So there you are then, "The End of Time" could have been even longer as Doctor Who's heroic Welsh bard, Russell Davies, writes in to say that the dying Doctor David actually visited all the previous companions from Ian and Barbara through to Ace (and Benny and Charlie and Lucie and all the others), as well as the Millennium-edition companions we actually see on screen.
I can't help wondering whether this means Tennant materialising on the space freighter and hollering: "come on then, Adric. All aboard allons-y!" or materialising in a Cretaceous glade and watching a rather good meteorite show with a sad shake of the head.
(Not to mention doing for Katarina that thing that he later does for River Song. No, that other thing, that thing with the TARDIS in space and the extended air corridor.)
And one way or another it's quite hard to pop in to visit Leela and Romana. And Sarah Kingdom ought to be a definite gonner… if it wasn't for the clever "out" written into his trilogy of Companion Chronicles by Simon Guerrier.
("Home Truths", "The Drowned World" and "Guardian of the Solar System": well worth a listen, even if Alex and I are killed off in the first one.)
And then there's Sarah Jane's closing valediction, and it's happy endings all round: Ian and Barbara in Cambridge, Ben and Polly in India, rather marvellously Liz Shaw (not dead) on the moonbase (wearing a purple anti-static wig?), the Brigadier perennially stuck in Peru, Tegan (not dead) in Australia, and the Dorothy "someone" who has to be Ace (not dead/not dead/not a bitch and probably dead) having founded the charity "A Charitable Earth".
(And if it is Dorothy for Ace not Dorothea for Dodo that still leaves Ms Chaplet missing-presumed-brainwashed between episodes of "The War Machines". Also, odd that Sarah failed to mention Victoria Waterfield who was fostered "sometime in the late Twentieth Century", not least because Sarah met her… albeit in spin-off "Downtime" aka – at least in our flat –The World-Wide-Web of Fear. Yes, we did tick off all the other companions: Susan, Stephen, Zoe, Nyssa and Mel are all in the future; Vicki née Cressida and Jamie are in the past; Turlough and assuming-she's-alive-god-help-her Peri are on alien planets – so all of them are out of range of Google.)
Really, I ought to frown on this sort of thing, as it is rather naughty, bulldozing all the spin-off lines left and right. But it brings such a warm glow to my heart that I can't help but forgive him. And anyway, the whole premise of The Sarah Jane Adventures is based on bulldozing spin-offs or she'd have been killed off in "Bullet Time" (the Past Doctor Adventure) or "Dreamland" (the Big Finish audio, obviously, and not the Tenth Doctor cartoon!) and more subtly erasing her meeting with the eighth Doctor in Lawrence Miles' "Interference" or the seventh in the comic strip.
So it's all rather lovely, but also rather fannish. They all lived happily ever after, not only belying all those "gritty" and "grim" novels and audios, but also the spirit of "School Reunion" from Russell's own version of Doctor Who. And are we not in danger of carelessly suggesting that best friend Sarah is actually the weakest link, if absolutely every other companion has made a brilliant life for themselves?
Russell has all sorts of mixed messages about optimism (the Doctor makes people better, except when he doesn't; life gets better, except when it doesn't) and about whether Jo is an idiot – or, more hurtfully, a child (except when she isn't). In contrast to the 'Sarah Jane becomes a lonely old spinster' of "School Reunion", he's carefully shifted Sarah's backstory out of the way, and given us 'Jo and all the rest have fantastic lives (don't mention the dead ones)'.
In fact, there's almost a sense that the story is lying to kids about death, especially in the way that the Doctor most treats Jo as a child and does lie to her about the death of the Time Lords. Obviously, the Doctor was never going to be dead, but there's a message here that if you really, really don't believe that someone is dead, then it'll turn out that they're not, and that rather undoes all the good work put in at the start of the episode where Rani's dad tries to explain to her about grief and denial and what Sarah is going through.
So, even though Jo's life has been a fantastic adventure, and she's been so successful, all of her children have followed her example, the moment she steps back into the Doctor's orbit she reverts to "helpless girly".
Why didn't she just punch him and say: "how dare you pretend to be dead! I've got too much to do to be travelling half way round the world just because you aren't dead!"
Or as Sarah ought to have said: "there's nothing 'helpless' about being a 'girl'."
All of which means that although it would be nice to see this as an exploration of what the Doctor means to his companions after he leaves their lives – a sort of, forgive me, companion piece to "School Reunion" – it's not really.
What it is instead, and who can blame it, is a celebration of all things dotty in the person of the irrepressibly wonderful Katy Manning as Jo Jones née Grant.
At times it seems like a pastiche of the old Jo Grant – she knocks something over on her entrance; she plays up the "dumb blonde" – at times it's almost more about the real Katy – the business with the glasses; the other business with the glasses…
What I felt was nice was that Jo wasn't demeaned by this. If anything, she's shown to be acting up because she's actually covering up for being smarter than people take her for, and – in spite of the streak of self-doubt about the Doctor never coming back for her – she shows that she's made a good life for herself succeeding in raising a happy and engaged family with no compromises.
Emphasising the contrast with "School Reunion", Jo and Sarah share a "compare the monsters" conversation like the one between Sarah and Rose in the earlier story. But this is comparative not competitive, more of a shared greatest hits.
Likewise, Russell gives each companion reason to be jealous of the other: Jo has had the life that Sarah lost out on wasting her time waiting around for the Doctor; but equally Jo has never had the Doctor come back for her (or even so much as a robot dog) to say that he didn't forget her. But it doesn't last. It's more of a brief sting quickly healed than a real emotional core to the plot.
And it is delightful when they realise he took them both to Peladon. And Jo mentioning Karfel… what a wicked Bandril Ambassador you are, Mr Russell; all those kiddies going out to snap up copies of "Timelash" on DVD.
I did, incidentally, between watching parts one and two, listen to Big Finish's Companion Chronicle "Find and Replace", staring Katy as both Jo and the irrepressible Iris Wildthyme. In many ways it covers very similar ground – Jo in the present day, looking back and revisiting her time with the Doctor. It takes a very different route (there's a time travelling Number 22 bus involved) but arrives at a similar place emotionally: Jo has had a happy life, but the best of it was with the Doctor and she loves him and misses him, but loves her life too.
That ambiguous blend, that it's possible to regret and not regret at the same time, is very human, very Russell.
Of course, most of the other Russell tick-boxes are on show too.
