Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Running Up That Hill

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Warriors of Kudlak

We were always told as kids and today that playing too many video games and the like could be hazardous for our health and in this episode that is taken to its logical conclusion as adept players at a laser tag game are being recruited to an interplantery war between old, old foes.

Now I have never played laser tag (it was called Laser Quest when I was a kid), or anything else like that but I can see why it is quite popular even when some people would play it only as an aid to pick up girls. Of course in this episode it is the two lads who get themselves into trouble only for the two girls to come in and rescue them.

poor old Clyde is going to have to have Luke asking him endless questions about girls

Once again Luke shows that he is not just an average, nerdy kid by managing to hack into the onboard computer of an alien vessel. Clyde was quite funny especially in the second episode when he was so obviously trying to impress the girl, Jen, when they were on the Yuvodni spaceship, bigging himself up and basically calling Luke a bit of a nerdy geek, hoping that this would impress a girl by being a jack the lad type.

Unfortunately for Clyde this didn’t work and it was Luke who got a kiss off the girl in the end. The problem is now that poor old Clyde is going to have to have Luke asking him endless questions about girls, the kind of things they like and even how to pull them. Why doesn’t he just ask Maria? She is after all a girl and far more qualified on the subject that Clyde and most teenage lads.

That single shot alone would probably have blown the budgets of every episode of The Chuckle Brothers combined!

There was a nice effects shot in the second episode of the Earth from the Yuvodni spaceship and then the pull back shot from the window of the spacecraft to show the entirety of the spaceship which was a little bit like the shot in the opening titles of some Babylon 5 series.

That single shot alone would probably have blown the budgets of most CBBC dramas and also every episode of The Chuckle Brothers combined!

I also liked the twist at the end where Mr Kudlak just laid down his arms and gave himself up to Sarah Jane after realising he had been duped by a computer programme that just didn’t want the war to end. That gives Mr Kudlak a bit more depth than would normally be afforded to the baddies in a children’s drama and also makes you realise that he wasn’t really a bad sort he was just a solider obeying orders.

If anything the true villain of the piece was the slimy Mr Chadwick who was a fun part and the actor who played him was obviously having a whale of a time playing the part.

Lis Sladen was as good as ever here and she was really quite commanding when she walked straight onto the bridge of the Yuvodni ship and demanded her son back.

I am not too sure about the need for the character of Mr Smith, who is just basically like K9 but not as portable, and with the voice of Alexander Armstrong rather than John Leeson. They do seem to use Mr Smith sparingly, and then only when they need to know what they are up against, so perhaps he is useful as a plot device to explain to the audience all the technical stuff and give them an idea who they are up against, as Sarah is only human after all.

I really enjoyed Warrior of Kudlak it was a fun story, directed with panache by Charles Martin and did not talk down to the children in the audience about the futility, and violence, of war, which was a fairly serious subtext for a children’s television series.

This series is getting better by the story and it would be a great shame if it didn’t get renewed for a second series.

A View to a Kudlak

Appearances can be deceptive.  One of my favourite television series is Gilmore Girls whose premise is that a teen mother has grown up and now has a teenage daughter who's become her best friend and they have to deal with dating and life in a small town in America.  It sounds dreadful, the stuff of television movies with Jane Seymour which climax in a rush to a hospital for whatever reason.  Except it’s written with all the wit of The West Wing and the screwball comedies of the 1940s (particularly the rapid fire dialogue), acted superbly and has an indie sensibility which constantly raises it about the premise – the scenes at the prep school the daughter attends are like seeing Alexander Payne’s film Election in slow motion.

Similarly, if you’d said that …

The Sarah Jane Adventures: Warriors of Kudlak: Part Two

… the second half of a story which features laser tag, pantomime villains and the alien child discovering girls would turn out to be one of the best bits of Doctor Who related storytelling ever, I really, really wouldn’t believe you and suspect you were trying to trick me somehow – perhaps there would be lights involved and a prodding stick with a large stuffed pointing rubber glove on the end of the kind they use of Facebook to give you a poke.

