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Tag: Sarah Jane Smith

The Most Important Woman in the Universe

Review of Turn Left / The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End

With this set of three episodes, we have reached the end of our Series Four journey (see what I did there?). While, if I’m being honest, I didn’t remember as many details from them as I thought I might, they are definitely, as a collective whole, the episodes that made the most lasting impression on me from this series.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2008 BBC

In particular, Turn Left, the nominal single episode that leads directly into two-part series finale, stands out to me as one of the best episodes of the entire RTD1 era. Although it still has some flaws, like some regrettable Asian stereotyping (and at least one Chinese character that I’m pretty sure was only half a character, but I had to stop myself from further research to confirm my suspicion after the first fifteen minutes), it is overall a brilliant piece of television.

The whole premise is another take on the butterfly effect, this time focusing on how extremely important Donna is to the universe—or, in fact, the multiverse—as a whole. By changing one tiny decision, Donna alters the fate of all reality.

Before I talk about that cascade of events, I want to mention that one of the things I’d forgotten was how much the fortuneteller got Donna to spill. Without Donna verbally guiding her to the specific inflection point that could prevent her from ever meeting the Doctor, the fortuneteller never could have implemented her plan. (And here we find another flaw: what was the fortuneteller’s motivation? Was she hired by someone? Who?)

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Planet of Oblivion

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Review of Planet of Evil (#81)

DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 20
Original Air Date: 27 Sep – 18 Oct 1975
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: Terror of the Zygons (Four, Sarah Jane, Harry, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Pyramids of Mars (Four, Sarah Jane)

I know there have got to be fans out there who have a particular soft spot for Planet of Evil, but as far as I’m concerned, this is a seriously forgettable story. It came around on my calendar and I thought, “Which one is that again?” And I wasn’t much the wiser after looking at the DVD cover.

As usual, I tried writing down what I remembered of the adventure before starting my re-watch, and I am chagrinned to report that (a) I could barely remember anything beyond the story involving the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (with that recollection being entirely due to the aforementioned cover image) and (b) everything else I remembered was in error.

To make matters worse, even after watching all four episodes again, I still don’t have much of an impression of the storyline. It’s a pretty typical story of its type: some planetary exploration team has discovered something it shouldn’t have, causing members of the expedition to die before the TARDIS crew arrive and discover what’s going on and how to resolve the situation.

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Standing the Test of Time

Review of The Time Warrior (#70)

DVD Release Date: 22 Dec 20
Original Air Date: 15 Dec 1973 – 05 Jan 1974
Doctors/Companions: Three, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Green Death (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (Three, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier)

Unlike most of the other entries in the Everything Else series, The Time Warrior is one about which I remembered quite a lot even before watching it again. Even though I’ve previously only covered it as a NuView (way back in the second month of the blog), it’s long been one of my favorite Third Doctor stories.

Among other things, it’s got a lot of firsts: the first Sarah Jane Smith story, the first appearance of a Sontaran, and the first ever mention of Gallifrey. It’s also got Jon Pertwee buckling some swash, scientists from the present day being used to nefarious purpose in the past, and an overall strong story that holds together well.

Almost as soon as I hit “Play,” further details came flooding back. To begin, writer Robert Holmes’s name showed up in the opening credits. “Ah yes,” I said to myself, “that explains the ‘strong story’ bit.”

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Set for Adventure

Review of Pyramids of Mars (#82)

DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 04
Original Air Date: 25 Oct – 15 Nov 1975
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: Planet of Evil (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Android Invasion (Four, Sarah Jane)

When I checked my calendar to see what adventure I was slated to review this month, I have to admit I was pleased to discover I was in for another High and not a Low this month. Although it’s somehow never made onto my personal list of favorites, Pyramids of Mars ranks #7 on the i09 master list I’ve been following, and it’s a far sight better than a lot of the other stories I’ve selected for 2021.

