Sunday, 5 April 2020

Beyond The TARDIS Mark of the Berserker Part 2 by Andrew Allen



After a quick recap of last week’s misadventures. Rani and Luke do the logical thing, and attempt to ring Sarah Jane herself for help – leading to a cute cameo from Lis Sladen who’s turned her phone off in accordance with the rules of the hospital in which she’s alien-hunting (apparently the ward is OK with all other sonic devices). When they can’t get in touch with the lead of the show, Rani and Luke begin to call up the rest of the supporting cast, leading to another cute cameo from Mariah and her dad, who manage remarkably quickly to hack into the secret files of UNIT and find out the history of this week’s Scary Alien Artefact.

Meanwhile, Clyde’s dad is fulfilling his function as Typical Nightmare Weekend Divorced Dad by getting his son lots of new clothes and driving around in a flashily expensive car (yes, it’s all stolen, but that’s almost beside the point).Clyde has renounced his friends and any degree of interest in ever saving the world again. It reminds you of what the style of the Doctor Who universe was when it was being overseen by Russell T Davies – OK, fine, have the world about to end, but if you can’t push that crisis into the background in order to concentrate on a family dispute, then the story isn’t worth doing.

In this, the script is subtly economical too, never taking half a page of dialogue to achieve what can be delivered in just a few words: as soon as Carla discovers that Paul’s car is heading towards the marina, her reaction is absolute and immediate: ‘He’s taking my baby,’ she cries, terrified. We’ve said it before, but in many ways SJA, via its script, very often proves itself to be somewhat more mature than its parent show (no, we’re not even entertaining the possibility that one might call Torchwood ‘mature’ – not without smirking, anyway).

By the end of the episode, everyone is gridlocked into an immovable position – how exactly can you defeat a force that can bend everyone to its will? This is a story that has very little of Sarah Jane in the episodes, which is a trick that the concurrent seasons of Doctor Who used to do. But – with the exception of Turn Left – those stories were not particularly concerned with the absence of the title character – indeed, in Love & Monsters, or Blink, the Doctor still prowls around the edges and influences the plot. This double of Sarah Jane Adventures goes a little further, suggesting that as powerful and resourceful as the supporting cast are, the story cannot continue without Sarah Jane, and the day can be won only by bringing the star of the show back into the mix: which is exactly what the episode does, with a quick handwave of exposition to explain why she’s suddenly in the right place at the right time.

By the time we get to the epilogue, Clyde gets to talk about his ‘found’ family – Sarah and friends – indicating that he is who he is because of knowing them – while Ms Smith gets to briefly mention her own parents, which is so incongruous it can only be a plot seeding for a forthcoming episode ..   

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