This could have been the same kind of runaround that we found in both of the previous stories and superficially it did mirror those climaxes in that it featured some kind of an assault on the villain’s lair in order to save whomever’s been captured this week.  Except on this occasion there was an extra emotional kick because it was the kids first experience of what Sarah’s life was like amongst the stars and her apparent first trip off world in twenty years and being reminded once again of the old days.  Both also had that vital look of awe which is often lost in the pace of drama these days, each moment first with the toy soldiers and then with the former companion and her mini-companion taking the time to underline that they’re in space, the convincing shot of Earth being its best digital rendering yet.

But then it becomes apparent that the whole story doesn’t just reference Iraq through Lance’s father’s death during a tour of duty there – the whole story is about the war.  On the one hand, there’s Kudlak kept in a perpetual state of war by his digital commander engendering a sense of fear in an opponent whose in not position to really fight back (the standard Doctor Who two dimensional alien adversary who turns out to be really a two dimensional alien adversary who’s surely Koquillion from the 60s story The Rescue for the new age).  On another the pulling of the kids to the space ship so that they can be transported to the theatre of war (which is revealed to not really exist either) on the basis that they’re good at playing the game version when it’s clearly different and could lead to the combatants treating the real thing as though they’re playing Medal Of Honor.

There’s also such a confidence to the production.  Every great series as a moment when it becomes apparent that the programme makers have realised what they can accomplish and are entirely comfortable with what they’re doing.  In old Doctor Who that was The Daleks (or The Mutants or whatever) and in new Doctor Who, that was Dalek I think and for SJA, it’s this episode.  The performances are top notch-- even if one or two of the guests are a touch over the top – all of the regulars have become utterly comfortable with one another as though this is the twenty episode they’ve worked together let alone the sixth.  Clyde and Luke and Sarah and Maria were excellent double acts, the former in particular graduating from the Geordi/Data analogy to Bones/Spock as the human making fun of the alien throughout but still showing loyalty and friendship when it came to the crunch.

It had an epic quality too.  This may have been a disused gasworks doubling for the interior of an alien spaceship again (which is rapidly becoming nu-Who’s quarry cliché) but it created a scale which I suspect isn’t often seen in shows in that slot on a Monday night.  I’ve said it before but this show has a filmic quality which in some places mirrors or supersedes the mother series.  Look at those gorgeous lateral tracking shots during the scenes amongst the crates where the kids all discovered one another and the use of a version of deep focus so that we could see action in both the fore and backgrounds of shots.  Listening to the dvd commentaries for the classic 70s stories, the production teams from the time often note how much better the show would have looked if they’d been allowed to do the whole thing using single cameras and here is a show which is superficially similar in terms of its storytelling doing that and proving them right. 

The series is currently averaging a million viewers in its current timeslot, which is apparently massive in comparison to what’s usually shown there.  But that still means there are masses are people who enjoy the main series but are missing out on this even though in places its just as entertaining as that and in others even more so.  Perhaps they’ve looked at that timeslot and decided that it is just for kids in which case they’re like the people I’ve spoken to who haven’t seen Gilmore Girls because they’ve seen the rather cheesing dvd box art or heard about the hokey premise.  Perhaps they’ll catch up on dvd or if the BBC decide to give it a Sunday night repeat.  For now though, it’s their loss.  For now, the rest of us have a weekly half hour treat which is fun, exciting and makes you think and is amazingly y’know for kids.

Next Week:  A brim full of Asher.

OMG PWNT!

Warriors of Kudlak, Part 2

And so, onto part 2 of the magnum opus on shoot-em-ups, and nobody's screamed "OH, YOU CAMPING SON OF A BITCH!" Mind you, this is Doctor Who. Camp is probably already assumed to be part of the deal.

Kudos to Kudlak in these opening moment. Even though the security of his entire operation has been compromised and everything he's been working for is on the line, he still finds time to slap Grantham about a bit before getting after our heroes. I wonder what this guy's diary is like?

MONDAY 24th APRIL

Got to work. Slapped Grantham about a bit. Filed papers. Slapped Grantham about a bit. Concocted plan for universal domination. Considered not slapping Grantham about so much. Slapped Grantham about a bit while doing ｓo.