The plot is moderately perfunctory and full of holes. And there's pizza in it. The human villain's characterisation ("Earth has nothing for me") is borrowed from Lance in "The Runaway Bride" (though with even less reason – I mean, she works for UNIT; how much excitement do you want?). The alien menace looks a bit like an Earth animal (Muppet vultures, in this case) and has an overworked naming convention (the Claw Shansheeth of the Fifteenth Funeral Fleet). Paint the Graske blue and you get a completely different alien… and then call it a Groske. Tee as they say hee. His place names are wacky too, here with the Doctor "dying" in the Wastelands of the Crimson Heart (is that anywhere near the Silver Devastation? Or is it part of the Jaggit Brocade, affiliated to the Scarlet Junction?) And Jo's jailbait grandson Santiago plays the "gay agenda" when he mentions his dad joining the "Gay dads across Antarctica" (not to mention Jo and Sarah snuggled up in bed, er, coffin together!). Santiago refers to the Falklands as Las Malvinas too; this is apparently controversial (like anyone brought up in Peru would call them anything else).
And speaking of Santiago, did anyone else feel that the story was setting him up to join the regular cast? All that heavy business about him never settling down or his parents never being in the same place for long enough for them all to be a family together – did it not seem to be leading up to the obvious "I'm going to stay put for a bit, Sarah Jane's offered me Luke's old room"? Not that I'm not cool with Clyde and Rani pairing. But with Tommy Knight's Luke removed to Oxford, they could have been looking for anotherpretty young manlots-of-answers-but-doesn't-fit-in, fish-out-of-water character. And it would have been an opportunity to bounce some new ideas around the old team.
Anyway, none of that really seems to matter because, as usual with Russell's writing, he somehow seems to bypass conventional drama and go straight to intravenous emotion.
There is also all the evidence that Russell is having a great big laugh.
Referring to Ace as Dorothy "something" clearly references the fan arguments between those who say her surname was supposed to be "Gale" (as in Dorothy Gale from "The Wizard of Oz", rather missing the point that her being whisked "over the rainbow" by a time storm in "Iceworld" is an allusion, one among many in that story) or those who say it should be McShane as used in the New Adventures and later adopted in the Big Finish Audios (or even more clumsily Dorothy Gale-McShane, which pleases nobody).
Likewise, the idea that Ian and Barbara haven't aged since the sixties. I quite like the idea voiced by some that this refers to their immortality on DVD, but I suspect that it's more of an allusion to Russell's own oft-stated description of Lis Sladen herself.
He even takes the rise out of his own Doctor-worship when Doctor Eleven delivers a very Doctor Ten-ish "the whole universe would shudder…" and then undercuts it with a "gotcha!" (Itself the mirror of Luke's gotcha on Clyde at the opening of the story.)
And do we really have to go into an analysis of the "507 lives"? (508, actually, as it would be the first one plus one more after each of 507 regenerations – the same mistake the TV movie made before redubbing Mr McGann.)
It's a joke. It's a joke! It's not a retcon; it's not a revision; it's not complicated numerology (5+0+7=12=the same as the original number of regenerations, have pity, please!); and it's certainly not a declaration that he's now immortal!
Obviously the series is going to have to do something when we get to Doctor number thirteen because, as Russell admits in interviews, that "thirteen lives" rule has stuck in the public imagination. And obviously whoever is showrunner when the time comes would be mad not to use it as a springboard for storytelling.
Holmes and Hinchcliffe introduced the idea of a limit to the number of regenerations precisely because immortality made for bad drama. Obviously it was a plot device for "The Deadly Assassin" (the Master running out of lives drives the whole story), but additionally the idea was to make it seem that the Doctor could run out of lives too, in order to invest him with a real sense of having something to put on the line in his adventuring rather than merely risking no more than just another "face lift". It makes him less than a god; it makes him a better hero.
And anyway, I don't subscribe to the thesis that twelve regenerations is itself a "retcon": it's not a contradiction of "live forever barring accidents", and in fact the new series has gone some way to smoothing this over, with all that "curse of the Time Lords" and the Doctor repeatedly saying that he does not age but does regenerate. Clearly the idea is that a Time Lord can live forever if… and only if… they stay home quietly minding their Ps and Qs. But if they have an "accident" they've got regeneration as a Plan B to get them out of that too.
Now that's not perfect either – the Doctor is seen to age to advanced years in both "The Leisure Hive" and "The Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords" – but let's make allowances.
The point being: the Doctor is not going to sit around in an ivory tower for all eternity; he's going to keep putting himself in the way of "accidents" and he knows it.
So are we stuck with thirteen?
Well, in "The Deadly Assassin", Coordinator Engin, the doddery Time Lord in charge of the APC net and dispensing general exposition, states that "after the twelfth regeneration nothing can stave off death" and as I say the entire plot of "The Deadly Assassin" (not to mention the Master's subsequent motivation in "The Keeper of Traken" et seq.; not to mention the entire plot of the TV movie which does this whole Master/Eye of Harmony/planet in peril shtick again; and especially not to mention the entire plot of that famously-reliable continuity-soother "Mawdryn Undead") depends on this strict limit. Though of course, the plot of "The Deadly Assassin" also relies on the fact that this simply isn't true: the Master, after all, believes he can break the rules, and nearly succeeds (as his subsequent longevity attests).
Because the other point that "The Deadly Assassin" makes repeatedly is that the Time Lords do not understand their own technology. (This has been ridiculed, but even today on Earth no single human actually understands all of the programming in Microsoft Windows, so roll that forward ten million years.) The Master is the only one to work out what the Eye of Harmony is and where it is and how to work it – even the Doctor himself only guesses most of this based on the Master's plans. So Engin could be just plain wrong.
Though in fairness, while you can use that to say Engin is wrong about the twelve regeneration limit, it's much harder to explain why the Master would behave the way he does if he doesn't believe that the limit is at least difficult to break.
But there are plenty of ways out of it: fans at the moment are very fond of "something to do with the Time War". After all the Master was resurrected (having previously fallen into the business end of a portable black hole), and the Doc may or may not be carrying around the Matrix in his head, stuffed with the spirits of every Time Lord who ever lived and died. Any number of technobabbly explanations could be used from the "Retcon of Rassilon" to "it's part of the TARDIS; without it I couldn't survive". The simplest approach is just to have a successor take over the role (yes, like all those Arnold Rimmers); the opportunity was missed with the car-crash ending of "Journey's End" of course, where you could have had the Doctor live happily ever after with Rose and DoctorDonna regenerate into a new (say it) female Doctor and take off in the TARDIS. Or there's even the "Curse of Fatal Death" approach – it's a miracle!
Of course, taken with the (much more controversial) "earlier Doctors" aka "those faces in the mind battle with Morbius", although also alluded to by the "secondary" control room containing props and costumes for more than just the Doctors we have known, Hinchcliffe and Holmes were contriving to suggest that Tom was in fact something like the twelfth Doctor so the whole limit was blown to pieces in "The Caves of Androzani" anyway!
(And now all we need is River Song to respond to one of his "I'm nine hundred and a bit years old" speeches with: "Doctor, you're seventeen hundred and seventy two and no one cares that you're into four digits except for you!")
