The proof of Sarah Jane’s special status among Doctor Who companions is that she’s the only one ever to be spun off into her own show. Most fans know about The Sarah Jane Adventures, but in 1981 John Nathan-Turner decided to have his cake and eat it, too, by eliminating K9 (whom he hated but children loved) from the main show and giving him a show of his own, starring none other than Sarah Jane. The show was to be called K9 and Company, and the pilot episode, A Girl’s Best Friend, was broadcast at Christmas, 1981. If you can get past the terrible credit sequence (featuring the irritating post-disco music which was so prevalent on US television at the time, and Sarah Jane sporting that awful early ’80s asymetric ponytail we also see on “Enlightenment” in “Four to Doomsday“), what you’ll find is a show (written by the same dude who penned the aforementioned dud) which actually isn’t that bad. Sarah Jane’s nephew, who was clearly intended to play “companion” to her “doctor”, isn’t any worse than many companions of the actual Doctor, and if the story were a Doctor Who two-parter I’d rate it as average and a bit derivative, with an anticlimactic ending. However, Liz Sladen doesn’t slouch even one iota in her portrayal of Sarah Jane several years after the end of her travels with The Doctor, and when she finds (in 1981) a crate he left for her (in 1978, apparently during the gap between “The Invasion of Time” and “The Ribos Operation“) containing K9 Mark III, her apostrophe “Oh Doctor, you didn’t forget!” is warm, heartfelt, and bittersweet. I like to imagine that after Leela’s departure, the Doc felt a bit lonely and decided to approach Sarah Jane to travel with him again, but when he arrived at her Aunt Lavinia’s he found her off wandering the world under her own power, in search of some story, and decided to leave her his spare K9 (having just replaced his own) as a present. And speaking of Aunt Lavinia, this is the first time we actually see her since she was first mentioned in “The Time Warrior” (when young Sarah Jane unsuccessfully tried to pass as her to get into a government lab). Though the pilot never sold, the story is considered canonical, and when Sarah Jane meets The Doctor again in his 10th incarnation, she has K9 in the trunk of her car; furthermore, there are references to her unseen ’80s and ’90s adventures in her own show later. And we certainly can’t forget both Sarah Jane and K9’s appearance in “The Five Doctors“.
One of those unseen adventures is depicted in Downtime, a 1995 direct-to-video feature in which the character of Kate Stewart first appeared; the Great Intelligence possessed Victoria Waterfield in 1980 (a few years after she leaves The Doctor in “Fury from the Deep“, set in 1975) and got her to set up an institution it then used to attempt to take over the very young internet. So both The Brigadier and his daughter are swept up into the action, as is none other than Sarah Jane Smith, investigating the mysterious “institute”. Oh, and the Intelligence is possessing the body of Professor Travers, who died in 1980. All of the characters are played by their original actors, licensed directly from the writers who created them by means of a loophole in the way the BBC does writers’ contracts. The story is neither “officially” canonical nor especially great, but it’s entertaining and far more respectful of canon than the majority of the Chibnall-era episodes. Indeed, given that the next time (by in-universe chronology) we see the Intelligence it’s still living in the internet, and given that this story shows Kate reconciling with her father after years of estrangement due to her parents’ divorce (an event hinted at in “Battlefield“, set two years after “Downtime”), and given that we see Sarah Jane already doing the kind of stuff we see her doing in her own show 12 years later, I’d have to say that this one is much more canonical than most 13th-Doctor stuff and even a few of the sillier 12th-Doctor entries. The first half is kinda confusing, but by the second it all makes sense and stands up with average Doctor Who stories.