Oooh. Dressing gown AND army boots. Tasteful. SHIT, DID SHE JUST SAY UNIT? Oh, sod. Now I've got to rewind.

Anyhow, into the attic we all bound and shout "Mister Slightly Disappointing! I need you!" and before long Kudlak's fizzog is up on the screen (and pulling an "Oooooh, Matron" face for no reason that I can place). Meanwhilst, Solid Luke and companion are doing what every video game character does best - opening boxes!

BINGO! All of a sudden, Clyde is a happy chappy and everyone in the audience is cradling their heads in pain. Oh no. Not the "Black characters have to have black love interests" cliche. Not the "Keep yer damn n*gger paws of our whaaaaaht womenfolk" bullshit. They wouldn't do THAT to us, would they? Let's watch and see.

I punched the air like it was a ginger stepchild.

Back on Earth, an event is unfolding more shocking, more alien and more Fortean than any of the child abduction rubbish - Maria's been given an action sequence! Not a very good one, but still not a very good one where she practically blows Grantham's head off. After weeks of her prattling "Whassat then? What does that do? What do we do now?" I punched the air like it was a ginger stepchild.

All of which pales in comparison, of course, to the following "Stick with me, I'll look after you" scene. Six episodes after Clyde is introduced as Luke's cool mentor, he's utterly upstaged by his own first love interest. Can this show do turnabouts, or can this show do turnabouts? Stay tuned though, it gets better.

Now, given the amount of times that Kudlak has gone "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" Directly into the camera over the course of the two episodes, you'd be forgiven for thinking he's just a little bit panto. In an utterly superb twist, however, the moment the doors are closed he turns into a tired, bitter, regretful old man. He dreams of peace. He muses on how many of the human children he has condemned have made it through. Suddenly the Noel Coward smoking jacket all makes terrible sense. Christ, even by the parent series' standards, this is great writing.

Yeah and... granddaugher... *YAWN* Hand of Rassilon... erm... renegade.... something. Oooh, good chips, aren't they?

Speaking of great writing, the kids are still trapped in the holding bad and "Not going anywhere." "Wanna wager?" says Luke, and busts down the door with a swagger. I really, really hope stuff like this become a catchphrase for him. This is precisedly the kind of stuff that is going to make chibi-Doctor so precious if he ever successfully migrates to Who itself. Imagine how much fun it would be watching The Doctor if we'd seen the buildup and the whereto of each of his little foibles and quirks. As it is, he's like Super Gorilla Grodd from the Super Friends whenever he gets a chance at fleshing things out. He just sort of wanders off.

Caffrin Tayt: So Doctor, who is this Rani?
Doctor: Mmm... time... some.... time girl.... half human... mother's side... er... special time chutney... probably in the Matrix... yeah.
Caffrin Tayt: What was that? Doctor! It sounded like you were about to say something vitally important to the show's character development!
Doctor: Yeah and... granddaugher... *YAWN* Hand of Rassilon... erm... renegade.... something. Oooh, good chips, aren't they?

Oooooooooooh, look at that. Lovely little moment of 'stalgia for Sarah Jane. Oh, give the old girl a break. She's been upstaged by the kids for a month now. Much more of this and she'll start to worry about her career and prospects. And perhaps be more suggestable. To the idea of taking it up the wrong 'un. In a cheap hotel room.

At a Doctor Who convention.

We've all just been Girl in the Fireplaced again.

The kicker? We've all just been Girl in the Fireplaced again. You didn't have the parts so you used the yoof, and my god what a kicker it is. This single sequence alone has as many quotable lines as the average episode of Who hands down. "Peace is a stranger's land! We have no place there!" "AND I WILL NOT SUFFER MY ENEMIES TO LIVE!" "I am not an innocent, but maybe I can find some of those that were."

Marvellous. Just marvellous. The sunlight on their skin as they run from Combat 3000 reflects perfectly the utter euphoria of this plot arc; and just when you're trying to pretend that there's somthing in your eye, the whole subtly racist subtext is revealed (as is everything in this show) to be a gigantic sucker punch, and Luke ends up sucking faces with his best mate's prospective paramour. Looks like Jen could tell the difference between an alpha male and a maaaahfy male after all. Shame she hasn't seen Clyde, as we have, being mature, supportive and brave for the past six weeks. If she HAD, maybe she'd have a bit more mildew around the skirting boards for him.

