SJA #23 : Lost in Time

"The tapestry of time is a fragile thing. Apply the slightest pressure, and the threads of history can unravel. But you understand that, don't you, Sarah Jane?"

Episode #23:        Lost in Time.
Companions:        Sarah Jane Smith, Rani Chandra and Clyde Langer.
Air Date:              8th to 9th November 2010.

A harmless investigation turns into an epic quest across time and space. Sarah Jane and the gang are separated by the enigmatic Shopkeeper to find themselves in three different time-zones throughout history – doing battle against ghost hunters, Nazis, Tudors and a mysterious parrot called Captain!

Along comes another Sarah Jane Adventures episode that I thoroughly enjoyed. Recruited my a mysterious shopkeeper and his parent, the adventurers are split up and sent into different time zones to recover pieces of a temporal artifact, the chronosteel. Clyde arrives during the second world war, and helps thwart a Nazi invasion. Rani finds herself in service to Lady Jane Gray in her last hours and Sarah Jane helps a 19th century ghost hunter save the lives of two children in the 21st century.

I like this story because it brings home the time traveling historical stories of the early days of Doctor Who. Although I wasn't a fan of them the modern stories can be done so much better even in just a brief hours worth of television. In particular the life and death of Lady Jane Gray, an historical figure I had never heard of prior to watching this episode when televised. Having watched it, I was moved to read up on the actual events.

As for the mysterious shopkeeper we never learn who he or his parrot companion are but according to The Brilliant Book 2012, and a blog post from Neil Gaiman, Gaiman and Russell T Davies were both of the personal opinion that the Shopkeeper was in fact the Corsair, a swashbuckling Time Lord friend of the Doctor's mentioned in the television story The Doctor's Wife.

I do like this particular adventure a lot and it shows what the show could do when the writers put their minds to it. More like this would have been preferable to the overly basic children's stories.

SJA #22 : The Empty Planet

"Weird alien noise, terrified kid and what do we do? Run to the window and start talking all Star Trek. We must have looked really normal."

Episode #22:        The Empty Planet.
Companions:        Sarah Jane Smith, Rani Chandra, Clyde Langer, and Mr Smith.
Air Date:              1st to 2nd November 2010.

Clyde and Rani are apparently the only survivors of the human race. The whole of Earth is empty – even Sarah Jane has vanished. A deserted London holds terrors of its own, mainly in the form of two mysterious and menacing robots.

The Empty Planet is a Sarah Jane lite story. In fact she only appears at the start and the very end. The story instead focuses upon Rani and Clyde stuck in a world where everyone else has vanished, except for a young school boy. They find themselves pursued by two robots with a mysterious mission. The story itself is nothing special and is simply a hunt for a missing individual. The same sort of story we have seen before in the Sarah Jane Adventures.

For an episode where really, nothing actually happens, this is still a rather good story. Rani and Clyde by themselves make for an excellent pair of adventurers, and it is a refreshing change to have the show focus on just two characters rather than the whole gang. A bigger threat than what is presented might have made it a better story though.