Series 1
When it comes to Doctor Who spinoffs, I only LIKE Torchwood, but I absolutely LOVE The Sarah Jane Adventures. Though the BBC classified it as a kids’ show, this mostly means no sex scenes and less-overt violence rather than dumbed-down stories and over-the-top or just plain bad acting (as is so often the case in US kids’ shows). The Sarah Jane Adventures has neither; the stories, acting and production values are all easily as good as those in the parent series, and Liz Sladen’s portrayal of the beloved heroine is as though she had never left the series. Even the kid sidekicks don’t bring the show down; they’re portrayed as bright, competent teens, and it isn’t like The Doctor himself hasn’t had teenaged companions before (Susan, Jamie, Zoe, Ace…) including some (Vicki, Victoria) who were far more annoying than any who appear in five seasons of Sarah Jane. The first episode, Invasion of the Bane, easily stands alongside the top 20% of Doctor Who stories; the monsters are creepy and genuinely threatening, their scheme is credible, and their focus on spreading buzz by targeting teenagers is both devilishly clever in-universe and a perfect, believable way to bring teen helpers into Sarah Jane’s world. As for the title character, Liz Sladen’s portrayal of her is pitch-perfect; she’s the same lady we love, albeit 30 years older, wiser, and pricklier due to living a very solitary life for over two decades. Her adventures with The Doctor (not to mention her equipment, which he seems to provided even though we aren’t explicitly told that’s the case) have made her into a kickass adventurer in her own right, even to the point of having learned some portion of his trademark bravado. Indeed, she is very much the Doctor analogue of this series, the mysterious, solitary force for good who knows a helluva lot more than she’s telling and is often thought mad by others due to her habit of saying incomprehensible things and displaying weird, often off-putting habits. The standoffishness and (let’s be honest) outright rudeness she displays through the first half of the story are very realistic for a person who has lived as she has for as long as she has, especially given that she already displayed a little of that when we first met her at the age of 23. Her opening up to Maria and Luke is both natural and believable, and the way she speaks about The Doctor is both moving and follows from her words in “School Reunion“. Last but not least, the story had exactly the right amount of fanservice, especially K9 and the memorabilia in her secret attic, linking the show solidly to its roots without being a mere indulgence in unproductive nostalgia.
In Revenge of the Slitheen, there’s another link back to “School Reunion“: though Sarah Jane has never met the Slitheen, she remembers Rose mentioning them. And just as when she was a companion, Sarah Jane never misses a trick; despite the Slitheen power drain cutting off access to “Mr. Smith” and her scanner, she and her gang are able to figure out how to defeat them anyhow. The Slitheen are really perfect villains for this show; despite being a credible threat, the farting and giggling marked them as kid stuff from their first appearance in “Aliens of London“. Since this was the first regular episode of the series, airing a full nine months after the pilot, it serves as a second introduction, bringing in the “cool kid” Clyde Langer to serve as a foil to Luke’s brilliant-but-square character, and giving Sarah Jane an opportunity to recap her time with The Doctor for new audience members; it’s an important part of the story because the intended audience in 2007 wasn’t yet born when Sarah left Doctor Who in 1976. And just as in the previous episode, there’s a little nostalgia for parents watching along: though Sarah Jane & her team defeat the aliens by destroying one of the links in their giant circuit, she calls on UNIT to clean up the rest, and is heard to say, “Give my love to the Brig.”
Eye of the Gorgon is such a good old-fashioned Doctor Who tale one almost forgets it’s actually an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Sarah Jane has clearly learned a lot from The Doctor; after decades of working on her own, she has now learned to trust her young companions even to the point of giving them separate missions and entrusting Maria with her “sonic lipstick”. Speaking of Maria, this is the second adventure in a row where she is the one who “pulls the trigger” (so to speak) on an alien menace; at this rate that girl would have racked up a pretty impressive body count by the time she was 16. My favorite part of this one, though, was the character of Bea Nelson-Stanley, whose amazing adventures with her late archaeologist husband (including an encounter with the Sontarans and battling one of the Gorgons) must remain forever a mystery, since they are buried in a brain now impaired by an advanced case of Alzheimer’s. One wonders whether perhaps the intrepid duo ever met The Doctor (perhaps the Second?), in an unaired adventure we can only guess at.