Jack's copy of The Ladybird Book of Ladyboys says this about Warriors of Kudlak Part 2: "Slyther no swiping! Slyther no swiping! Slyther no swiping!" "Aw, maaaaan..."

Kud Lak Credibility?

Warriors of Kudlak - Part 1

Way, way back in the swirling mist of the 80s when women were women, men were women and the term "Hero Sandwich" didn't make me think about scenarios involving John Barrowman, Christopher Eccleston and Freema Agyeman, there was a dream. A brave, foolish dream to get kids fit by playing video games. The game was called Athletics World and the peripheral involved was called the Nintendo Power Pad. You were meant to pound its big, friendly buttons alternately with your feet in order to simulate running, thus luring you away from the dangers of spending fourteen hours a day mentally mapping out Metroid.

Everyone with a NES bought it and played it twice. The rest of us were watching Debbie Greenwood slyly shilling a game called Hypersports which encouraged us to have exactly the same experience while sitting on our arses and knackering our Spectrum keyboards up. (The Japanese lapped it up of course, but every Japanese gamer interviewed since then candidly admits that everyone just got their mates round and took shifts on it.) My point is that with the shooting games of today, this is exactly how daft Laser Tag looks now, meaning that the latest SJA is hopelessly out of touch with the yoof and will be a complete train wreck, right? Right?

Oh God help me, it's even better than the last three. Week after week it just gets better.

You already know this is Whoniverse gold but while Tennant may have made it snow, half way across town Sarah Jane is making it snow Golden Grahams.

So here's the deal. A big snail (in a dressing gown that looks like he should be talking with a Noel Coward accent and reciting enchanting anecdotes about how he found the most delightful little bar on Zha'ha'dum but the evening was completely ghastly as a result of some dreadful little American oik blowing the planet up) is recruiting children for war by letting them train with guns that don't work. This should be a completely familiar experience to anyone who's ever actually played Laser Tag, which consists of paying a tenner for fifteen minutes of shouting "HELLO? HELLO? IS THIS THING TURNED ON? I DON'T THING MY HELMET'S ON PROPERLY!"

Meanwhile, life as usual on D**** a** t** B******** Terrace. SJ's investigating blah, Luke doesn't understand blah, Maria rolls eyes at blah, likable banter, the birds are singing, the sun is shining, Fenric's in his prison and all's right with the world. Beneath the surface, however, something horrible lurks. The Mouseketeers are going emo, and in what could have been the most humiliating spurt of melodrama in the history of children's entertainment since Santa turned up FOR REAL in My Parents are Aliens:

1) Luke winces in palpable suffering when he realises what he's done to Lance.
2) Clyde displays shocking maturity, brushing SJ aside and saying "I'll go, I'm the one that dropped him in it."
3) When asked if Luke is still finding it hard at school, Maria flatly replies "No more than the rest of us."

Just when you think things can't get any better, we cut to Brandon playing a 2D shooter in a cafe. WHERE'S THAT FUCKING CAFE? TELL ME NOW, CBBC!

The birds are singing, the sun is shining, Fenric's in his prison and all's right with the world.

It takes precisely three and a half minutes of this faggotry before Clyde snaps and bellows at Luke about thinking that HE has problems, so the pair of them go to cool their heels at Mista Granfam's Skool Fer Gifted Yoof. At the same time both Grantham and Kudlak are having a competition to see who's more paranoid about being sent to sleep with the Macra by their boss first. You already know this is Whoniverse gold but while Tennant may have made it snow, half way across town Sarah Jane is making it snow Golden Grahams. And then... and then... Luke says with a look of unbridled delight on his face "I'd be good at killing people!"

Twenty minutes into a fifty minute story, pants already round ankles, and not for the usual reasons. Clyde and Luke are of course about to walk into a GIGANTIC elephant trap. Meanwhile Miss Slutten (SLADEN, I mean SLADEN, sorry, my mind must have been wandering) gives Mr. Smith his Frosties and sets out hotlegs into action.

