A quick question about The Set-Up (anon)

[moonlightmead.livejournal.com]

Wandering through the list of crossover stories at The Hatstand, I came across mention of The Set-Up (not online; on the CD, disk 09, author anon). It's listed as a crossover with The Sandbaggers. It's an undercover as gay story in which they seek out the blackmailers by doing something blackmailable: no prizes for guessing what. I like this story very much.


I cannot for the life of me work out where the crossover happens. None of the characters particularly suggest themselves as characters from another programme: good guys or bad guys. There's a Wikipedia article on The Sandbaggers and a fanlore.org article on The Sandbaggers. And reading through them, I can't find a single name which corresponds with names in The Set-Up. There is a very short passage right at the end in which wheels within wheels are revealed. The articles about The Sandbaggers make it sound like wheels within wheels woul be very in keeping with the that. And that's the best I can do.

If anyone is familiar with The Sandbaggers (which sounds interesting, I have to say, and the dates and theme do make it sound as though it ought to cross over very well), and has access to the CD, I'd love to know where the Sandbaggers stuff comes into The Set-Up, or whether it's just accidentally misfiled.

Comments

[sc-fossil.livejournal.com]

If you did that much research and nothing panned out, I'd go with misfiled or mislabelled! :)

[moonlightmead.livejournal.com]

Well. "Research". Hmm.

Read story I like. Glance through pieces of internet. Read story I like again. Consider idly. Read favourite bits of story I like again. It wasn't onerous!

byslantedlight has lighted on exactly the same part that I did as being the maybe-crossover point, though, so it's still an open question, I think.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Well, you made me start to read The Set-Up the other week, though I don't know The Sandbaggers at all, and I've just finished it. I couldn't see much crossover either, especially as The Sandbaggers is supposed to be all Cold War stuff... highly-trained officers whose work includes dangerous missions that tend to be politically sensitive or especially vital, such as escorting defectors across borders, carrying out assassinations, or rescuing other operatives who are in trouble behind the Iron Curtain and this story is about the lads going undercover in a gay club to uncover someone who's blackmailing people for information - not a touch of the Iron Curtain to be seen...

But it does fall into crossover territory at the very end, because it talks about the SIS and "C" which are directly from The Sandbaggers... it just seems rather a waste of crossing over, almost as if the author couldn't be bothered unravelling the "wheels within wheels" and so just said "ah well, it was a secret cross-over..." Unless perhaps she wrote for the Sandbagger fandom, and really it's Pros crossing over with that...

Makes for a rather unsatisfying Pros story, though...

[moonlightmead.livejournal.com]

This is the bit I am not sure of, because I'm pretty sure that SIS is real, and that C is supposedly the influence for the Bond book's M. But Pros doesn't use SIS anywhere. So I don't understand whether it's Pros, borrowing a couple of real-world pieces of terminology (and some Pros authors do do that), or whether it's Pros, borrowing The Sandbaggers' terminology.

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the SIS is real (ha - it's even got a website, these days! *g*), but I think there's enough mentioned at the end of The Set Up to confirm that this is supposed to be a crossover with The Sandbaggers rather than just with RL. According to the wiki entry, and to one of the Sandbaggers fan pages, In the series, the United States Central Intelligence Agency and SIS have a co-operative agreement to share intelligence.. The CIA are based at Langley, Virginia - as described at the end of the story. Mentioning the CIA, the SIS, "C", Langley and the idea that the SIS might have an unusual advantage over Langley in the future seems like alot of coincidence if the author didn't mean it to be a connection to The Sandbaggers... Trouble is, only that anonymous author could really confirm it - or perhaps the archivist and/or storylist maker. The latter must have had a particular reason for including it in the crossover list...