Oh, and the business with the TARDIS key – Sarah and Jo both ought to remember it as the "Twerpee spade" and not the Eccleston Yale – just wave your hands and use the words "perception filter". It's not like the TARDIS really looks like a 1960s Police Box. Why should the key look like a key? And yes, the key does have its own perception filter: the Doctor uses that fact in "The Sound of Drums" for his personalised "somebody else's problem fields". So the Shansheeth's memory weave is having the girls remember the TARDIS key exactly as it is… including the perception filter that makes it look different. Will that do?
By the way, it was quite nice that Matt Smith was in this. But, in spite of his usual top quality performance, he was somehow almost entirely irrelevant (in a way that Mr Tennant really wasn't when he guested last year). In a way he's actually overshadowed by the clips. I mean hooray for the clips, hooray for a rubber dinosaur and hooray for the Three Doctors and an especial hooray for having actual wonderful non-Doctor Who clips of Jo's fabulous life-after-the-Doctor.
But making it a show about the celebration of memories, and the power of memories, the actual right-up-to-the-minute living-in-the-moment Eleventh Doctor is diminished, reduced to guest presenter in his own tribute show, second fiddle to past glories which manage to defeat the bad guys for him.
The focus was always on Jo and Sarah. And maybe that's right.
But maybe that's where "Death of the Doctor" falls down: if you're going to do a cross-over story then it ought to be something huge – a confrontation with a pan-dimensional dark lord, a face-off with the creator of the Daleks; this isn't. At its heart, for all of its alien planets and Muppet-vultures, this is really a "little" story about Jo and Sarah sitting down with the man they both once loved and saying: "why didn't I get what she got?"
So it is a lovely little drama. But for the return of the Doctor into Sarah's life, for the return of Jo Grant, for the return of Russell Davies to Doctor Who… we expected something a little bit more.
Next Time… Clyde and Rani find themselves with an intriguing mystery, a pair of rather stylish robots, and an awful lot of vacant real-estate when they're left on "The Empty Planet".
You might think that this is the throwaway story, between the emotionally heavy "The Nightmare Man" and the season big-hitter "Death of the Doctor", but there's something quietly profound going on underneath the surface of this story: a sense of sadness and nostalgia about lives wasted and the serious question of a genocidal manic seeking redemption posed for a tea-time audience.Don't forget to tune in to CBBC later for the next adventure!
Ocean Waters (Cheryll Campbell) personifies the spirot of nostalgia. Superficially she's a comic creation; her organisation is called "B.U.R.P.S.S." for goodness sakes; even her name is a pun on "River Song" and "Amy Pond". And yet there are a couple of moments, just a couple and I wonder if it'sLizLis* Sladen adding them herself, where Sarah Jane steps back and notices Ocean's real situation. In part one, where they find Mr Dread's press clippings and discover that Ocean is a genuine abductee, Sarah Jane wonders to herself, "if only she'd thought of a better name [for B.U.R.P.S.S] perhaps someone would have taken her seriously". In part two, they all pretend to have had the same attack of the mind-rubbers that Gita has, but just watch Sarah as she sees how hurt Ocean is that they've all forgotten. She winces to herself, knowing that – however necessary to protect Rani's mum – this is cruel and hurtful for Ocean.
And think also of the genuine terror that she experiences when her personal "nightmare man", Mr Dread, comes literally bursting back into her life.
Ocean's life, tragically wasted since her abduction in19741972*, curiously mirrors that of the android Mr Dread too, whose life was literally put on hold in that same year by his masters in the Alliance of Shades (and an alliance of "shades" would be a Spectrum; one wonders if they include a "Scarlet").
The Men in Black androids from "Dreamland" are evolved into much better characters here. They are closer to the Agents from the Matrix, of course, than Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones: I particularly loved that their reaction to the sonic lipstick was to all do the "Agent Smith neck-crick" thing. The ridiculously oversized guns are jolly funny as are the detachable hands, and also a nice Auton pastiche, although a bit more Addams Family "Thing", than scary Auton arm from Rose.
Mr Dread in particular is a rather lovely creation, even if his "prepare to be incinerated" catchphrase is a bit rubbish. Played by Angus Wright, he's got a very dry sense of humour and a slightly world-weary attitude, like he knows that his job is now rather pointless and that anyway Sarah Jane has much more right to defend the Earth, and is just plain better at it. He is, essentially, (as referenced several times by Clyde) a Terminator, but one that knows just how ridiculous he is.
It's a real shame that he's used up all his battery juice. (Oh, but he has – he says he has a five-hundred-year battery, and uses up four-hundred and fifty years in activating the transmat, so fifty years left… but he's been operating on Earth since the Nineteen-Fifties… fifty years ago.) It would have been rather nice to employ him as a kind of recurring guest robot, as K-9 was in the first couple of series.
And was anyone else expecting Sarah to open up his freezer with the line: "Mr Dread… I need you!"
Of course, he's wrong about one thing: he tells us that, without the second activator disc, the vault is sealed forever and his purpose is now over. To which both Alex and I replied: transmat! In just the last few minutes, Mr Dread himself has used the transmit equipment to get Androvax's Veil ship out of the vault (and, incidentally, one presumes the second disc too); what's to stop anyone else doing the same?
Anyway, also returning this week: Adrovax, Destroyer of Worlds, Last of the Viel.
How many times has Doctor Who done a "last of the… [insert species here] in desperate gamble to save their people" story? Particularly when the "last of the…" in question turns out to be a bit of a baddie?
Well about twice, actually: there's Eldrad, last of the Kastrians, ("The Hand of Fear") and obviously Scaroth, last of the Jaggeroth ("City of Death"). At a pinch you might count Broton of the Zygons, but he's not "last" of his race. Not least because he's expecting a terraforming (Zygo-forming?) ship to arrive with survivors. Possibly Monarch of the Urbankans (whose plan to resurrect his dead race in digital format is the very same plan that killed them all in the first place). Oh, and Rassilon's whole get-out-of-Time-War free gambit.
What is a twist is that Androvax, the not-actually-any-more-last of the Veil, manages to get away with it. You're far, far more likely to have this plot fail and the Doctor moralise on about "everything having it's time and everything dying" (and if it's Davy Ten, get that faraway look in his eye). And yet here, as Ocean tells us, hanging a light on it, we get a definite "win" for the aliens.
Now, arguably that's a "win" for the Universe and Sarah Jane too: a victory over entropy from just one more species spared from extinction. And it's worth remembering that – aside from the almost casual attitude towards exploding Slitheen – almost no one ever dies in the Sarah Jane adventures; even Androvax himself is still struggling manfully on despite the lethal swamp-viper venom allegedly about to kill him at any moment.
But even so, this is still, quite unusually, a rare example of the "score draw" in the Doctor Who universe.
And actually that's a better moral than the traditional: "if you're evil, you can never achieve anything good and your race are all better off dead".
Interestingly we never do really address the question of whether Androvax is "good" for saving his people or "evil" for all the other worlds he has destroyed. Obviously, destroying twelve planets is evil, and he's played throughout as duplicitous and self-interested. And yet he is without doubt expending his life to save his people. So as I say, interesting as it's left to the viewer to think about.