Hotfoot. HotFOOT.

What follows is not only a titanic punch-the-air moment, but one of the stalest cliches of the whole franchise being transfigured into a benchmark for the Who mythos. The use of a sonic probe as a weapon. "AWRRRRRRRR, DOESN'TKILLDOESN'TWOUNDDOESN'TMAIM!" Prattles the Doc. Don't be such a self-impressed, cowardly tool, it can vibrate anything in any direction at any frequency. Of COURSE it kills, wounds and maims. A gun by any other name is still a gun, moral high ground destroyed. Furthermore, not only now is Sarah categorically not a replacement for The Doctor; if anything she's a hyper-tech Philleus Fogg. She's prepared to make bullshit sentimental judgement calls like saving the child of the Slitheen, but only if she has the luxury to do so. Put her back to the floor, and you're dead.

Back to the wall.

And the icing on the cake: an intelligent cliffhanger. Oh no, the Doctor is in a situation where he might die! Will he or won't he? IT IS A MYSTERY! Army of Ghosts. The Cybermen have ALREADY TAKEN OVER THE WORLD when the episode ends. That's a cliffhanger. Gorgon - Maria's dad is (as far as we know) ALREADY DEAD. And now, Clyde and Luke are off to God knows where and there's no Tardis to bring them back.

I just did a special sneeze.

JACK'S COPY OF THE LADYBIRD BOOK OF LADYBOYS says this about Warriors of the Kudlak Part 1: Xander Armstrong was turned down for the role of Marvin in the Hitchhiker's movie. Seventeen times.

Laser Squad

In point of fact I was probably a bit too critical of laser tag in my late review last night but one.  I do remember enjoying it quite a lot whilst I was at university even though I wasn’t very good at it and largely a sitting duck.  There were a couple of staff members who just seemed to play the game all day.  Personally, I’d be quiet if that were my job.  Oh and there was that time when I met a girl at the Laser Quest in Edinburgh.  Our eyes met over the laser sighting and we killed each other many, many times.  And laughed.  Then killed each other some more.  And then her boyfriend arrived and he killed me too.  It was like a mini-version of the love triangle at the heart of Starship Troopers and I was Dina Meyer.  Except clearly not.  She has bigger biceps.

The Sarah Jane Adventures:  Warriors of Kudlak: Part One

In fact the appearance of laser tag in this was generally accurate, although in my experience the participants were at least six years older and clearly lifers, becoming experts at these fictional war games at a time when there wasn’t anything in the real world to keep them occupied (how times change).  I can empathize with Luke, who before going into battle didn’t see the attraction but soon found himself blasting away.  There is an adrenaline rush that kicks in, although in some arenas it’s possible to select a spot high up and pick your opponents off which isn’t as fun as it sounds.  You want to be running and jumping as happened in the episode; assassinations aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, even if, as in the film Grosse Pointe Blank, there’s an American version of Minnie Driver somewhere along the line trying to change your ways.  But I have to agree with Neil – is anyone playing this stuff any more?

Despite my reservations after seeing the trailer this was another wonderfully enjoyable half hour.  Time and again in The Sarah Jane Adventures you can see how horribly wrong everything could be, yet time and again it consistently surprises and delights.  The story isn’t a completely new one of course – recruiting humans for an alien war was the backbone of The Last Starfighter (‘Greetings Starfighter … you have been recruited by the star league to defend the frontier … etc’) and also to an extent the Eighth Doctor BBC7 play Human Resources.  What lifted this was the portrayal of the management of the project, Mr. Grantham, doing the Kudlak’s dirty work who in turn is also answering to a manager and the ineffectiveness of what they’re doing – the inability to find decent recruits is trickling up and down the hierarchy making everyone cross.  Plus, could the phrase, ‘I want more children!  Give me more children!’ be any more disturbing? (Yes, actually.  According to The Guardian at the weekend, Jonathan King has a new album out).

