cabinet makes a man switch places with an Egyptian goddess.
REVIEW: Even shorter than its predecessors, this is the first story in the lot to use the comics medium to do something you really couldn't on television. A lion-headed goddess (Bast?) walks out of a stage magician's box and sets fire to London. You can't do that on the telly very easily (especially not on Sapphire & Steel's budget). But once again, I wish sequences were longer, especially when one of the heroes goes back in time. Sapphire goes back to Ancient Egypt with the victim's young son, and it amounts to less than a page. Sure, the show wouldn't have dwelled on it either, but it's more a question of means than format. There's wasted potential in not devoting an entire chapter (which is still just two pages) to the dad's rescue.
And once again, we get Sapphire spinning time backwards so that the Evil actually never got out. The mechanics of this are unclear - she still has to figure out what triggered the event, rescue the victim, etc., so why an absolute need for a deus ex machina, and why can't she do it from the get-go? Or at least once she knows the trigger and can warn the victim off. It just seems like a perfunctory way to defeat the cat goddess. I guess it wouldn't do to let London burn down or even allow the magician to be killed (was there a moral imperative to the comics?). Poor Boldoni gets savagely hit across the face with an ankh. For the first few pages, the way the "D" is rendered in the lettering, I thought his name was Boloini, or "baloney", and appreciated the joke. It might still be on purpose, who knows. The fake who accidentally creates real magic.
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VORTEX: Doctor Who's famous Victorian music hall episode, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, also features a Chinese cabinet that acts as a time machine. Pyramids of Mars is where you go to see the Doctor face a destructive Egyptian god.
READABILITY: Medium - The strip starts to test its limits, but isn't quite ready to go all the way (if it ever does).
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