As we move towards the end
of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the show continues to swagger
with an impressive amount of confidence. It’s telling, for instance, that the
show is already adept at showing a ‘Sarah-lite’ episode, and indeed one in
which the lack of the titular character is indeed the entire point of the
story. So, where were we last time? How’s – to coin a phrase – tricks? The
Trickster is scrubbing heroes out of existence, Maria can’t help, a meteor is
plunging to Earth, and Sarah Jane isn’t around to help (neither is Bruce
Willis, for that matter, a fact that Clyde subtly refers to).
There’s a brief interlude
in sixties England as Maria tries to convince a young Sarah Jane that things
are going very wrong, and that it’s up to her to help – quite accidentally,
making Maria this episode’s version of Clara Oswald to The Doctor in Listen.
Young Sarah Jane is depicted as ‘clever, but not a swot’, and it’s worth noting
that while she’s sensible to the point of being accused of dullness, her sense
of unashamed adventure is in her DNA right from the start – she’s more than
happy to give in to her best friend’s peer pressure and investigate the
abandoned jetty. It’s not long before Maria is zapped to a limbo world, one
that looks somewhat like the dreamscape of the It’s A Good Life segment of
Twilight Zone: The Movie. Here, Sarah Jane pops up again to give us the plot,
becoming very much a surrogate Doctor Who – and as such, gets in a few
era-appropriate quips that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from David
Tennant, demanding of the mysterious villain ‘Any chance you could be a little
less cryptic?’
In answer to that
question, the Trickster suggests that Sarah Jane is a vitally important human
in the universe (obviously we already knew that), while neatly explaining away
the continuity issue of why none of Sarah Jane’s previous victories are
relevant to this story – although he does tantalisingly seem to suggest The
Doctor is still his main focus, even if whatever he and Sarah Jane did together
has now been erased from existence.
Back on Earth, Andrea
(Jane Asher) is offering people cake (presumably not her own brand) and
listening to old sixties songs, trying to forget her ongoing problems as the
speakers blare out Always Something There To Remind Me. In the end – as is
often the case with the Russell T Davies era – the world is saved not by the
titular character, but by a seemingly unimportant person with everything to lose
and even more to sacrifice for the greater good. And so it is with Andrea who
manages to face her demons, accepting that she has had a wonderful life, even
if that life will now never have happened, although Jane Asher gets a great
scene in which she finds the idea that she’s the one who is ‘supposed’ to have
died genuinely offensive. At the risk of
belabouring a point, there is something quite wonderful about the pivotal scene
in a sci-fi show for kids hinging on two women in their sixties declaring to one
another how important their friendship is.
Andrea’s defence of
trading Sarah Jane’s life for her own is well played also – ‘I was thirteen; I
was terrified’, and blends in well with moments of levity – Alan knocking out
the Graske by riding Clyde’s skateboard into him, and Chrissie witnessing her
first alien with the entirely reasonable dismissal ‘That’s ridiculous.’
When Andrea decides to
revoke her agreement to The Trickster (thereby restoring the timeline to the
correct reality), we are told that it was her death as a child that formed
Sarah Jane’s sense of righteousness and desire to put the world(s) to rights.
Sarah Jane tells her friend that she was never forgotten, and later – once the
meteor crisis is averted – is swift to say that it was Andrea that saved the
world. As everyone’s memories come back, Alan finds that he knows more than he
may have wanted to about aliens, and demands answers. But that’s a story for
another time.
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