The plot of Warriors of Kudlak is basically the same as that of The Last Starfighter: aliens with insufficient manpower to fight a war they’re losing use combat games to secretly recruit human adolescents as warriors. But there the similarity stops; while the 1984 movie presented a Manichean situation in which the recruiters were unambiguously “goodies” and the rest of the movie was fairly predictable, the Sarah Jane episode presented a far less black-and-white situation stripped of war-and-glory drum-beating in which one of the three main adversaries is revealed to be an honorable warrior misled by a lying megalomaniacal computer, and Sarah Jane demonstrates she has a spine of steel as she calmly faces down an actual villain pointing a gun at her face.
Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? introduces The Trickster, a malevolent entity who lives outside of normal spacetime and feeds on chaos. This creature is what the Black Guardian should have been: a godlike being who is limited mainly by the fact that he can only act in normal spacetime by securing the cooperation of a free-willed entity who is involved in whatever he wishes to change. In this case, he returns to the moment when 13-year-old Sarah Jane’s best friend Andrea fell to her death from a closed pier and gets her to agree to change places, so that Sarah Jane died instead and is therefore unavailable to save the world from its random, pointless destruction by an asteroid strike (a completely-chaotic event which will feed The Trickster). And the only person who remembers that Sarah Jane ever existed is Maria, due to Sarah Jane’s gift of a Hellraiser puzzle box which allows her to remember the original timeline. As is so often true of this series, the story is absolutely worthy of Doctor Who, and before his defeat The Trickster tells Sarah Jane that he has set his sights on The Doctor, who has defeated the forces of chaos many times. The only real gripe I have is with the ending; as I’ve pointed out before, even good science fantasy writers often have difficulty handling timeline shifts. Once the timeline was repaired, it had always been that way since 1964, which means Mr. Smith was around to stop the strike before anyone detected it, not at the last minute. And since Andrea died in 1964, she wasn’t alive in 2009 to have a birthday and invite all those people to Bannerman Road. When the timeline was restored, all the people standing in the street should’ve returned to where they would have been, and the only people who should remember any of it were those who handled the box. But again, this is a very common mistake in time-travel plots & doesn’t really affect anything except the way the last 5 minutes are handled onscreen; it doesn’t stop this from being an excellent story. And very few writers can handle such paradoxes well.
Poor Sarah Jane is put through the wringer AGAIN in the very next episode, The Lost Boy, when disguised Slitheen (in their new and improved skin suits which allow them to masquerade as people who aren’t very large, and eliminate the farting) looking for revenge (again) use the UK bureaucracy to openly abduct and imprison Luke, and would’ve had Sarah Jane locked up if not for the intervention of UNIT. And even that wouldn’t have worked without the cooperation of none other than Sarah Jane’s own supercomputer, Mr. Smith, whose evil origins are revealed herein, necessitating the intervention of K9 and a new ally: Maria’s computer-expert dad, who found out about his daughter’s secret life in the previous episode. As is the case with most episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures, this easily stands beside better Doctor Who tales, and I’m even willing to hand-wave away the absurd (and essentially impossible, though common in comic-book type stories) idea of pulling the Moon down from orbit as dramatic hyperbole to circumvent the necessity of depicting the graphically-violent (and therefore prohibited on BBC Kids) possibilities of psychokinesis.
Series 2
I wish there had been a few hints, even oblique ones, about the events of “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End” in the next episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but there were not despite the fact that The Last Sontaran is a direct sequel to “The Poison Sky“. In it, Sarah Jane must battle a lone Sontaran commando, trained & equipped to operate behind enemy lines (which is probably why he can recognize human sex differences, which most Sontarans have trouble recognizing); she’s fought Sontarans before, in her very first adventure with The Doctor and again in “The Sontaran Experiment“, so she knows just how dangerous they are and is ready to run and call in UNIT before the Sontaran derails that plan by capturing her. His eventual defeat sets him up as another villain who will later return seeking revenge for his humiliation at the hands of women and teenagers, but the major development in this story is the departure of Maria, whose father has received a big promotion which will require their move to America.