In a way there's almost too much plot. All the body swapping is certainly larks for the regular cast, all of whom get a go at the snarling lizard-in-a-human's-body shtick (thoughLizLis* Sladen remains far and away the best and most sinister at doing it: like "aged Sarah" in Clyde's nightmare last week, she's really good as a wacked out alt-Sarah; after all these years, people are starting to notice she can do this kind of thing). And the jokes come thick and fast, if pitched at a somewhat juvenile level.
But all the light-hearted froth seems to, ironically, pin down the more serious meanings underneath. And the incidental music will insist on tossing in comic stings, particularly over Ocean's disappointments, where something a little more downbeat would have underlined the genuine sadness of her situation, rather than mocked it.
And there's Mina Anwar's acting as Gita which swings wildly between hilarious and "hilarious"! It is a real shame that they mind-rubbered her at the end. There's a much richer vein of comedy to be found in having mum "in the know" (and trying to keep dad Haresh the headmaster in the dark) than in just returning to the mum and dad mustn't find out status quo. It would have been a nice flip of the season two arc where Maria's dad knows but mum Chrissis is, as far as we know, clueless. Plus, for a while there it genuinely strengthened Gita's character as she coped pretty admirably under the circumstances. A shame to undermine it again with more silliness.
But I loved the Pyramid of Mars.
Next time: Warm up the ol' android duplicate and get ready to infiltrate and kill 'cos it's "The Death of Doctor Who"… oh, no sorry, that's "The Chase"; this time it's muppet vultures and someone's painted the Graske blue for "The Death of the Doctor"
Is Julian Bleach the first to do the triple? Or at least first "actor who isn't Paul Kasey in a rubber suit", anyway? (Yes, ironic given that Mr Kasey is here playing a guest-Slitheen in the "one year ago" flashback.) After his ghostmaker for Torchwood ("From Out of the Rain") and of course Davros for Doctor Who ("The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End") he now plays the eponymous "Nightmare Man" for Sarah Jane.
And this is probably his best role for any series so far – yes, Davros is iconic and got the rather wonderful reveal of just what he'd done to himself to create the new Daleks, but he was in a very silly story and his screaming gypsy-curse ending served to undermine him further. Here the Nightmare Man is built up as a threat by his gradual approach over the first episode, making his appearance into the real world a genuine threat at the cliffhanger. Once here in our realist, he is almost charming in his childishness and selfishness, partly shy partly petulant, and a devilishly physical performance all exaggerated tiptoes and unnatural twists. The Pierot-esque white-face and the flower give him an aspect of sinister clown and of course, we've done psychic vampires before, not least in "Day of the Clown" a couple of years ago which this story resembles in a very much "done better" sort of way. And his ending – lifted from Sapphire and Steel's adventure six (if you're going to steal, steal from the best) – is suitably apposite and horrible, hoist as he is with his own petard.
He is a very Buffy-esque enemy, not merely his appearance, which is reminiscent of the grinning Gentlemen in "Hush", but also his fairly blatant subtext as an avatar of Luke's personal anxiety about laving home. He is bother literally and metaphorically Luke's nightmare.
If there is one duff note, it is know-it-all computer Mr Smith's naming the Nightmare Man. Calling him a Vishklar from the Seretti Dimension is making him "just another alien", rather than an almost metaphysical threat. Doctor Who has a long history of dealing with fallen gods and angels, from the Celestial Toymaker to Fenric and has always been comfortable with not pinning them down. If you have to identify the Nightmare Man, I should have preferred him named as one of the Pantheon of Chaos, a rival of the Trickster, perhaps.
Joe Lidster, this week's writer, hasn't done the triple, but it can surely only be a matter of time, as his writing just keeps on getting better. The dream-like quality that he achieves here is surely only more in keeping with Steven Moffat's new "fairy tale" house style for the parent series. And psychic concrete that was pretending to be a flyover in Guildford has to be one of the funniest throw-away lines in all of Doctor Who.
Rather wonderfully, the story is very much a game of two halves, with the first episode concentrating on the complication of changing relationships between the series "family" precipitated by Luke's decision to go away to university, what you might call the "soap-opera" aspects of the ongoing narrative if it weren't for the way that the term has become one of abuse on certain fan fora. To be dismissive of this would be largely to miss the point: the grounding in real world emotional drama is necessary both to emphasis the heightened reality of the Nightmare Man and the world he represents and inhabits, and to underline the connection between the everyday world (the world of the viewer) and the fantastical world (the world of the story). Luke's anxiety dream where he sneaks downstairs to overhear Sarah and K-9 mockingly laughing at the scene earlier where they said they'd miss him is horribly, horribly real, and the sort of thing many watching may even have experienced.
In contrast, the second episode is positively trippy, with each of the protagonists locked into their own private Nightmare – even Sarah Jane, whose waking nightmare is to be locked out.
It's actually a rather clever nightmare for Rani, giving her essentially all she dreamed of, but showing her a dark side to a career that she's clearly romanticized in her head. And in an episode that's actually very short of guest cast (and successfully making a virtue of it), it's a joy to see Doon Mackichan as the "evil" newsreader in Rani's nightmare news studio – named as Louise Marlowe but impossible not to think of her as Collatallie Sisters from the Day Today. But is she really "evil"? She is clearly an ice-cold unfeeling bitch, but she's also everything Rani aspires to be: smart, successful and up to a point doing the right thing – sure people do have a right to know about the aliens that Sarah Jane is actually covering up. It would be interesting to see this developed as a strand in the series, Rani's journalistic instincts taking her down a route of full-disclosure that Sarah herself has clearly abandoned.
Clyde's nightmare, a world where he ends up flipping burgers, is more obvious; it's the flip-side to Luke's nightmare of going away, the fear that Clyde may not get away. But to give it an extra stir of horror, Clyde's nightmare is inhabited not by another guest-star but by a decrepit wreck of Sarah Jane, repeating back to him all the secret fears and doubts he has – he's not as good as Luke, he's not important, his art doesn't make him special, he's not the one who is loved. These would be almost humdrum if it weren't for the person delivering them (a real chance for Liz Sladen to get out of Sarah Jane's normally straight-laced character and really show her acting chops). It shows a deeper side to Clyde that he has the special nightmare of the next generation of seeing someone you love and admire losing their marbles. It's possible that one's a bit near the knuckle for me.
Luke appropriately enough is trapped in the corridor between everyone else's nightmares (by implication the world of the Nightmare Man himself) here represented as a school corridor, all very "Wood Between the Worlds" (if you're going to steal, steal from the best). The triumphant "together we're unbeatable" speech may have been a little overdone (and the Murray-Gold-turned-up-to-eleven a little overwrought) but it was the appropriate "magical" or "fairy-tale" way to deal with this monster of private lonely horrors.
