Sarah Jane Adventures, Episodes 7 & 8

It's pretty clear The Sarah Jane Adventures has an agenda.

It's safe to say, that given its target audience of 'tweens, that Davies/Gardner are intentionally making a show not just to entertain, but to encourage scientific reasoning and skepticism in its viewership. Doctor Who has been doing a similar thing for years, albeit with a touch more subtlety.

This is not a bad thing, and nowhere is it more clear as in The Eternity Trap, where the crew (minus Luke - perhaps the actor had a scheduling conflict?) go to investigate [recurring character] Professor Rivers' reports of paranormal activity. Yes, in a haunted house. Why was this ep shown the week after Halloween? Anyway, Sarah Jane (harking back to her otherworldly adventures) emphatically insists on a scientific explanation, to the point I cringed in anticipation that the writers were going to serve her for hubris. But not so - really, it's a kids show, they're just driving the point home for the less perceptive viewers.

But of course the "haunting" does turn out to be more than imagination or pranksters with sheets and a projection unit - that would be a Scooby Doo episode. This is sci-fi: the "ghost" is an alien (who doesn't like being called a ghost ;-) ), the "paranormal activity" are merely the effects of a damaged transdimensional portal. In the end Sarah Jane is vindicated as well as victorious, and Toby (young investigator, cheerleader of the paranormal) learns from the experience and adjusts his perspective.

Hard-core skeptics be forewarned - check your Myth Busters' membership card at the door. Be prepared for references to "psychic energy" and "life energy", as well as some business about granite rock being able to record and play back scenes from the ancient past - that is, stuff that most of us find indistinguishable from "woo". But recall that many other sci-fi shows have incorporated telepathy, telekinesis, etc. as part of the natural (and explainable) universe. For example, Babylon 5 had major arcs revolving around the telepaths, who were genetically engineered as pawns of the Vorlons. Just remember that sometimes sci-fi plays fast & loose with the rules of the universe. It's only when a story shies away from or flatly denies explanations that it (IMO) crosses over to fantasy.

One thing that surprised me about this show for kids was that for once, the ending wasn't wrapped up neat and tidy. In vanquishing Erasmus Darkening, the people he kidnapped and transdimensionally transferred are lost. It's not said that they are necessarily dead, but it also doesn't give much hope that they were restored in any form. This realtively unflinching resolution -could The Sarah Jane Adventures be making an allegory about the afterlife? I think there's good reason to think so.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: pleased

Sarah Jane Adventures, Episodes 5 & 6

For 3 seasons running, any episode featuring "Sarah Jane Smith" as part of its title, has The Trickster as the featured adversary. This will be a hell of a spoiler if they keep up that tactic.

This was also the famed David Tennant appearance, although he really only figured prominently in the 2^nd half. And it's also not really his show. Sure, he's there to provide deus ex Tardis, and to babble his timey-wimey bits, but his primary function is as Sarah Jane's great unrequited love.

And it's here that we learn something that I was beginning to suspect - that this whole "call me Sarah Jane" business is so that the name "Sarah" is something special, reserved only for the Doctor. Since in the classic series, the Doctor rarely-to-never opted for "Sarah Jane". She protects that name they way she protects those memories.

So on to the main plot - Sarah Jane meets a nice man, has a disturbingly quick courtship, and decides to get married. Problem is, the guy is in the clutches of the Trickster. The Trickster made a deal with him during a tragic accident, and uses him as a pawn to apparantly marry Sarah Jane off so she won't cause him so much trouble. Kind of silly, but also sad because her beau has to decide to die back in the accident to save the world. Of course, it's also a bit of a ripoff of S1's story "Whatever happened to Sarah Jane Smith" where SJS's childhood buddy had to choose the same fate.

But on the upside, the episode is rife with continuity tidbits from new and classic series alike, from offhand references to Metebelis 3, the Judoon, and the Brigadier, to K-9 making his first full appearance. John Leeson can put food on the table once again!

Tags: doctor who

Sarah Jane Adventures, Season 3 Episodes 3 & 4

Not a lot to say on this one. It was primarily a "good alien" story. That is, what looks like a sinister situation only turns out to be an alien in need of assistance. Then it's a lot of mush and cleaning up the timelines. And since it's a kid show, every loose end gets tied up very neatly and very "happily ever after".