Day of the Clown would probably have been a much better story had the writer actually understood what a “child” is. When the Pied Piper came to Hamelin in 1284, teens of Clyde’s, Luke’s and Rani’s age would have been called “youths” and “maidens”, not “children”; the idea that such young adults could be lured by clowns and balloons is not only silly, but betrays a jarring ignorance of reality that shatters the story’s credibility. Add to that Rani’s being tossed in haphazardly as a replacement for Maria instead of developed as a character in her own right, and the simple way Sarah Jane wraps it up with cell phones and a meteorite fragment, and we have a formula for a very weak episode despite the clever Marlowe mechanism used to defeat the monster (“The devil…that…proud spirit cannot endure to be mocked”).
Secrets of the Stars is arguably the weakest episode of the first two seasons; its premise is yet another example of the overused “aliens from the Dawn of Time” scenario, which as I’ve pointed out before allows foes who would otherwise be just regular enemies to be portrayed as VAST COSMIC MENACES. In this case they could’ve portrayed the con artist astrologer’s newfound powers as somehow derived from the Earth’s recent shift to a different constellation and back, but NOPE; it’s just basically “he believes in BS that wasn’t BS in a different universe so he can affect everyone in the world, no saving throw, except for the Kid Who Was Never Born”. Worst of all, the story just kind of plods along formulaically to its highly-predictable end.
IMHO, heroic fantasy adventure stories are better when whatever menace the hero is up against does not threaten the entire world or even the entire UNIVERSE. If the hero is powerful enough (as in Doctor Who) the occasional global or universal threat is fun, but if the hero has less godlike resources (as in Torchwood) or just a few super-resources (as in The Sarah Jane Adventures), I prefer the menaces to be local, with maybe the occasional global threat in a season finale. So Mark of the Berserker is of just the right size; it features one bad guy (Clyde’s dad, who was a sociopathic arsehole even before he stole an alien mind-control device) whose powers are limited to controlling those he actually meets, at a heavy cost to himself; contrast that with the villain of the preceding episode, who can control everybody, everywhere on Earth, with no obvious cost to himself. While you’re at it, contrast the means by which each villain is defeated by one of Sarah Jane’s young companions, and I think you’ll see why I find “Berserker” far more satisfying than “Secrets”.
While the second season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was weaker than the first, it ended with a pair of strong, solid stories, both of them double sequels. The first of them, The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, features the return of The Trickster and is thus a sequel to “Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?” But because the titular “temptation” involves the Trickster tricking our heroine into saving the lives of her own parents, this is also a thematic sequel to the Doctor Who story “Father’s Day“. You may recall that I judged the 9th Doctor very harshly for his poor judgment in that story, but I don’t judge Sarah Jane nearly as harshly for three main reasons:
1) She was intentionally deceived by a godlike entity, whereas The Doctor had nobody to blame but himself;
2) Unlike The Doctor, Sarah Jane is “not a thousand-year-old alien time traveler from the most advanced planet in the universe” [and she’s] “without any advanced PhDs from 10-million-year-old god universities”;
3) While The Doctor stands around helplessly, leaving the obvious solution to an ordinary man, Sarah Jane fixes her own mess with the help of her parents, because as it turns out the apple didn’t fall far from the tree; her parents were both brave, wise, and brilliant, and she clearly inherited her razor-sharp intellect and finely-honed powers of observation from her mother, who despite being an ordinary British housewife in 1951 manages to figure out who Sarah Jane is, what’s going on, and what needs to be done. The story is by no means perfect; for example, I think it would’ve been better had the consequences been results of Sarah Jane never meeting The Doctor (a la “Turn Left“) rather than the results of direct actions by The Trickster himself, who didn’t seem to have that kind of power before; his enslaving humans to dig in the.alternate timeline doesn’t make any sense at all. But that’s true of lots of Whoniverse stories, and the character development in this one (Clyde in particular is really starting to shine in this season) is good enough for me to be willing to ignore a few clunky plot details.