It's a great shame to lose Tommy Knight from the show. He gave Luke an innocent intelligence that was a perfect counterweight to Clyde's knowing streetwise attitude, and his character gave Sarah Jane a connection to the world that she had almost lot. To look for a silver lining, perhaps this going will give a little more breathing room for the often-underused character of Rani.
One rather lovely touch to leave on: Sarah's "old car" that she gives to Luke appears to be her car from the Big Finish Sarah Jane audio series.
Next Time: I say, is that Mr Dread the robot agent of the Alliance of Shades from Mr Phil Ford's Doctor Who cartoon "Dreamland"? And is that Androvax the Destroyer from Mr Phil Ford's Sarah Jane adventure Prisoner of the Judoon? It must be the Phil Ford episode. Here Come the Men in Black. "The Vault of Secrets"
Apparently, this two-parter has earned the joint-highest appreciation index to date, a well deserved reward for writer Joe Lidster. Joe, who wrote this and the memorable episode "A Day in the Death" from Torchwood's second season, seems to be cornering the market in "regrets": a signature style is a tragic figure looking back, with flashbacks, on the disastrous decision that brought them to their current, usually dreadful, pass.
In this case, rather shockingly, it's one of our youthful heroes: a now-aged and abandoned Rani looks back on an empty life from the year 2059. This is heady stuff for a children's show.
We all have days when we are frustrated or belittled by our nearest and dearest, when we find their enthusiasms exasperating, or when we mistake their interest in someone else for excluding us. I dare say many of us have even wished to be left alone once in a while. WE don't really mean it, but what if someone granted that wish. That's the concept behind this week's story, almost fairy-story-like in its simplicity.
The framing device, set in the future, sees a local teenager, Adam, come exploring Sarah Jane's abandoned old house, only to discover the self-styled "mad old woman of Bannerman Road", namely Rani Chandra, alone in the attic.
She tells him the story of she's been alone since an ill-starred day fifty years ago, and we follow her through all the simple things that she – and in fairness her friends too – got wrong. Luke and Clyde are chatting online with Maria in America: they don't fail to include Rani but enthuse too much to her about the "brilliant Maria" so she feels left out, with an underlying sense that she feels second best, like she's Maria's inferior replacement (which is a clever riff on the "new girl coming into the show" to generate extra empathy with the audience who may also be feeling that she "took Maria's place"). When Sarah Jane pooh-poohs her suggestion for an investigation – typically in character for no-nonsense Ms Smith, and also typically in character she later recognises she's been dismissive – then Rani steals off for an adventure of her own.
Lured back to her old home town of Danemouth by an e-mail from her one-time friend Sam, a lonely orphan who has recently stopped communicating with her, she agrees to investigate a "demon" haunting a closed down funfair. Rani rightly deduces that the demon is actually a lost alien, who turns out to be a girl called Eve who is being looked-after by the caretaker and her mysterious Ship, who appears to speak from mirrors (yes, just like the Magic Mirror in the Disney "Snow White"). What Rani fails to realise is that Eve has dangerous powers which she cannot properly control, and Rani's interference threatens to unleash them.
There is an interesting moral question that's not really picked up on but it informs the feel of the whole show: Eve takes people who are homeless, lonely and makes them happy though playtime. But it takes their will away. We would label that "bad" but it's not her intention, and – if she's a utilitarian – she may well not even see it that way.
What is particularly wonderful here is the way that the story properly grasps the series' central idée fix that "the universe is wonderful and terrible at the same time". Eve is both wonderful and terrible, neither she nor her Ship are actually evil, but they do have, as I say, an alien morality that skews nicely away from what we might expect; they are literally fey, like fairy-folk they are perilous for mortals to be near. And for once you can understand why anyone would want to be in this world of prophetic time-seers even with all the danger that comes along with it.
Given that the title itself is a literary reference (to Mrs Rochester in "Jane Eyre", or possibly to the "Cracker" episode of the same name), there's some pretty heavy referencing going on: Eve comes from a race of time-sensitives (see "Warrior's Gate") who were caught up in "a war" (obviously the Time War, see in particular "The Unquiet Dead") and faced "extermination" (guess who!). And that's even before we get to the flashback clips (a device which itself is a reference to "Mawdryn Undead" and many others) where we get to see – whoo hoo – actual old Doctor Who clips from the third and fourth Doctor eras. And of course "he is returning" and "the darkness" allude to the prophesies in Doctor Who's 2008 series (go directly to "The Fires of Pompeii") or maybe the similar prophesy in "Planet of the Dead" – the clip from "Planet of the Spiders" is also a visual reference to "there is something on your back".
Meanwhile, Harry, the fairground caretaker, is played by Brian Miller, aka Mr Lis Sladen, who last appeared in Doctor Who (alright Doctor Who proper) in "Snakedance", also playing a Carnival worker. So that's a reference too.
And, getting self-referential, the conclusion sees Eve's new family taking a familiar shape – but, as Alex remarks, if Eve is Rani, Harry is parent-figure Sarah, computer-in-the-wall Ship is Mr Smith and fish-out-of-water orphan Sam is Luke, then where is their Clyde analogue?
Showing Sarah her future is a great idea, and knocks her back just the same way that seeing her past did in last season's "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith". It's almost a pity that the pay off will come almost immediately, as it might have been nice to have that hanging over us for a little longer.
On the other hand we do get the final resolution of the long-running "K-9 in a cupboard" plot, releasing the tin dog to take a bigger part in the adventures now that the BBC have permission to do so, it would seem. "So you'll be staying," says Mr Smith. "Oh good." Brilliant.
If anything there is too much good material, as it does slightly squeeze out a decent resolution. The major twist, that Ship deludedly grants Rani's unintended wish, and strands her in a world without Sarah-Jane, comes too close to the end, meaning the "I'm really here to set things right" resolution is rushed, almost as an afterthought.
If I might propose a solution, I'd have used a little non-linear story-telling: bringing the twist up to the front of the story and having Adam trying to get old-Rani to tell him the background. If we start with the illusion that Ship is malevolent, then the twist becomes that she's actually just as hurt and confused as Eve. Adam could then explain this to old-Rani who from that realises who he must really be.
We finish with "mad woman in the attic" Rani being replaced by "happy granny surrounded by family" Rani, which is another of the series' touchstones – the need for family. This too is rather more fairy-story than science fiction, the idea that timelines can be casually rewritten like this not really being in keeping with the Doctor's usual philosophy. (And it doesn't bear too close an examination in logic either; given that we can reasonably expect Sarah-Jane and gang to save the world again in the not-too-distant future, having Ship edit them out of existence would surely mean old-Rani wouldn't have a planet to stand on!)
But in fairy-story logic, this is just right: the ill-starred wish gets you into trouble and the selfless act gets you out again, which is just what happens here. Even if the order is a bit muddled.