After his initial appearance, Clyde might have become an intensely annoying smart arse of a character.  Instead he’s generally warm and empathic, his conversations with Luke about what it is to be a tweenage human often a highlight.  A lot of this has to do with cast and in fact now that Kelsey’s been rubbed from history (at least until series four when she returns as a villain) all of the young leads are quite charming in that way that the cast of the Harry Potter films are – and also with an unexpected range ... comedy … tragedy … comedy … tragedy … comedy … tragedy … You genuinely felt for Luke when he realised his one moment of feeling accepted by his peers led to pain for someone else – not really understanding why, in the main, kids tend to find cruelty strangely reassuring.

Similarly where other recent kids shows (admittedly from the US) have a tendency to go for the empty spectacle, there are some truly magical moments here of the sort which I remember from the classics of the Eighties.  As Sarah Jane and Maria led the cloudbusting machine which looked as if to have been borrowed from the Kate Bush video with Donald Sutherland up the hill and switched it on and let the gold lights fill the sky, I wondered if younger viewers would have had the same thrill I did on seeing Hurne the Hunter in The Box of Delights (which is high praise indeed).  Then golden beans fell from the sky! 

And instead of simply being a way of getting someone from a to b, it motivated the story and showed that Sarah-Jane has become much more than a journalist over the years.  There’s a useful feminist thread running through the series – in the past there would have been a cut to Maria’s Dad scratching his head over what this contraption could possibly be; now Sarah-Jane had to science bit covered.  This was a great episode for her overall, seen to be genuinely investigating for herself and significantly fighting her way out of tricky situations herself.

There’s also a pleasing injection of whimsy of the kind that Douglas Adams would probably approve of – and genuinely funny.  Sarah Jane and Maria turning up at the counter of the Combat 3000 looking to speak to the manager could have been dull as dishwater, a perfunctory bit of arguing.  Writer Phil Gladwin offered in its place the business with the incongruous sales clerk having to do the introductory monologue for every customer and Sarah-Jane using youth patter and being told not to by Maria.  The look of Dentian disappointment on Clyde’s face when he realised that Luke had beaten him on his first attempt and then trying to clunk-headedly show off to the villain of the peace.  Oh and the concurrent irritation that Mr. Smith isn’t quite as good as he could be (which I’m sure is a background plot to be resolved in the final story – I think he’s holding back vital information).

If I wanted to be clearly unfair and look for flaws, it would be the over convenience that Clyde and Luke just happened to be visiting the Combat 3000 just as Sarah-Jane and Maria realised that it’s at the epicentre of their investigation.  Mr. Grantham's office looked rather dark and drab and grey which was either a clever piece of design or some costs had been cut there to make way for the cloudbusting.  I’m also a bit confused about the time frame – how long after the previous story was this set, and when?  Shouldn’t these kids be at school, doing homework or what have you?  Also, and perhaps this’ll be answered next time, why exactly is Grantham working for them?  The money?  The power?  The girls?  The machismo?  Oddly enough, I didn’t have a problem with that arcade machine in the chippy – coin-ops in chippys are rarely newer than twenty years old – assuming they’re working at all.

Next week:  I just know that something good is going to happen.

Cloudbusting

SJA: Warriors of Kudlak Part 1

If you thought you had this story pegged from watching last week's trailer then, well, er, you'd be right. Let's face it, this episode is never going to win any prizes for originality but it's so much fun you hardly notice, let alone care. It's pure, unadulterated fun. Can you see what I did there? Un-adult. Like, because it's a kid's show. Oh, please yourselves...

In the proverbial nutshell, Grantham - an overzealous reject from The Apprentice - is running a Laser Quest emporium as a front for a sinister insectoid race who like to snarl a lot whilst dressing up as Mark Lamarr. Now, am I just hopelessly out of touch with the yoof of today or didn't this kind of bollocks go out of fashion in 1988? Laser Quest, I mean; a pastime so tedious it didn't even bother to have a bloody Zed in it's name. Perhaps I'm completely wrong and da kids are still into this shit, or maybe the author just thinks that they are and he has a vague - and probably unpleasant - memory of running around like an idiot back when he was a teenager in 1987. Who knows? More importantly, what would James Coleman do?

The game looks like it was written in BASIC on a $&@!-ing ZX80!

