THE PLOT
Years have passed since her travels with the Doctor, and Sarah Jane Smith has kept quite busy working as a reporter for Reuters news service. She has decided that the time has come to take a sabbatical, to settle in her Aunt Lavinia's country cottage and work on a book.
It is not destined to be a peaceful visit. Sarah Jane arrives to discover that her aunt has gone, without leaving so much as a note, after having earned the emnity of some locals over her condemnation of local pagan practices. She has left Sarah with only two things: a young ward, Brendan (Ian Searls); and a crate, inside of which is a mechanical dog left for Sarah Jane by the Doctor: K-9, Mark III.
When Aunt Lavinia's worries about a witch's coven prove to be all too well-founded, Sarah Jane must rely on her journalistic instincts and on her new little metal friend in order to save Brendan from becoming a human sacrifice to Hecate!
CHARACTERS
Sarah Jane Smith: Elisabeth Sladen is as game as ever, bringing an inherent likability to her performance. Unfortunately, though Sarah Jane is the central character, there isn't much more for her to do here than in the typical Doctor Who story. She worries about her aunt and her ward, she pokes around the village and asks some questions, and she tags along after K-9 to track down Brendan. Producer John Nathan Turner, promoting the piece, talked about putting Sarah Jane in the Doctor's role. But that doesn't prove to be the case. Sarah Jane has the exact role she's always had, leaving us a Doctor Who story with three companions and no Doctor! At least Sladen remains game, elevating the material significantly. She's also still very beautiful here, even if some of her outfits do her no favors.
K-9: Fandom has been heatedly divided over the metal dog since its introduction in the mid-1970's. I actually rather like K-9, and generally find his antics amusing. That said, he isn't terribly amusing here. John Leeson does as capable a job as ever in voicing him, but Terence Dudley's script allows K-9 none of the humor or personality that were staples of most of his Who appearances. Here, he really has been written as simply a mobile, talking Sonic Screwdriver. The result is a story in which Sarah Jane interacts with, and follows a plan laid by, a toaster oven on wheels.
Brendan: Long before The Sarah Jane Adventures, we have Sarah paired with a precocious teenage boy, not unlike Luke in conception. This could actually be very easily rewritten to be a "Sarah Jane and Luke on vacation in the country" story. Regrettably, Brendan is not as likable as Luke. With no "normal kids" to offset his precociousness, he simply comes across as an annoying know-it-all. When the Hecate coven prepares to sacrifice him (after, for reasons perhaps best left unexplored, putting him into what looks like a girl's summer nightgown), I wasn't particularly rooting for Sarah Jane and K-9 to hurry up. I think I was urging them to go ahead and take their time, maybe explore some of the local scenery...
THOUGHTS
I will say a few things in K-9 and Company's favor. One is that it's interesting that, a solid quarter-century ahead of Russell T. Davies' wildly successful Sarah Jane Adventures, producer John Nathan Turner came up with a strikingly similar spinoff concept. Both series present Sarah Jane as a successful journalist, investigating her own mysteries with the aid of alien technology (K-9 here; K-9, Sonic Lipstick, and Mr. Smith in the later series). Both series provide her with teen companions. Both even give her an unsually precocious teenage boy to whom she must act as "surrogate mum."
Where K-9 and Company fails is in trying to be too small-scale, too Earthbound. The newer Sarah Jane series sometimes falls on its face, and I honestly thought its pilot episode was even worse than K-9 and Company (though the series itself improved rapidly). But the newer series isn't afraid to be outrageous, bringing a new invasion from space almost weekly and keeping the pace ticking over so quickly that logic gaffes are swept away by the force of the show's energy.
K-9 and Company has no energy. The story is small scale. There isn't even anything alien or supernatural going on - just a bunch of superstitious locals who like to prance around bonfires at night. There isn't any threat developed until late in the day. The coven, as portrayed, only resorts to human sacrifice after one of its members mistakes K-9 for "Hecate's familiar." This means that K-9's very appearance is what makes a completely harmless bunch into a threat! That could have been interesting, had that been made a point of the story, but I think that's just an accident of lazy scripting on Terence Dudley's part.
Dudley's script seems to be cribbing from old Miss Marple movies, only without the colorful characters and witty dialogue. It's a very mild country mystery, one that proceeds at a very slow pace. John Black's stagy direction kills what few opportunities the script provides, ensuring there's no tension at any point. The climax is particularly clumsy, as K-9 simply blasts extras with his laser, causing them to fall over, while Elisabeth Sladen does some egregiously unconvincing kung-fu.
Though this is a lousy episode, I still think it should have been made into a series. The ratings were solid enough, this despite some severe transmission difficulties. Elisabeth Sladen is engaging, and future scripts would likely have improved. As it stands, K-9 and Company is a sort of halfway house between being a Doctor Who episode without the Doctor and a very poor "25 years earlier" prelude to the current Sarah Jane Adventures.
Either way, it commits the only unforgivable sin in television: The sin of being boring.
Rating: 2/10.
Next Episode: Invasion of the Bane (not yet reviewed)
Search Amazon.com for The Sarah Jane Adventures
Review Index (not yet posted)
No comments:
Post a Comment