Next time… Something old, something borrowed, something blue… that'll be the TARDIS, then. He is returning! But is the Trickster really giving away the bride at "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith".
Another cracking start to a series: funny, exciting, full of ideas. And it's been years since Sarah-Jane was possessed; here Lis Sladen shows how it should be done, turning in a performance that is cheeky, even saucy at times and with a gleam of wicked fun in her eye, and yet also channelling real anger and evil when called up to end the world.
Publicity stills in the RadioTimes of our alien villain-of-the-week led us to dub this one "The Judoon versus the Jem'hadar", but new alien Androvax the Annihilator, a Veil lifeform and the eponymous prisoner, proved to be much more interesting. His method of possession – "stepping into" his victims – was a rather swish effect, and his telltale forked tongue flickering from his victims' lips was just brilliant. And, goodness gracious, a villain with a motivation – so what if it's the old "my world was destroyed so I will take revenge on the entire universe!" shtick; it gave him a little bit of depth, and Lis was able to play with that, that hurt underneath the spite driving the wickedness, to great effect.
It's just a pity that he's (another sci-fi cliché) "last of the Veil" as they'd make cool recurring villains. Obviously he's a genocidal nutter, so it would be wrong to hope that he escapes again…
Opposite Androvax, on the side of Law and Order – or at least the side of stomping about causing chaos – is new Judoon hero, Captain Tybo.
Tybo takes those moments from "Smith and Jones" that show that the Judoon can be funny and really runs with them. He's hilarious, and yet totally in character, and actually smarter than he's given credit for. Even Sarah-Jane pigeon-holes the Judoon as "a bit thick", and yet Tybo wins us over from practically his first appearance, because even while he's being bloody-minded about it and shooting up everything in sight, he's also struggling to get on with his job while barely recovered from being whacked over the head with an iron girder. Bloody-mindedness or dogged determination: his unswerving law-abidingness is actually quite a worthy trait. And for all that he's hidebound to follow any rule he sees, from "No Unauthorised Admission" to "Pay and Display" with equal intransigence, he's actually quite adaptable, and he does "get his man". He's unswervingly polite too, always thanking people when they obey his (okay usually barked, usually delivered at gunpoint) orders; as role-models go, I can think of worse, and I wouldn't object to a few kids playing "Captain Tybo" in the playground. His final line to the kids, commuting their "death penalties" to "being grounded" surely shows that he has a sharp line on what's really going on as well.
Kudos has to go to Paul Casey who has to perform some rather complex mime and to Neil Gorton for making such a brilliant, flexible, mobile prosthetic Judoon head who between them bring Captain Tybo to life and make him feel completely real. And of course Nick Briggs, too, for giving up his larynx to give Tybo his voice.
Nothing quite tops the hilarity of Judoon driving, though. "I am trained in all pursuit vehicles!" Tybo insists before lurching off in a "commandeered" police Landrover. And when Androvax' spacecraft lurches off into the sky at the end, we remarked: there's a Judoon driving that, isn't there.
Slightly less hilarious was the "comedy" subplot involving Rani's parents getting themselves caught up in Judoon shenanigans. Although there were elements of farce in the "ooh, Rani mustn't let Mum and Dad see her with an alien" ducking behind pillars and near misses, the timing was never sharp enough, nor was there any real sense of "disaster" if they actually did collide; this is all far more Secret Seven than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all – we're not going to end up with emotional meltdown. Nor was the "lets humour the parents" ending entirely in keeping with the show's overall message of "there are wonders out there if you're willing to look".
And besides, we've seen this done before and done infinitely better on November 23rd 1963, when Susan was the one who understands and accepts the "unearthly" and it was Ian and Barbara who went into "can't cope" mode. And it's done without compromising the dignity of the teachers, which doesn't just help them as characters, but also makes the alien more alien, (and less "panto").
I think they just about got away with the coincidence of Sarah-Jane getting possessed on the very day she has just visited the very nanobot laboratory that villainous Androvax needs to work his dastardly scheme. Swarms of tiny little dots being quite handy for the effects guys, these miniature monsters actually worked rather well as a threat, particularly the 'peril' moment where they eat through some fire doors to get at Clyde and Rani, leaving a delicious bite-hole in the woodwork. It would have been nice at the end though, if when they'd all switched off they'd left some sizable bite-marks removed from the building too.
Oh, and under the microscope molecule-sized robots really don't look like cute beetles with chomping mandibles.
For the regulars, it was a good week to be Clyde, who pretty much took the lead here, coming up with the ideas and generally keeping things moving – even while claiming to be no more than "one-liners guy". Not a bad week for Sarah's adopted son Luke either, who gets to be rather brilliant in talking Mr Smith out of self-destructing and disabling Androvax ship after one glimpse of the blueprints, plus psychoanalysing the villain into surrender: not a bad week's work at all. Which just leaves Rani to be a bit wet.
I don't want to get too into the gender politics of it, but for a series that is normally chock full of positive female roles, this week had Sarah-Jane turned "evil", Rani's Mum doing something dappy, and Rani herself reduced to tailing Clyde and Tybo and hiding whenever her parents appear.
On the other hand, where Captain Tybo was generally portrayed as dim (albeit with undertones), Rani's father Haresh, who is also remember their headteacher Mr Chandra, was reduced to pure comic relief and the only person her Mum could get one over on. Including making him literally wetter than his daughter.
The "fifth" regular is obviously the multi-talented Alexander Armstrong, also returning to BBC1 in the brilliant sketch show he shares with Ben Miller ("face the front!") and probably still to be seen on BBC4 or BBC HD as Clive Sinclair in tragic-comedic Eighties microcomputer biopic "Micro Men" ("there's even a bloody game about me trying to get a bloody knighthood!" "you might want to read this" "ah… apparently, I've been offered a knighthood"). It's only a shame he wasn't guest presenter of "Have I Got News For You" on Friday as well.
Alex remarks: I do hope Sarah-Jane remembers to cancel the self-destruct properly because he was left thinking about it on a three-second countdown. Oops!
Next time: Oooh, looks like spooky goings on! Make a wish! A haunted house and a crazy old lady… that can't be Rani can it? Is she… "The Mad Woman in the Attic"?!
As the sixth televised* Sontaran adventure, this is quite definitely the best, taking aspects from all of its Doctor Who predecessors and finally getting them right.
(*The straight-to-video "Shakedown" is also a highly superior story, actually making the Sontaran attack look powerful and dangerous, and – by deploying a small squad but as part of an armada that is stopping every ship in the sector – just for once makes for a Sontaran force that appears to live up to their cloned-by-the-million propaganda.)
The lone crashed Sontaran is of course straight from "The Time Warrior", along with the lights in the sky and the kidnapped scientist; threatening to conduct experiments to learn more of humankind's weaknesses is, well, d'uh, "The Sontaran Experiment"; genocide as revenge is a theme from "The Invasion of Time"; while the invisible spaceship is from "The Two Doctors".
