The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith
Dec. 8th, 2008 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatAs more than one reviewer has observed this is the Sarah Jane Adventures meets Father's Day and, personally, I think it suffers from the comparison.
Father's Day worked, in part, because it was introducing Rose and, through her, the viewer, to the limitations of time travel necessary in a series like Doctor Who. It was quite a clever way to cut short the endless "why doesn't the Doctor just pop back and put it right" comments and a brave move to place it so centrally in the new series. However it also worked because of Rose's youth and inexperience and was playing with some interesting themes about family mythology and childhood adulation. When transposed into the world of the Sarah Jane Adventures the central protagonist of the story ceases to be a young girl just learning to ropes of time travel and becomes instead a seasoned adventurer. The story is no longer about a young girl who idolises her unknown father learning that he is fallible but noble anyway but about a middle-aged woman who has always doubted the devotion of her parents learning that they were perfect after all. In short much that made the story work has been jettisoned. It is also no longer refreshing and new, though given that much of its audience were probably half their current age when they saw Father's Day, that is probably not a huge concern to its makers.
Looking at the reviews, which I don't normally, but they're a bit hard to miss when you're behind, I think the episode stands or falls on whether you buy into Lis Sladen's performance and here I simply didn't. Sladen appears to have a fairly limited range of facial and vocal tics she employs to signal any distressing circumstance Sarah encounters. They were out in force in this episode, but given the series' emphasis on the emotional traumas of having a son involved in dangerous goings on, I'd already seen them all too often recently. I never bought the temptation. I never believed that Sarah was so compelled to save her parents she'd risk anything and everything for them. So, in the end, I didn't buy the basic premise of the story. An interesting example of where a good idea simply fails to work when transposed from its original setting.
Rani and Clyde were good though.
The cognoscenti will observe that I've missed out on reviewing Mark of the Berserker. Maybe one day I'll get to see it.
Father's Day worked, in part, because it was introducing Rose and, through her, the viewer, to the limitations of time travel necessary in a series like Doctor Who. It was quite a clever way to cut short the endless "why doesn't the Doctor just pop back and put it right" comments and a brave move to place it so centrally in the new series. However it also worked because of Rose's youth and inexperience and was playing with some interesting themes about family mythology and childhood adulation. When transposed into the world of the Sarah Jane Adventures the central protagonist of the story ceases to be a young girl just learning to ropes of time travel and becomes instead a seasoned adventurer. The story is no longer about a young girl who idolises her unknown father learning that he is fallible but noble anyway but about a middle-aged woman who has always doubted the devotion of her parents learning that they were perfect after all. In short much that made the story work has been jettisoned. It is also no longer refreshing and new, though given that much of its audience were probably half their current age when they saw Father's Day, that is probably not a huge concern to its makers.
Looking at the reviews, which I don't normally, but they're a bit hard to miss when you're behind, I think the episode stands or falls on whether you buy into Lis Sladen's performance and here I simply didn't. Sladen appears to have a fairly limited range of facial and vocal tics she employs to signal any distressing circumstance Sarah encounters. They were out in force in this episode, but given the series' emphasis on the emotional traumas of having a son involved in dangerous goings on, I'd already seen them all too often recently. I never bought the temptation. I never believed that Sarah was so compelled to save her parents she'd risk anything and everything for them. So, in the end, I didn't buy the basic premise of the story. An interesting example of where a good idea simply fails to work when transposed from its original setting.
Rani and Clyde were good though.
The cognoscenti will observe that I've missed out on reviewing Mark of the Berserker. Maybe one day I'll get to see it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-08 11:30 pm (UTC)Ah well. I still watch it. *g*
(no subject)
Date: 2008-12-10 11:03 am (UTC)