Episode
One
It
will frankly never stop being somewhat remarkable that a kid’s TV show with
lasers, aliens, and monsters has as its protagonist a woman in her fifties, and
more than that, one that leans in deeply to that woman’s hopes, desires and
preoccupations without making her seem like an alien to the young viewers.
Of
course, the great thing about The Sarah
Jane Adventures – and Elisabeth Sladen’s performance of the part – was that
we could always recognise implicitly what she was going through, even if we
hadn’t had personal experience of the events ourselves. In The Temptation Of Sarah Jane Smith, we’re allowed to see a
significantly more vulnerable Sarah than we’ve seen elsewhere: yeah, sure,
she’s screamed often enough in seventies Doctor
Who, and she holds Luke tight when she thinks the Daleks are about to
exterminate everything in ‘Journey’s End’, but here – like many of the best
stories in SJA – the truly terrifying
battle is happening in her own heart.
It all
starts innocently end-of-a-previous-adventure enough when Team SJ attempt to
return a scared kid, looking like a cross between a manic Just William and a depressed Milky Bar Kid, back to his own time,
from where (when) he has become lost. There’s a rip in time – a fissure – and
Sarah has to return the lost boy back to the fifties, and close up the gap
(‘like a time energy puncture repair kit’, Luke suggests. The kid needs an
accompanying hand, however, and when Sarah goes back with him, she discovers
that there’s a jump in geography as well as time.
Apart
from slightly, quietly and outrageously settling once and for all the UNIT
dating controversy, and ignoring Sarah’s statement of her home era in Pyramids Of Mars (that’s not the only
thing Sarah will choose to ignore about Pyramids
in this story), Sarah Jane Smith pretty quickly deduces that some boxes are
best left unopened (perhaps she saw the title of this adventure), and turns on
her heel before she starts to look for parents. At which point – perhaps
inevitably – The Trickster turns up, to provide some pre-title credit
Diabolical Laughter ™.
Everyone
soon suspects that Sarah’s trip to the past has unduly disturbed her – ‘She
didn’t even complain when Steve Wright came on the radio,’ remarks Clyde, which
tells you a) just how bad things have got, and b) that the kids round here
really don’t keep to regular school hours. Sarah’s determined to do the right
thing, and not mess around with time (‘The Doctor .. knew what he was doing,’
she comments, ‘most of the time.’
Luke
is given the task of finding out what’s wrong with his mum, and after a while
she tells him: on the other side of the ruptured time fissure are her parents,
Barbara and Eddie Smith, shortly before they die in a car crash. Sarah also
reveals that they had apparently abandoned her as a baby just before they died.
Nobody knows that part of her history, she says – not even The Doctor.
She
acknowledges that being so close to a pivotal, fixed point in time of her life
is almost certainly a trap, and declares that she’s strong enough to say no.
Luke doesn’t dissuade her – in fact, he’s downright persuasive, which almost
hints at an earlier version of the script where the part of Luke was being
played by The Trickster. In the end, he goes with her to the past, while taking
the mickey out of her clothes (he doesn’t really have the right too, though: of
course Sarah Jane Smith’s idea of a typical 1950s skirt would come complete
with pockets).
Sarah
decides pretty rapidly that she won’t come into contact with herself as a child
(she doesn’t mention the BLE to Luke, but it’s fair to assume he could do the
maths), but will attempt to save the lives of her parents. Her rationalising
over her emotions is by necessity a slightly rushed affair (of which more next
episode). Meanwhile, Rani and Clyde discover that a Graske was cosplaying as
Creepy Kid, and attempt to save Sarah that way, by utilising a helpful box that
protects them from (a certain amount of) harm.
So,
yes – this is the episode in which a pair of charismatic jobbing character
actors take on a gig for a children’s TV show, perhaps barely aware of the
level of fandom that are going to be watching their every move far-too-keenly.
Although, if there’s any justice, they now have a guaranteed route to the
comic-con circuit for the rest of their professional lives as the mum and dad
of Sarah Jane Smith.
There’s
a very decent cliff-hanger image that looks like a cross between the image of
the future The Doctor once warned Sarah about, and the UK posters for the movie
The Day After Tomorrow. Having now
set itself up as a companion piece to both ‘Turn Left’ and ‘Father’s Day’, this
episode does a lot to suggest that Sarah Jane is the most important companion
in the world. And we can hardly argue with that.
Episode
Two
The
second episode of this two-parter is both far too short, and has to do a bit of
plot-delaying to get to the denouement. This isn’t anybody’s fault – certainly
not writer Gareth Roberts, who’s doing a lot of juggling here, but more that
the real villain is a much more emotionally nuanced thing than the Graske or
even The Trickster: those masked foes are just the weaponry. It’s fear and loss
that pull the trigger.
This
will mean that by the time the episode ends, Sarah’s father and mother have to
do a very sharp pivot both in terms of how they accept what they know about the
universe and their place in it, as well as how they conduct themselves with
Sarah (our Sarah, not their Sarah). Frankly, their willingness to sacrifice
themselves for a nebulous greater good is by necessity sold very quickly. This
is less a criticism than an observation: there just isn’t enough time on screen
for Sarah to read out the Wikipedia entries of her adventures from ‘The Time
Warrior’ onwards. Luckily, Roberts makes mum and dad very much the harbingers
of doom in a way that makes no chemical or scientific sense, but is absolute
poetry narratively: everything they touch in their own time turns to dust
(which means they get to embrace Sarah at the end, but cruelly robs them of a
final kiss with their baby Sarah).
There’s
a cute visual joke with a police box – although it does make you think why
couldn’t the Doctor Who crew just
film a few seconds of their TARDIS,
since Lis Sladen is clearly never in the same shot, and in any case, this
police box is somewhat obviously much smaller on the outside considering the
height of the police officer that pops out.
Rani
meets (a version of) her mum, in scenes that harken back to – of all things –
‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ (although in this case, the invading forces of
approximately 50 years and the absolute destruction of all buildings in a
single three foot alien). Sarah Jane’s name has still become iconic, and she’s
known as the woman who sold the earth (although it’s telling that even here,
it’s well established that she was tricked and lied to).
Rani
and Clyde split off into smaller storylines (after sharing their first
peck-on-the-cheek kiss) – the latter travelling with the Graske, and Rani back
to Sarah’s past (‘yes, ethnic girl in the fifties,’ she manages to pith in the
village hall).
It’s
not too long before the elder Smith’s have driven off into the denouement,
something that the Trickster had somehow not seen coming: ‘They’ve saved the
world,’ Sarah Jane opines, ‘something that we Smiths are quite good at.’ As
we’ve hinted, it feels like there should be another thirty minutes to deal with
all the emotional fallout of this story (of which there is a lot), but as we’ve
also hinted, that would likely be thirty minutes of Elisabeth Sladen and cast
looking mournfully at one another and talking about the past. Which – don’t get
me wrong, with these actors, would be a genuinely great piece of TV – but I can
understand why they’d want to cut it short.
In the
end, it’s about a beginning that we didn’t even know we had. And somehow,
impossibly, makes a character we’ve known for forty years even richer.