"The Sontaran Stratagem" contributes the 2008 look for the warrior clones, though here they go even further making Commander Aargh!, sorry Kaagh a combination of the eponymous "Predator" and one of Stargate's Jaffa, with his rippling invisibility and his CG unhelmeting.
Yes, we've seen this sort of spot-the-references kind of writing before (stand up "Mad Larry" Miles), but here it's used to blend a new and better Sontaran out of the mythology. Kaagh is powerful, aggressive, resourceful, sadistic and actually quite clever, particularly in part one where he allows Sarah and friends to run because they are most likely to run to where he wants them to go anyway. Also, his "destroy the Earth by smashing it with the humans' technology" plan is actually rather better than General Staal's car-based chaos.
The only moment that rings false is Kaagh's survival at the end, tragically not Jimmi Choo'd to death after all. Wouldn't a Sontaran warrior surely rather self-destruct his ship,pyrrhically killing his vanquishers? Or at least crash it into them?
It is also the last episode for Maria and Dad Alan, necessitated by Yasmin Paige's O-Levels. It was good of her to return for a "regeneration" story, and allowed for some snuffly emoting from the kids, and a couple of stand-out moments from the grown-ups.
The first, when Sarah Jane learns that Maria is off to America and freezes on her, is a very well chosen piece of acting. It's neither what you would expect, nor the comfortable choice, but it is very true to Sarah's history, her ongoing pain at being abandoned by the Doctor.
Equally, the sly reveal from Maria's mum, Chrissie, at the end "I remember it all, you know…" is a lovely overturning of our (lowered) expectations of the character. In fact it's a shame that it's taken it being her last episode finally to put some 3D shading on Chrissie, who's been entirely the comic relief in a mum-mustn't-find-out face kind of a way. And she turns out to be much stronger than her family gave her credit for.
Incidentally, while I mention the acting, Mr Smith is clearly being allowed to act more like (and sound more obviously like) Alexander Armstrong. The sheer ridiculousness of the super-computer is now being used for comic effect, and Armstrong wittily plays along, even if it means that the machine now sounds more than a little like the "frighteningly right-wing Sat Nav box" from the Armstrong and Miller show. Funny, that.
The visual look of Mr Smith, his pink screen-saver, is somewhat softened now that he's no longer an evil crystal intent on destroying the world, but he's not the only effect to have been upgraded, with some immensely impressive work on the camouflaged Sontaran and his ship. Excellent use of "borrowed" CG from the climax of Doctor Who's "The Poison Sky" seamlessly extended into a longer sequence as Kaargh comes crashing to Earth demonstrating perfectly that blowing the ship up was the place to start the story, not to finish it.
Next time: discover the meaning of coulrophobia, learn the secret of the pied piper, and meet the new residents on Bannerman Road on "The Day of the Clown"
This would be what Russell T Davies (and the trailer) would call the season finale, and everyone's back for the climax: in the evil corner, the Slitheen – out for revenge for their defeat in, er, "Revenge of the Slitheen" – and in the good corner, hooray, it's the Dog!
Continuity is therefore understandably quite heavy in this story.
For the second time in two stories, someone is planning to smash the Earth into rubble with a cosmic collision. This week, it's Sarah's previously benevolent alien computer "Mr Smith" – in fact composed of a bit of Xyloc crystal welded to a heap of Microsoft and a Dalek cannon – who has decided go in for a spot of planet cracking, to allow the rest of his crystal race to break out. This has been – as he tells us at every opportunity – his "purpose" all along.
His plan is to double-cross the Slitheen, having them bring an alien telekinetic device to Earth, and make use of Luke's Bane-designed mental powers to drag the Moon out of orbit and sledgehammer open the planet.
Since we are getting continuity heavy, you do have to wonder why he didn't just let the asteroid from "Whatever Happened…" do the job for him. Let's be generous and assume that he'd calculated that the asteroid would be insufficient to serve his purpose. (After all, the Earth has survived gigatonne-level impacts before without the Xyloc escaping – Adric and a freighter full of Cybermen spring instantly to mind.)
And along with the Racnoss you have to ask how much else is buried down in the middle of the Earth underneath all those Silurians and the Stahlman's Gas. (Or whatever the Primord-making green gunge really is.)
The first episode is genuinely disturbing television at times. Maria and her Dad are already reeling from the end of the previous story where he was dragged bodily into Sarah's world of aliens and demons. The discovery that Luke is apparently a missing teenager called Ashley throws everyone into further confusion, with Sarah trying to do the right thing for her adopted son and Maria's mother Chrissie showing a really nasty side and turning Sarah and Luke in to the police. There are some serious questions of what is the right thing to do here – Luke is devastated to be taken away from Sarah, but under the circumstances she could easily be seen as the one responsible for his brain-washed condition. Just how easily did she accept that he had been created by the Bane? When "Ashley's" supposed mother challenges her with "And did you think the fairies left him?" this is actually quite near to the knuckle – substitute "aliens" for "fairies" and yes, that is exactly what Sarah thought.
The return of evil child-Slitheen, Carl also raises some difficult ideas. Clearly he is a psychotic murderer – he lusts for the "kill" that he thinks he has been denied. No, let's be fair, by his culture he has been denied. But he's also a boy orphaned by the violent death of his father. That's really not as funny as the giggling, farting, joke monsters that the Slitheen started out as.
Actually, there's some recognition that the joke had gone as far as it could be taken, with the introduction of new skinsuits – to explain quickly how the Raxacoracophalatorians can fit into bodies of any size while also writing out the farting – that go a long way towards making the Slitheen more threatening monsters. In fact, of course, it turns them fully into the Zygons.
Then there's a delightfully unexpected cameo for Floella Benjamin, turning up as director of the Pharos Institute (almost certainly named for but no relation to the Pharos Project in Logopolis – though ironically, this Pharos has had more success in attracting alien intelligences.) Actually, she's a little bit mannered in her performance, but it was lovely to see her nonetheless.
It's also a story for unexpected new talents. Clyde gets a TRON moment, zapped inside Mr Smith and using his previously unheard-of powers to communicate with the outside world, specifically Maria's dad, Alan. And Alan himself turns out to have what he refers to as "mysterious contacts", implicitly in the FBI.
(You have to wonder if we're supposed to infer that Maria's dad really is a spy… though it's probably a coincidence that we've seen him working with Daniel Craig's James Bond in the Madagascar scenes at the start of "Casino Royale"!)
This is actually a bit naughty: random talents coming out of nowhere just when they are needed is a bit of a cheat on the audience – it breaks the old Chekhov's gun rule. You can just about get away with it with Alan, but there is just no acceptable reason for Clyde suddenly to be able to do the one thing that the plot needs him to do.
These flaws tend to undermine the second episode a little, which is much less a creepy psycho-drama and more of a stop-the-evil-computer action adventure. It's got great pace and energy – and good effects: the Moon falling towards the Earth is rather beautifully realised – and you can't not raise a cheer when Sarah pulls her secret weapon out of the hat.