One thing that can be said for Russell T. Davies is that he really knows how to do season finales, and that’s just as true of The Sarah Jane Adventures as it is of Doctor Who. Enemy of the Bane is a sequel to both “Invasion of the Bane” and “The Last Sontaran“, and has as much packed into a two-parter as Classic Who often had in a four-parter. Mrs. Wormwood is now outcast from her own people due to the “Bubble Shock” fiasco, and the titular Sontaran is outcast from his people due to his failure, and both of them blame Sarah Jane and therefore team up for revenge. The plot has a healthy helping of twists and turns, and Sarah Jane seeks the help of an old friend, The Brigadier, now “Sir Alistair”, who can get her into UNIT’s “Black Archive” (which is something like that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only somewhat smaller and much better organized). Seeing the old Brig (who despite walking with a cane is not helpless) in action again was just wonderful, and the conclusion is deeply satisfying.
Series 3
The third season opened with Prisoner of the Judoon, featuring one of the Shadow Proclamation’s brutal, simple-minded, rhino-headed cops crashing near London and allowing his prisoner – a thoroughly-nasty serial killer of entire worlds named Androvax with the ability to take over others’ bodies by simply “stepping into” them; the creature was the in absolute control, yet could access all of the victim’s memories. In Sarah Jane’s case, that gave him access to a lot of dangerous information and weaponry, and left Luke, Clyde and Rani (mostly hampered by the Lawful Stupid Judoon captain) to save the Earth from a horde of nanorobots the villain uses to build a duplicate of the Roswell saucer (exactly as it appeared in “Dreamland“) and then plans to set loose to destroy the Earth. It’s a very uneven story; on the plus side, the kids’ mockery of the space cop is funny, and Liz Sladen portrays the alien-possessed Sarah Jane in a creepy, repulsive manner just by posture and facial expressions. On the minus side, the Judoon are always highly irritating to me as a lifelong, diehard anti-authoritarian, and it’s not always spiced with humor (who the hell do the “Shadow Proclamation” think they are, anyhow?) Beyond that, the menace is dealt with far too neatly and quickly, just in time for the credits.
The Mad Woman in the Attic [sic] is a good example of a “framed” story which doesn’t actually seem to know how to resolve the frame. I get that they’re doing a time loop, but the frame doesn’t actually add anything to the story, so using it as the source of the title is rather misleading, and not in a good way. And resolving it with a plot device only slightly less trite than “It was all a dream” is extremely disappointing. As for the story itself, it was OK I guess, but a bit more juvenile than is typical for the series.
The Trickster is one of the nastiest villains in the Whoniverse; though his schemes are comparable in evilness to other Who supervillains, he seems to take special joy in setting up situations so that even after he’s defeated, his target and everyone else involved feels like shit. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is a perfect example of this; since he gains power over people by offering to save them or their loved ones from imminent death, he sets up the situation so that good people are forced to take actions that will send others to their deaths, thus souring the taste of victory and leaving his opponents with guilt and sorrow rather than relief. Fortunately for Sarah Jane, The Doctor has detected The Trickster’s presence this time around and keeps trying to break through the temporal distortion the godlike villain has set up, finally succeeding at the exact right moment for maximum dramatic effect in any story involving a wedding. The kids, especially Clyde, help The Doctor to ruin The Trickster’s scheme to keep Sarah Jane and her fiancé isolated from the others, but in the end the only person who can set things right is, as always in Trickster schemes, the one with whom he has made the deal. The interaction between The Doctor and Sarah Jane is always bittersweet; they both still clearly love each other even though their lives have taken them on different paths, and both K9’s presence and The Doctor’s intervention demonstrate that he still feels a powerful connection to her, especially at this time when he knows the end of his current incarnation is coming.
Big, solid, satisfying stories are always a hard act to follow, but I’m sorry to say that The Eternity Trap barely even tries. The setup isn’t a bad one: “an alien stranded on Earth allies himself with a local leader so as to have facilities & resources necessary to repair his means of getting home” is not only an adequate description of Sarah Jane’s very first adventure with The Doctor, but also of the exiled Third Doctor’s time with UNIT. And science-fictional explanations of hauntings have been a feature of the Whoniverse so regularly that it would take much too long to list them all. But the latter is the source of one of the problems with this story: Sarah Jane knows that extradimensional and/or noncorporeal life forms exist; she’s fought several herself, including The Trickster and the Pied Piper. So why does she go around this story obnoxiously pooh-poohing the existence of ghosts rather than saying something like, “I don’t believe that these phenomena are caused by the dead”? It makes her seem a bit socially clueless (given that the friend who invites her on the ghost hunt is a scientist who wants to make tests, not a spiritualist con artist) and dishonest (given her own weird experiences). On top of that, there just isn’t enough going on to fill the screen time, and what there is seems a bit confused and self-contradictory. All in all, this one probably could’ve been much better after a rewrite or two.
