Thursday, 4 October 2018

Beyond The TARDIS SJA: Warriors of Kudlak: Part 2 by Andrew Allen



While the first episode of this adventure risked standing on the spot while on the central characters run up multiple platforms, episode two sometimes runs the risk of being almost too like a computer game shoot-em-up: there's lots of thrilling running around and shooting lasers, but comparatively minimal story. That said, there is a cute argument to be made about our relationship with violence to be made by the denouement of the episode which we'll chat about in a moment, but in the meantime, it's an episode of boys will be boys with plastic guns.

Because Clyde is required to be funny and derisive at least forty percent of the time, he also has to be curiously slow on the uptake when it comes to making a journey by transmat, assuming it to be a well-budgeted special effect (and he's supposed to be smart). Speaking of special effect budgets, this week's monster saves on his by the time honoured method of wearing a Very Long Coat while chasing Maria and Sarah around corridors, the latter of whom gets a line to calm the kids and infuriate the older continity freaks when she refers to her 'UNIT training'.

Sarah deduces pretty quickly that Kudlak is recruiting soldiers, at the same time that Clyde and Luke discover the bunch of kids who will soon be fighting in an unseen war, who our two friends soon recruit themselves to rise up against whoever it is that's got their fingers on the controls. Star Trek, Planet Of The Apes and even Terminator 2 get referenced within minutes of one another (and Sarah gets called a 'cool old bird'), but it soon becomes apparent that war cannot be fought if the combatants are not willing. 'Fight your own wars. It's got nothing to do with us', snaps Clyde, while the response, hinting at the episode's end, suggest that without war, the cosmos has no need of soldiers.

Ultimately, it is revealed that - much like a real computer game - there is no war, but no shortage of desire to fight one, whatever the cost, something that humans themselves have been guilty of, even at the cost of their own lives. 'I think if more people saw the Earth like this,' says Sarah, observing her home planet from above, 'They might appreciate it more.' It's this odd sense of nobility that closes the episode, as we say goodbye to a monster bred for war and finds itself purposeless when stripped of a need to fight - which is not a million light years away from the very first creature Sarah Jane Smith met way back in her debut story of Doctor Who. Time makes a monster of us all.

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