This is actually another interesting point – clearly Mr Smith cannot realise what Sarah keeps in that safe on the opposite wall. I mean he's hardly likely to conceive that it's a portable black hole with a robot dog stuck in it, but it is interesting that Sarah has never talked to both of her synthetic friends simultaneously, nor introduced them before her – admitted dialogue triumph of – "meet my dog!"
Checking back to the DVD of "Invasion of the Bane", though, she does indeed only call on Mr Smith after she has bid K-9 a fond au revoir.
In the end, I think the joy at getting K-9 back, and in action, even for only a minute or two more than outweighs the slight downsides.
It's been a terrific first series, and heavily hinted in the CBBC broom-cupboard that it isn't the last.
Next Time… so what has the Doctor been up in the meantime? He's caught theFlight of the Darned* sorry, the Voyage of the Damned.
As I'm sure you know, 1994's short play for Radio 4 "Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman" saw the real Susan (Carole Ann Ford) replaced by Jane Asher. Guess what…
We're back on spooky territory this week, after the more sci-fi "Warriors of Kudlak", with a sinister cloaked figure altering the timeline with a wave of a finger, making Faustian bargains and trading in eerie puzzle boxes.
This is a more obviously Buffy/fantasy episode and we are clearly in the realm of magic: we take it for granted that sinister cloaked figures can do this sort of thing because, well, that's what sinister cloaked figures do.
Credited as "The Trickster" he has a terribly familiar line to any fans of the old Doctor Who: particularly those who remember a certain duck-hatted blackguard from the twentieth season, with a love of chaos, a penchant for sinister bargains sealed with strange trinkets and use of the line "waking or sleeping". On the other hand, the Black Guardian would seem a little out of proportion to Sarah Jane and this Trickster's keenness to encounter the Doctor suggests that he hasn't met him yet. Referring to Sarah as an "Ephemeral" is more reminiscent of the Eternals from "Enlightenment", though of course they had a connection to the Guardians too. "Eternals" have been mentioned a couple of times in the new Doctor Who (throwaway remarks in "Army of Ghosts" and "The Shakespeare Code"… by TV's Gareth Roberts, coincidentally!) and form an intriguing part of the series "greater mythology" in the post-Time War universe.
Alex though suggests, and I think he's right, that this fellow is most like the Shadow, the Guardian's stooge from "The Armageddon Factor"; even his half-made face is similar to the Shadow's half-skull visage, as though neither of them are quite real enough.
Of course, robbing some of the fruitier episodes of Doctor Who gives him an excellent line in dialogue and he glides through the proceedings like a malevolent spectre. He appears in a mirror, as did the Shadow to the Marshal of Atrios. But interestingly, he appears to Andrea in a mirror which, in the altered timeline, hangs on the attic wall where Mr Smith would normally reside. Which might be worth thinking about.
Andrea herself (Jane Asher, obviously) is the lady who lives across the road, a slightly earthy woman who paints, either for a living or as a hobby, and likes parties, especially her own. Well, no she's not, but the Trickster has changed history in order to wipe out Sarah Jane. The usual outcome of this situation is that the alternative Andrea would be either an obvious sinner who doesn't deserve to take Sarah's life, or a saint to make it poignant that she cannot have the life that belongs to another. But she's actually quite an interesting character, a real person, obviously not evil but not above being played as selfish and occasionally spiteful. Who wouldn't want to live if faced with death and given a second chance? We all know she made the wrong choice, but could we really know we would make the right one in her place?
Of course, Andrea doesn't really have a dilemma at the end, because there's a dirty great asteroid falling on her house – her choice is death or death, so it isn't so very hard to put right what she did wrong all those years ago. But it does need Maria to be there to point out that she has the choice to make – she'd never have realised that she'd been cheated… if it weren’t for those meddling kids. (Something that the Trickster should probably have thought of!)
With Sarah and Luke banished to limbo and Clyde relegated to "some boy from school" by the altered history, much of the episode hangs on the young shoulders of Yasmin Paige as Maria. I admit it: think she's probably the weakest as an actor of the three regular kids – though Clyde's character is least well-drawn, which somewhat undermines Daniel Anthony. But she does pretty well here, holding the story together as the traditional "only one who remembers". Since we, in the audience, have seen the Trickster casting his spell we are way ahead of her, but she manages not to look stupid as she catches up. At least not too often.
Then, in a seriously unexpected twist, Maria gets the same "taken out of time" treatment – with Graske cameo (and you've got to admire a series confident enough to just throw the Graske in with need to make it 'returning main villain') – leaving dad Alan to be the surprise hero. Clearly they've decided to quickly forgo the Buffy-esque "Dad never spots that Maria is the Slayer" theme and indeed the story ends with him expecting an explanation. Development, then, is being worked into the series' longer story, and a good thing too.
The time paradox story, someone changing the present by changing the past, oddly enough doesn't crop up in Doctor Who proper very often. Usually, the TARDIS takes the Doctor straight to the source of the interference. The usual example is "Pyramids of Mars" where the Doctor shows Sarah a future where he doesn't finish the job and stop Sutekh the Destroyer. The new series, of course, showed us the inside of a paradox in "Father's Day" and it's implied that the Daleks changed the history of the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, and that the Doctor altered Harriet Jones' timeline as Prime Minister (which Russell T Davies has admitted is what allowed the Master to step in and seize power).
So this "there's something not right with the world" type of story actually owes more to "Star Trek the Next Generation" – think "Yesterday's Enterprise" – or even "Sapphire and Steel".
But unlike those series, "Whatever Happened…" takes the trouble to be a part of an ongoing "real world". In fact a story that by its very nature demands a reset switch seems to be the least reset-y of the series so far.
Writer Gareth Roberts has thought about the questions that the viewer is going to ask. He has Sarah demand of the Trickster what happened to the previous stories, all those invasions that she stopped – the Bane, the Slitheen, the Gorgons – which is certainly what I was asking, and what a lot of regular viewers will have been asking. And we don't mind the Trickster airily dismissing them with an "I sent them away", because at least the question hasn't been ducked. It's implicit that the entity had to work to find an alternative timeline that would still be valid up to the point where his random asteroid smashes the Earth. (Which also satisfies the "and why aren't you doing this all the time?" question.)
This series of Sarah Jane Adventures just keeps on getting better (fingers crossed for the final story). To me, they seem to be better at the genuine ghostly stories – ironic, given the dismal nature of the witchcraft plot in "K-9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend". Or maybe not, since that was just total Scooby Doo – no alien / extra-dimensional intruders at all, which clearly misses the point of what Sarah's life ought to be about: finding marvellous things, here on Earth.
Next time… Could Luke have had a life before Sarah Jane rescued him from the Bane? And what happens when a Smith goes bad? Someone is out for revenge on "The Lost Boy".