The other purpose the story served was to give the audience a "heads up" about next time, when David Tennant will be putting in a full appearance in "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith". Tennant fans take note, this will be like a bonus episode of Who.

Oh, and P.S. - K-9 is back, and has finally been written into the show for good, so hooray for that!

Tags: doctor who
Mood: busy

Sarah Jane Adventures, Season 3, Episode 1

So Sarah Jane was renewed for yet another season - it seems RTD's strategy of marketing sci-fi to 'tween girls is paying off.

The feature alien for this story is one of my all-time favorite of the new series, the Judoon! Not so much a "baddie", but not protagonists either. They're dangerous, yes, but they're also the law, albeit kind of rigid about following rules (which was the source of much of the humour in this story).

Of course, beyond the Judoon-squee, don't expect too much meat on the story. It is marketed for ~11-15 age bracket, so it never gets too complex. It's the usual stuff - aliens pop up, Sarah Jane + kids investigate, keep the villains at bay and stave off questions from meddling parents. I do prefer the chemistry between Gita and Haresh to that of Maria's parents. The latter were just annoying, whereas the former are almost cute.


Anyway, not much to say on this. The SJA formula I've noticed to date is that the first episodes go heavy on camp and simplistic storylines, and by the time the season rounds out, the content becomess almost grownup-worthy. However it never really loses the family squish factor, so expect many declarations about how much people care about one another. Bleh.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: thirsty

FYI SJA update

Okay! There are UK dates for The Sarah Jane Adventures posted on Wikipedia.

Seem this season will be a different format - although each story is still comprised of two 30-minute segments, they'll be airing them over the course of 6 weeks and not 12. The first half of a given story will air on Thursdays, with its conclusion broadcast the following day.

Season 3 will kick off with Prisoner of the Judoon (OMFG JUDOON HOORAY!!!) on October 15^th. Also be sure to tune in for the Oct 29^th/30^th story The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, co-starring David Tennant!

Season finale will air 20 November.

Tags: doctor who, sci-fi
Mood: excited

sci-fi calendar items

For my own reference, as well as yours:

• Oct 27^th: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is released on DVD, Blu-Ray, digital download. Premeires on the Sci Fi Channel (no, I'm not using that other name) sometime in November.
  
• Nov 3^rd: V premeires on ABC.
  
• No word on air dates for Sarah Jane Adventures S3 (with Judoon kickoff and later ep w/David Tennant), other than "Autumn".
  
• Similarly vague about final Tennant episodes Waters of Mars (November) and 2-part finale The End of Time (Xmas).
  
• Also! We have an unoffical report that BBC has picked up a 4^th series of Torchwood. "How?" is another question - as a sendoff, it would've been the best in TV's history (at least as far as I know). But to continue? I'm not opposed, but I do wonder how they can just "go back" to the old format...

Tags: doctor who, sci-fi
Mood: nerdy

For those in need of a David Tennant fix...

David Tennant will appear as The Doctor in a full story of The Sarah Jane Adventures sometime in its third season.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: optimistic

Sarah Jane Adventures, Episodes 11 & 12 (long)

The S2 finale of The Sarah Jane Adventures was a school-reunion of friends and foes, pitting Sarah Jane + crew (including my longtime favorite, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart) against past SJA/Who baddies The Bane and Karg the Sontaran.

I do love revisting past characters, but basically didn't think this episode achieved its goals. However first I'll talk about the positive points:

First and foremost is their choice to (finally!) join up again with the Brigadier. Sir Alastair may be a little heavier, a little slower, and a little greyer, but he's still the same old Brig. OK, so he's a lot heavier, older, and slower, but I don't care. At 79, Nick Courtney is still acting in multiple jobs per year, not to mention his unwavering, enthusiastic support of Doctor Who in general. Everything I have read about this man makes me seriously respect him. I am very happy he's made his way onto the Who franchise, and fervently hope they will leverage his appearance into showing up again on the main series (maybe the regeneration episode?).

I also liked that his cane turned into a gun. :)

Other bits of good were: the incidental music, Clyde getting a lot of good lines (I'm starting to like him best out of the "kids"), and I actually was surprised when the Sontaran revealed himself at the first episode. Before the season aired, I had actually read about the Sontarans being in the finale, but had forgotten. So good for you, SJA, you made me go, "What?" (and Chris too.)

