Review: The Sarah Jane Adventures

You wait for one alien invasion to come along, and two come along at once. Although nine months have passed for us since the pilot of The Sarah Jane Adventures back in the New Year, which saw the Doctor’s former companion defeat the Bane, adopt a son and begin to gather a rag-tag crew of preteen sidekicks, the start of the full series of adventures begins only the next day. And guess what, there’s another set of outer space villains with a dastardly plan.

You can only imagine the fights that would break out between different monsters all tripping over each other to rule planet Earth if the Doctor and now Sarah Jane didn’t stop them. “Oi, Bane, what’s with this fizzy drinks lark? We were here first avenging our defeated relatives and stealing all the world’s energy, and then you came along and turned the population into zombies!”, the Slitheen might say. At this rate, alien threats will become a weekly occurance or something…

Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith is at the core of the show, continuing the Doctor’s work fighting for what’s good, here on Earth. It’s great to see her back on our television screens, and you wouldn’t think it was thirty years since she left the TARDIS having been left by the Doctor in Aberdeen.

But in this first story of the regular series, the focus is more on the youngsters, as Maria and Luke start school. No sign of Kelsey, loud-mouthed sidekick from the pilot, so instead we have Clyde, another loud-mouthed sidekick, though one who is marginally obnoxious rather than completely so.

The character moments help make the show stand out, particularly when Maria dispatches one of the Slitheen with a bottle of vinegar (they’re a calcium-based life form, you see?) This act of killing another creature, though in self-defence, is built up as an important moment, and it’s nice to see it not being taken lightly. For the children, particularly Clyde, killing monsters might be just an adventure, but it’s clear that Sarah Jane has a somewhat different perspective on things. I hope that this theme will be developed as the series goes on.

As with Doctor Who, you’ve got to take the science on its own terms, where it works according to the Laws of Drama rather than Laws of Science as they exist in the real world. One goof that I was sad enough to spot was the instant effect that the Slitheen’s energy stealing machine had on the sun. Even if the Slitheen’s energy-stealing gadget worked faster than light by some advanced alien technology, which I’m perfectly happy to grant, it should still have taken around eight minutes for light to reach the Earth after their machine was turned off and the sun turned back on.

The Slitheen’s first appearance in series 1 of Doctor Who was perhaps one of the show’s weaker moments, but to my mind the problem lay in the execution rather than the concept, with scenes that could have combined dark humour with a sinister edge being played solely for cheerful laughs.

Here, the family from Raxacoricofallapatorius are the kind of monster you’d imagine that Roald Dahl might have invented had he ever written for Doctor Who, giggling childishly as they plot the end of the world and sniffily complaining about human children – “the stench of Haribo and chicken nuggets”. I have to feel sorry for any fat teachers though, who will no doubt be coming under suspicion from their pupils of being aliens in disguise.
Made for CBBC, it doesn’t have as many of the additional layers of interest that Doctor Who includes for the older audience, though there are plenty of little Doctor Who references (“For the love of Clom!”) for fans to appreciate. It’s bright, loud and fun, with all the warmth and energy of Doctor Who, just pitched at a younger audience, and held together with some good performances. It’s easily good enough to keep this adult gleefully entertained on a Monday evening!