The other element of this episode that led me to question this show's yoof culture credentials can be witnessed in the hilarious scene where an archetypal yoof plays an arcade game in a cafe that appears to have been transported into to the late 1970s. The game he's playing looks like it was written in BASIC on a $&@!-ing ZX80! At first I thought the guy must have been into hardcore retro gaming or somesuch nonsense, but the High Scores table had swirly CGI graphics all over it! I'm surprised that these kid's used handles like 'Halo' - if they thought that Horace Goes Skiing was cutting edge then watching an XBox 360 fire up would have blown their heads clean off! I can only assume there was a rights issue and instead of showing the poor guy playing a real arcade game they knocked something up on the PA's mobile phone ten minutes before they shot the scene. I'm nitpicking, of course.

Sarah Jane Smith is the Doctor!

Anyway, Sarah Jane is on the trail of some missing kids. She meets with a parent of a teenager who has recently gone missing. This being the 21st century she is a single parent. I think there's a quota that the CBBC have to hit. Sarah promises that she will use her powers as a journalist to find the missing boy, when we all know that if she was a real journalist she'd have the public believing that the mother had killed her own son within a couple of weeks. Tops. Thankfully, there is a clue that ties all of the missing children together: the weather. Because every time it rains...

There's a fantastic moment where Sarah Jane cobbles together a massive Heath Robinson contraption for detecting transdimensional whatsits that have been left in the earth's atmosphere by the evil child-snatching aliens. And she points it at the big sky. And you just know that something good is gonna happen.  Just saying it could even make it happen. Think the Doctor jerry-rigging that Dalek scrambler in Remembrance of the Daleks and times that by a thousand. Because Sarah Jane Smith is the Doctor! Forget whether they should ever cast a female Doctor - they're already doing it! And given her age I'm guessing/hoping that she'll manage tick the celibacy box that we desperately crave from this franchise right now. Sure, she's only human with one solitary heart, and that can dull your excitement a wee bit, but I can still feel the influence of the Doctor(s) on her shoulders as she takes on the villains, not to mention her companions. She even dresses like them. Last week we got her take on Tom's Planet of Evil jacket, and this week she's decked out like a curvy Eccleston. She is practically dreaming of Ogrons!

Elizabeth Sladen is so much better here than she ever was back in the golden age, too. No "'octors!" to be found here. Just a compelling, believable and utterly captivating performance that you can't take your eyes off. And the kids are alright too. And besides, all the alien eccentricity we'll ever need is provided by Martin Fowler.

This week, Martin attempts to discover what it means to be human. Again. Today's lesson: comedy. Why doesn't Clyde just show him that episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data does his stand-up routine and just be done with it? Not that many kids today would know who Brent Spinner was, which I guess is probably the point. And instead of sub-chaplinesque slapstick pap and maudlin chuff, at least this fresh take on the 'tin man' idea flirts with genuine humour. Data had dull-as-ditchwater Geordi as a guiding mentor, whereas Martin has Clyde, a man who will probably attempt to teach him the fundamental concepts of humanity through the lyrics of Rhianna's 'Umbrella'. I know which one I'd rather watch.

Where is the gruffness of Zen? The sarcastic whine of Orac? The perky paternalism of TIM? The Biddy-Biddy of Twikki?

Meanwhile, back at the MILFcave, Sarah Jane calls upon the trusty Mr. Smith (boy, that steam powered unveiling ain't never gonna get old, is it?) and Alexander Armstrong kills the script stone dead with his insufferably bland interpretation of what a sci-fi supercomputer should really sound like. Where is the gruffness of Zen? The sarcastic whine of Orac? The perky paternalism of TIM? The Biddy-Biddy of Twikki, for pity's sake?! Sadly, Mr. Smith is as boring as the name implies. But he does manage to plug the necessary gaps with the aid of some flashing lights, and it isn't long before all of the protagonists dovetail nicely in the 80s hell that is Combat 3000, and a pleasingly retro cliffhanger to boot.

In short, I loved it. Bar the odd nitpick and my total inability to wax positive about anything for more than a paragraph, I'm really being swept along by this show. It's by far the best articulation of the franchise right now as far as I'm concerned, and I can't wait for next week. In fact, I didn't. I've seen it. One word: "Minty!!!!!!"