Otherwise, I'm not sure the episode worked out - there were too many players involved (Mrs Wormwood, the other Bane, Karg, the Brig, Sarah Jane, Luke, Rani, Clyde, the Bane masquerading as a UNIT officer, Rani's parents) for the ~54 minutes the two episodes totalled. If they had another half hour of air time, this setup would've worked fine, but as it was, a lot of characters didn't have much to do, or disappeared for long stretches.

With all the actors left little room for plot. It was kind of G-rated Indiana Jones:
1. Everyone search for the so-sophisticated-it's-indistinguishable-from-magic alien artifact.
2. Everyone fight over it.
3. The artifact is used, and it threatens to do something so overwhelmingly terrible everyone in the galaxy*.
4. The goodies prevail through Love, and the baddies kill each other, leaving clean gloves for the protagonists.

There probably would've been room for a better plotline, even with all the characters, if the writers had abandoned the "motherhood" angle on the story. Just like the S1 finale, someone comes along to challenge Sarah Jane's motherhood, so a lot of good air time wasted in hand-wringing and declarations of maternal love (from Sarah Jane and Mrs. Wormwood, who "engineered" Luke). Unlike the S1 finale, the touchy-feely business took center statge far too often, when really I just wanted to see the Brig fight a Sontaran. Ah well, I try to (constantly) remind myself that it's a kids show, so the squishy stuff isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

* - Note to Who producers: You insist on using "galaxy" as your frame of reference in many episodes, and in fact refer to humans traveling between galaxIES. I think you need an astrophysicist to acquaint you with the size of a "galaxy", and the vast distances of NOTHING between galaxies. None but the most sophisticated of races (Time Lords, Daleks maybe, certainly not humans) should be able to achieve the ability to travel between them. The result would be pure chaos.

So now there's no Who-related material until Dec 25^th, and that's only the one special. At least there's the BSG webisodes (starting tomorrow), plus I've also finally started watching *gasp* Star Trek: Enterprise. And yes, I still hate Scott Bakula.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: busy
Music: Wolfsheim - find you're gone

Sarah Jane Adventures Episodes 9 & 10

Definitely another one of the better Sarah Jane Adventures, particularly of this season. This story focused on the way-back-story of Sarah Jane, and the mysterious cicumstances surrounding her parents. That is, their death in a car crash, and their abandonment of baby Sarah Jane right before that. Sarah Jane + crew find a rift that opens to that fateful day in 1951, which would cause Sarah Jane to cross her own timeline and possibly rewrite history. But it is a trap by the Trickster (last seen in S1's Whatever happened to Sarah Jane? story), who is trying to take advantage of a weak spot in the space time continuum. Or something. Explanations get fuzzy at that point. Sarah does indeed succumb to her "temptation", opting to save the parents she never really knew. But then history is rewritten and 2008 is replaced with a post-apocalytic wasteland of human slaves overseen by the (also slave) Graske assistant of the Trickster. Clyde and Rani are immune from the temporal changes because of the alien "box" that protected Maria in the last Tricker story. They make a deal with the Graske and he lets them help Sarah Jane & Luke in 1951, although really all Rani does is tip Sarah Jane's hand and cause a fuss with her modern clothes (and ethnicity, but they were only slightly hinting at that). In the end, it turns out Sarah Jane's parents are smart cookies (at least the mom) and they figure out that they are the temporal nexus, and that they need to die for all of humanity to live. So they volunteer to drive to their own deaths. Which is noble, but not entirely believable - I'd have to think they might need a little more evidence than a freak storm and a mysterious visitor before volunteering to kill themselves and leave their baby an orphan. But, I realize they probably didn't have screen time to hash it over any more than they did. And they had to give Sarah Jane a no-fault option (i.e., she couldn't ask or trick her parents into dying). As every one of the SJA eps has a "human" issue to be worked out, Sarah Jane is able to achive closure with respect to her parents. They did love her, and did not willfully abandon her, and she was able to know them for a short time. Next week: The final story + Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart returns!! Tags: doctor who Mood: busy

Sarah Jane Adventures, Episodes 7 & 8

Well, I'm over a week late in reviewing this, but fortunately there's lots more to say on this episode than previous ones.

