Friday, 5 April 2019

Beyond The TARDIS Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? Part 2 by Andrew Allen



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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