The Sarah Jane Adventures
does Tron – almost. It’s such a neat idea that you wonder why Doctor Who didn’t
get there first (in fact, they almost did, before the hiatus nobbled The
Nightmare Fair back in the eighties). Since kids aren’t exactly hanging around
arcades these days, the conceit is updated to a more modern shoot-em-up arena:
the kind of laser zone place where teens hang out to get jacked up on plastic
cups of weak squash, warm pizza, and war games. Luke, desperate to become more
like a Real Boy, is getting confused by jokes (and in deference to this
episode’s Lesson Of The Week, he discovers that some types of teasing is
actually bullying). What he can’t quite get his head around, however, is that
adolescents (and indeed grown ups in arrested development) choose to pretend to
kill one another for fun. Those of the audience who already know how these
types of stories play out can already guess what’s going to happen: there is a
dark and mysterious presence lurking in the shadows, picking off the best
fighters for their own nefarious purposes. This means that to a certain extent
the curse of the cliff-hanger hangs heavy: the plot is required to spin on its
wheels slightly, and the characters are restrained from knowing too much too
early, while they’re put in place to meet Certain Danger at the 25 minute mark.
Actually, that’s slightly
unfair, since the plot wheels spin around entertainingly enough. There’s a
nasty (human) villain straight out of Eastenders Cockney Casting (in fact, he’s
called Grantham, which surely cannot be a coincidence), which gives a human
face to this week’s alien menace. Sarah Jane subtly manages to employ her NLP
journalist training when snaffling details from reluctant interviewees, while
Daniel Anthony’s Clyde Langer continues to be the character that the writers
clearly have most fun creating dialogue for (‘We’ll get back to Slang 101
later,’).
The stand-out scene,
however, is where The Sarah Jane Adventures once again fully leans into that
sweet spot where the Venn diagram of the show’s true core audience is: and it
ain’t the kids. In a delightfully over-worked sequence, Elisabeth Sladen gets
to cosplay as Kate Bush – or more specifically, Kate Bush circa the
Cloudbusting video, as she essentially invents a steampunky machine that is
able to manipulate local weather conditions. Well, it’s a hobby.
Meanwhile, Mr Smith
continues to get more sniffily impatient than you might expect from a computer,
and there’s a mild lesson regarding Stranger Danger: both Clyde and Luke are
sent into danger by a charismatic older man telling them that they’re special.
As indeed they are: the unseen alien presence certainly thinks so, anyway. As
to what they’ve been selected for: that revelation will have to wait for the
next episode …
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