The inanity of the “I don’t believe in ghosts” cant Sarah Jane is given in “The Eternity Trap” is reinforced in the very next story, Mona Lisa’s Revenge, in which actual beings and objects materialize out of pictures and the titular villain’s “brother” resides in a painting which, in a nicely Lovecraftian touch, is locked up in a box hidden away in a museum’s cellar for centuries because everyone who looks upon it goes mad. The story is just too farfetched to take seriously, even in the Whoniverse; I mean, the idea that the French would ever lend the single most valuable painting in the world to a museum in London is more fantastical than all the premises in any given SEASON of The Sarah Jane Adventures. So I just watched it as a comedy, and in that sense it’s very entertaining. It was obvious that the actress playing “Mona Lisa” was having an absolute ball, with her not-at-all-posh English accent, 21st-century slang, and general bad-bitchiness; she completely upstages Sarah Jane, who spends nearly all of part two trapped in a painting. And best of all, the writer knew that the famous lady is painted on wood, not canvas, which is more than can be said for the late, great Douglas Adams.
P.S. – if you just can’t get enough of stories about supernatural entities trying to escape paintings, I wrote one you may enjoy. And if you like that one, there are plenty more like it in my collection, Ladies of the Night.
Davies & Co closed out the third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures with The Gift, a lighter tale than the finales of the first two seasons. Of course, the menace is still real, but that never stopped a story under the Doctor Who umbrella from being funny, especially when Sarah Jane’s arch-enemies the Slitheen (who, as I pointed out from the start, are hard to take seriously) are involved and their plot explodes in a gigantic fart, splattering our heroes with slime. Again.
Series 4
The absurdity of the “I don’t believe in ghosts” lines Sarah Jane was given in “The Eternity Trap” come back to haunt this thread again in The Nightmare Man, wherein a malevolent noncorporeal entity which feeds on fear and manifests through nightmares comes to haunt Luke, feeding on his fear about going to Oxford a year early and manifesting to attack his friends via his superior psychic powers. IOW, it’s Sarah Jane & Company vs a powerful ghost with the help of K9 and Mr. Smith, who set up a telepathic link which enables all the Nightmare Man’s victims to enter one dreamscape to fight him together. The story is actually very clever; it allows the show to explore Luke’s and the others’ feelings about his going away to school without the entire 50 minute screen time being just Sarah Jane and the kids sitting around talking about it. And I like “K9 is with Luke” a lot better as an excuse for keeping him sidelined much more than “K9 is floating in space monitoring a mini-black hole”.
Just how many secret vaults full of extraterrestrial objects are there on 20th/21st century Earth in the Whoniverse? Besides Torchwood’s extensive collection and numerous private collections (seen in episodes such as “Dalek” and “A Day in the Death“), there’s also the UNIT black archives and, as we now find out, The Vault of Secrets. This story sees the return of Androvax, the planetary serial killer, who has discovered that his race is not completely dead, and some of them are in suspended animation in a starship held in a hyperdimensional vault guarded by none other than the same android Men in Black encountered by The Doctor in “Dreamland“, who work for a group called the Alliance of Shades (a precursor to the Shadow Proclamation, perhaps?) It’s a redemption tale, both for Androvax and the android Mr. Dread, but while I can understand Sarah Jane’s wanting to rescue Androvax’s people, I’m sure there could’ve been some way of doing that without letting the incredibly dangerous monster loose on the universe. Yes, he’s dying, but there’s no telling how much damage he might cause before he finally drops; by betraying Sarah Jane’s trust in this story, he clearly demonstrates that he hasn’t reformed even one bit.
