Tuesday, 4 September 2018

Beyond The TARDIS SJA: Warriors of Kudlak Part One by Andrew Allen



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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