So far, this has been the best story of season 2, despite the main premise (alien pendant with "careful-what-you-wish-for" power) borrowing heavily from the Torchwood story "Greeks Bearing Gifts". Somewhat related, I've noticed something of a trend with The Sarah Jane Adventures between S1 & S2:
- One Who villain recyled, to be tackled by Sarah Jane & crew (S1 was Slitheen, S2 was a Sontaran)
- A Sarah Jane "backstory" ep in story #5 (they've been making allusions to Sarah Jane's dead parents for a while now)
- Generally better episodes towards the end of the season than at the beginning. Or at least here's hoping.

This is also the first time we see Clyde's parents, and get their backstory. As it turns out, Clyde's dad left his mom and ran off with her sister. Um, yeah, quite the Jerry Springer setup. So all this time Clyde masks his pain of abandonment by becoming a jokester and getting into trouble. I can believe that, and the actor plays the irresponsible, not-quite-grown-up-himself dad very convincingly. Well, until he turns into a demon Berserker, that is. I liked the mom too - and I would imagine we'll see more of her than the dad, since he lives in Germany.

We also see a minor resurrection of the Maria character (and her dad). I'd been wondering if they were going to bring her back in some fashion, since they kept referencing her long after she "moved to America". Seems the New-Who tendency to revisit old characters has made its way onto The Sarah Jane Adventures.

In the end, the power of the alien pendant is vanquished by a heartfelt appeal from Clyde, but nothing gets "fixed" in his life. His dad is still a cad, and not likely to have "seen the light" from the awful pendant experience. Clyde also finds out he will soon have a (three quarters?)-sibling, whom his dad has just bailed on, repeating history. Hrm, all this seems kind of a messed-up of a storyline to have in a kids' show; I could see parents complaining. But who knows, I'm from America where parents complain about their kids seeing anything of the real world, so my internal gauge may be messed up.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: tired

The Sarah Jane Adventures, Episodes 3 & 4

Jeebus, not another scary-clown story. Overall, this was a weak and formulaic script. In fact, here's the formula: (primal fear/boogeyman) + ("justified" w. scientific/alien explanations) = no-brainer sci-fi They even pulled the getting-trapped-in-the-funhouse-mirrors gag. *groan* And for some reason Lis Sladen decides to compensate for plot deficiencies by over-acting. Really, this show was just a vehicle to introduce the preteen-girl-replacement Rahni. Which unfortunately is pronounced the same as "Rani" (as in The Rani). At first blush, this girl is an annoying and unsympathetic character. We'll see how it goes. Tags: doctor who Mood: cynical

Sarah Jane Adventures, Season 2 Episodes 1 & 2

The long sci-fi drought is over!

The 2^nd season of The Sarah Jane Aventures kicks off with a followup story on Who's S4 story, The Sontaran Strategem / The Poison Sky*.

All and all it was rather formulaic (complete with bad-guy-reveals-all gloating), but I'm inclined to be charitable since this is a show geared for audiences 1/3 my age. Really, the reasons I watch this show are for Lis Sladen and Who tie-ins; beyond that I try not to have too many expectations. Thus, there's not too much to say - it wasn't terribly imaginative, but it kept me occupied while doing the elliptical.

Also in this episode they wrote off the Maria character (perhaps because she's hit puberty and won't look like a little girl much longer?) by shipping her and the dad to America. No big loss there - she was too "plucky" for my tastes and her mom was turning into a Donna Noble clone. Although no similar fate for Clyde, who is basically this series' Mickey Smith.

* - How I wish they didn't individually name both sides of new Dr. Who 2-parters.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: nervous

Since dj_vlad wanted to know, others might too

FYI, The Sarah Jane Adventures Season 1 is available for pre-order now, to be release in Oct.

Torchwood S2, as well (for Sept), but I think I posted that one before.

Tags: doctor who
Mood: cheerful

hooray for the Brigadier!!

The Brigadier (Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart) will be featured alongside Sontarans in the 9^th & 10^th episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures!

About flippin' time too - Nick Courtney isn't getting any younger...

Tags: doctor who
Mood: excited

SJA S2, Autumn 2008

Well, at least in the long, dark stretches between now & 2010, with only 3 Dr. Who Specials and Five Torchwood stories, it's at least comforting to know that The Sarah Jane Adventures got renewed for a 2^nd Season, set to air in Autumn '08.

Mood: relieved