I suspect it’s primarily because Tom Baker has never been a particular favorite that Pyramids doesn’t really ping my radar (or even my Marconiscope, as Laurence Scarman calls his nascent radio telescope). It’s still relatively early in his tenure (meaning he’s not too over-the-top in his characterization yet) and includes Sarah Jane (among my preferred Companions), so it’s certainly on the positive end of the Fourth Doctor spectrum for me, and yet it still only tends to come to the forefront of my mind when I think about what Classic stories other fans recommend.

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The Brain of Neowhovian

Review of The Brain of Morbius (#84)

DVD Release Date: 07 Oct 08
Original Air Date: 03 – 24 Jan 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Android Invasion (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Seeds of Doom (Four, Sarah Jane)

This week includes both the 57th anniversary of Doctor Who‘s first broadcast and the American Thanksgiving holiday, so it feels like an appropriate time to review a well-loved story, a Hidden Gem that barely fits the moniker. It’s pretty hard to argue that The Brain of Morbius is hidden from fandom in any meaningful way, as it is often cited as an iconic story from an era that many consider “golden,” but in the five-year-old io9 ranking of the 254 stories then extant, it placed at #110, solidly in the second quartile.

So how does a famous story end up in such an ignominious place? It’s a good question that dovetails nicely with my own experience of Morbius. Before sitting down to re-watch, I didn’t really remember much detail; the story as a whole had not made a big impression on me, despite my having seen it multiple times. My clearest sense of the story was its obvious allegorical similarities to Frankenstein. If I thought hard enough, I also remembered that this is where we saw all those mysterious faces that may well have been previously unknown incarnations of the Doctor (or, others would argue, might be Morbius’s other faces), but that was pretty much the extent of it.

Imagine my surprise when I heard that the Doctor and Sarah Jane had landed on Karn.

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Agreeable, Decent, and Short

Review of The Sontaran Experiment (#77)
DVD Release Date: 06 Mar 07
Original Air Date: 22 Feb – 01 Mar 1975
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, Ian Marter
Preceding Story: The Ark in Space (Four, Sarah Jane, Harry)
Succeeding Story: Genesis of the Daleks (Four, Sarah Jane, Harry)

One common experience I’ve heard from people over and over during this pandemic is that it’s very difficult to concentrate. Whether it’s our work or our entertainment, no one seems to have the brainpower to do anything that requires anything beyond the attention span of a hamster.

That’s why The Sontaran Experiment is the perfect selection for this month’s installment in the Hidden Gems series. The only quality this adventure shares with the eponymous enemies’ famous ones (namely, being “nasty, brutish, and short,” like life) is that blessed final one. At two episodes long, it is one of the shortest Classic Doctor Who serials ever, on par with a single modern Who episode. Adding to the delight is that it stars a relatively calm, low-key Tom Baker, early in his run, alongside Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith and Ian Marter’s too-oft-overlooked Harry Sullivan.

Having just left Nerva Station (see: The Ark in Space), the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry arrive at a transmat receiver on the “dead” planet Earth that those on Nerva had left behind. Harry and Sarah Jane spend a fair amount of time talking about the complete lack of life on the planet and how creepy it is, all the while tromping through heavy scrub. You can practically hear botanists everywhere screaming at them.

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Eldrad Must Get On With It

Review of The Hand of Fear (#87)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 23 Oct 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Masque of Mandragora (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Deadly Assassin (Four)

There are many memorable things about The Hand of Fear: the disembodied hand, “Eldrad must live,” Sarah Jane’s outfit, and—of course!—her touching, somewhat precipitous farewell. Unfortunately, plot is not among them.

Perhaps that’s why io9’s Best-to-Worst list ranked it in the bottom 30%, at #187 of 254. While plenty of other stories I’ve reviewed have fared far worse (see, for example, The Monster of Peladon, Terminus, and Timelash), HoF is the lowest-ranked of the Fourth Doctor’s remaining titles on my “to be reviewed” list, so here we are.

It all starts out promisingly enough, with a quarry actually acting as a quarry, for once. The Doctor and Sarah Jane land there accidentally just as some charges are set to detonate, resulting in Sarah Jane being buried. She reaches for a hand held out to her that turns out to be a piece of the remains of an alien being known as Eldrad.