As was the case with “School Reunion“, when I sat down with Grace to rewatch The Death of the Doctor, I could not for the life of me remember what the villains’ evil plan was, because the return of Jo Grant eclipsed everything else in my memory. And really, I’ll probably need to refer to this if I want to remember it again later, because the alien plot (accomplished with the help of a corrupt UNIT officer) is just an excuse for bringing back Jo, who has never met Sarah Jane despite their having both been companions of the 3rd Doctor. To see my two favorite companions in action together, with a guest appearance by the 11th Doctor, was absolutely wonderful; Jo was just as one would predict her to be after having traveled the world with her husband as an environmental activist for the past 40 years. I loved the contrast between Sarah Jane (who has become deeply skeptical) and Jo (who has gone full-on-woo), and I really loved her reunion with The Doctor, who responds to her sadness at his never having visited her by revealing that during his farewell tour at the end of “The End of Time“, The Doctor didn’t only visit those he loved in his Tenth incarnation, but rather all of them, so even though Jo didn’t see him, he was able to tell her about her life down to the number of grandchildren (including the one on the way). And at the end, Sarah Jane reveals that she has also looked up other former companions: Ace runs a charity, and Ben & Polly have done similar work; Harry did important work on vaccines; Tegan is an activist for aboriginal rights; and Ian and Barbara are married Cambridge professors who haven’t aged since the ’60s (possibly in a lesser version of the Captain Jack effect). We are also told that Liz Shaw is apparently back with UNIT, currently stationed at their secret moonbase, and The Brigadier is still stuck in Peru on some secret mission, as previously mentioned at Sarah Jane’s wedding. This of course brings up the question of why so few of The Doctor’s friends were able to make it to his supposed funeral; I mean, Martha and Mickey even work for UNIT, so it should’ve been easy to get them here. But the question itself provides the answer: the traitorous Colonel Karim didn’t want too many companions there, both because of the possibility of overloading the “memory weave” (as eventually happened even with just the two) and because, while she was concerned with the threat posed by current UNIT operatives, she foolishly underestimated Jo, Sarah Jane, and her gang as “a couple of batty old pensioners and a bunch of teenagers”.
Though The Sarah Jane Adventures was considered a “kid’s show” by the BBC, remember that so was Classic Doctor Who; it’s still usually quite sophisticated by the standards of what US networks consider “kid’s shows”. Alas, The Empty Planet is an exception; it’s strictly kid stuff, though still of much higher quality than the pap dished out to American kids. The story’s main problem is one very common in Doctor Who: technology mismatch. The idea that a technology capable of teleporting every human being on Earth simultaneously, with Klaatuesque exceptions for vehicles in motion and the like, would NOT have any more effective means of locating a living person than sending a couple of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots to physically search for him in a city is completely absurd, and that these aliens can’t think of a less disruptive way to perform the search is just painfully silly. And they respect the Judoon’s authority enough to leave Clyde & Rani behind, but not the classification of Earth as a “Category 5” planet? What? This is definitely in the bottom tier of SJA tales.
Lost in Time is definitely a much better story than its predecessor; like the best tales from this series, it has a flavor much like that of a classic Doctor Who tale. It introduces a new recurring character, a mysterious Shopkeeper with an even more mysterious parrot, who not only knows about Sarah Jane and her gang, but has the power to open time portals. He sends each of the three in search of a mysterious metal object with the power to change history, but while Clyde and Rani get relatively major events (a Nazi invasion of England & Lady Jane Grey), Sarah Jane’s mission involves saving two unknown 1990s children from a house fire. Given that the situation caused a future echo in 1889 (where it caused a haunting) and was resolved by a Moffat-worthy timey-wimey intervention, I suspect the children would’ve later been revealed to grow up to be pivotal figures in the present; alas, the untimely death of Liz Sladen the next year ended any possibility of finding out, or of more than one brief reappearance of the Shopkeeper.
Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith was the last episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures broadcast during the life of its star, but it’s just an eerie coincidence; Elizabeth Sladen wasn’t diagnosed with pancreatic cancer until filming on the 5th season had already started. The coincidence even extends to the plot, in which Sarah Jane’s health suddenly and precipitously declines. Alas, in real life there was no evil alien plot behind Sladen’s illness, nor any way for Luke, the gang, K9 and Mr. Smith to save her. And so it’s difficult for a fan to watch the story without feeling sad. Fortunately, the producers did not mimic “Ruby White’s” plan to replace Sarah Jane so the show could go on without Sladen; ironically, in a franchise whose main character is replaced every few years, the producers have always shied away from bringing in new actors to play beloved characters whose performers have passed on. The same courtesy was later extended to The Brigadier when Nicholas Courtney died; his last appearance was in “Enemy of the Bane“.
Series 5
The final season contains only three stories rather than the usual six, cut short by Liz Sladen’s illness and subsequent death. None of the stories are especially notable in themselves, but are interesting for what they hint about where the series might have gone had Sladen died later. Sky features the first of what were probably going to be many returns for the mysterious Shopkeeper and his equally-mysterious parrot, plus another appearance of the eminently-likable Professor Celeste Rivers, Sarah Jane’s scientist ally from the Pharos Institute (whom we first met way back in “The Lost Boy“). The story is of course a parallel to Luke’s origin, in that baby Sky (who soon becomes a 12-year-old thanks to the venerable sci-fi trope I call “instant kid, just add plot device“) was actually engineered by aliens for nefarious reasons and is adopted by Sarah Jane at the end. Since Luke is off at Oxford and no longer appears in every episode, Sky was obviously intended as a replacement.
The Curse of Clyde Langer is another indication of the new direction the producers seemed to be taking The Sarah Jane Adventures; it is extremely dark for a kid’s show, and even unsettling for adults. Due to touching a totem pole in which an evil spirit (excuse me, an evil, deathless, noncorporeal alien) is imprisoned, Clyde becomes the victim of a curse (excuse me, “extremely powerful psychophonic programming”) which causes eveyone who hears or reads his name (even his friends and his own mother) to violently hate him, to the point of physical attack, calling the cops on him, and destroying his artwork; the latter felt especially brutal, given the love he pours into the work. The only person immune to the curse is Sky (probably because unlike Luke, she is only humanoid, not human), who (with the help of Mr. Smith) is able to prevail upon Sarah Jane and Rani to analyze their own behavior and thereby defeat the curse. Due to the curse Clyde temporarily becomes homeless and befriends a homeless teen girl (it’s subtly hinted she ran away due to sexual abuse) and there is no happy ending for her at the end of the story, due to a misunderstanding when the now-freed Sarah Jane comes to find Clyde. Given all this and the following story, it seems the show was taking a turn toward more overt examination of social issues via fantasy plots, a venerable sci-fi and fantasy strategy going back at least to The Twilight Zone and Star Trek.
The very last episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, The Man Who Never Was, is a satire of advertising hype & another shift toward a darker, more adult aesthetic with acknowledgement that there is a slave trade in aliens, as previously seen in Torchwood. But because this ISN’T Torchwood, the story doesn’t dwell upon the infrastructure which enabled the enslavement of the alien Skullions (a trade which incidentally figures in the penultimate episode of “Miracle Day“), but rather concentrates on the immediate enslavement of these specific creatures, and how Sarah Jane and the gang free them while defeating the villain’s evil (but sadly typical) plot to become incredibly wealthy by concentrating on marketing rather than R & D so as to pass off an unimpressive product as the newest “must have”. The scenes of the “Joseph Serf” hologram glitching and twitching, and Sarah Jane’s attempt to unmask the deception while yet maintaining proper journalistic decorum are both very British and very funny, as are Clyde & Rani’s elaborate precautions to assure themselves that the “Serfboard” really IS just a harmless tablet-style computer. And because this became the last episode of the series, an end narration put together from other Liz Sladen narrations was added at the end as a sad but fitting close.