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The Tedium of Peladon

Review of The Monster of Peladon (#73)
DVD Release Date: 04 May 10
Original Air Date: 23 Mar – 27 Apr 1974
Doctors/Companions: Three, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: Death to the Daleks (Three, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: Planet of the Spiders (Three, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier)

For the last couple of years, as long-time readers may recall, I’ve been introducing my daughters to both modern and Classic Who. During one such spate of enthusiasm, they agreed to watch The Monster of Peladon with me.

I can’t remember now how exactly we landed on that selection. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the girls wanting to see more Sarah Jane, and being enamored of the idea of hearing her “There’s nothing ‘only’ about being a girl, Your Majesty” speech. And to their credit, they actually enjoyed the adventure—and I didn’t hate it.

But I was not ready to come back to it so soon (relatively speaking). It’s not that it’s actively awful, despite its bottom 5% ranking in io9’s Best-to-Worst list (coming in at #243 of 254); it’s just kind of… boring. Although I should’ve known better, given that it’s a Pertwee-era story, I had forgotten it was six episodes long rather than four. There was some serious resigned sighing when I realized what lay in front of me for my re-watch.

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Setting the Standard

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Review of The Five Doctors (#129)
DVD Release Date: 05 Aug 08
Original Air Date: 25 Nov 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, One, Two, Three, Four (cameo), Tegan, Turlough, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, Romana II (cameo)
Stars: Peter Davison, Richard Hurndall, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, (Tom Baker), Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Carole Ann Ford, Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, (Lalla Ward)
Preceding Story: The King’s Demons (Five, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion)
Succeeding Story: Warriors of the Deep (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the show’s beginnings, I felt now would be an appropriate time to look back at a different celebration of its history. Though this year we mark fifty-four years since the show’s inception, 1983 was merely twenty, and the Powers That Beeb decided they couldn’t let such a large, round number go unnoticed.

Here in the post-fiftieth-anniversary era, we think of that celebration as having pulled out all the stops, but really, it was The Five Doctors that set the standard. And while, like Moffat, JNT didn’t get everyone he wanted to participate, he nonetheless pulled together a remarkable cast, including—in a way—all five incarnations of the Doctor who had appeared up to that point.

While First Doctor William Hartnell had (just barely) managed perform a part in the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors, he was already eight years dead by the time this next milestone rolled around. Rather than exclude his Doctor entirely, though, JNT simply recast Richard Hurndall in the role, much like David Bradley has taken over the same in the modern era. But much like Eccleston for the fiftieth, Tom Baker could not be convinced to reprise his own Fourth Doctor (reportedly because he thought it was too soon).

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The Beauty Beneath the Masque

Review of The Masque of Mandragora (#85)
DVD Release Date: 04 May 10
Original Air Date: 04 – 25 Sep 1976
Doctor/Companion: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Seeds of Doom (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Hand of Fear (Four, Sarah Jane)

Last month I started my new series of reviews of Tom Baker’s season openers with his inaugural adventure Robot. His second season started with Terror of the Zygons, but as mentioned last month, I’ve already reviewed it. Therefore, I’m moving on to the Fourth Doctor’s third season, which begins with The Masque of Mandragora.

By this point, Lis Sladen had been in the role of Sarah Jane Smith (SJS) for three years, and Baker had been portraying the Doctor for two. They are so wonderfully comfortable with both their own characters and each other, they make for fabulous, cozy watching.

It was also the third and final season of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, so often touted as the “golden age” of Doctor Who. Sladen would leave at the end of the following story and the second half of the season would see Baker unwillingly paired with another Companion (it’s well known that he was rather horrible to Louise Jameson during her time as Leela, though by all accounts they are fast friends now). As Season 14 opens, though, Baker is clearly at the height of his powers and happy as a clam.

The story opens with SJS and the Doctor wandering the halls of the TARDIS, apparently just for kicks. They happen across a secondary control room, wood-paneled and covered with dust after long disuse. (It was used as the primary for most stories in the following year-and-a-bit.) From here they discover they are being drawn to a strange place by the Mandragora Helix before escaping and ending up in 15th-century Italy.

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