The Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion Of The Bane

After all the pretentiousness of the recent Doctor Who ‘updating’, comes a tiny ray of hope – a spin-off series aimed squarely at kids.

Hopefully this will follow in the footsteps of the original and ignore such deadening intrusions as flatulence, underage sex, homosexuality, and, I really mean this, love.

Please - get rid of all the love.

Now, fun science-fiction anyone?


This afternoon’s pilot, about ex-companion Sarah and a bunch of kids from her road, kept threatening to throw this opportunity away, and I have to admit this concerns me. But let’s be positive. Although the pilot set the ongoing situation up with a single-parent family, an orphan, and a (groan) love interest, pilots often tend to get the final direction of the series wrong.

It’s also understandable that this opener would mistakenly try to copy the errors of its parent show. I sincerely hope that this will not include draining-out just one burnt-out writer again.

Alarming then, that the very same above writer madly tried to co-write this as well, and no surprises therefore that the plot is almost identical to his first episode Rose.

For example, it’s set on present-day Earth, told from the companion’s point-of-view, who lives with her single parent, encounters the Doctor character fleetingly at first, finds aliens at a nearby company, has her friend captured, is rescued by sonic lipstick instead of a sonic screwdriver, is chased by aliens into a room of alien technology where she learns the backstory… and many more.

Even some of the dialogue is the same. (the exchange when Sarah orders her companion to forget her) It could be a deliberate allusion to the earlier episode, but surrounded by everything else from it too, this seems unlikely.

Oh, and it’s his fifth story about zombies…


However it also has a co-writer, and I suspect that this is why the script is peppered with characters protesting that things don’t make logical sense, enabling the inherant plot-holes from the original to be solved at their inception this time.

K-9 only gets a cameo appearance, but at least he’s there, and still voiced by John Leeson too. What makes no sense though is why on Earth the rest of his lines are then read by another computer, rather patronisingly called “Mr Smith.” I’m writing this 6 months later, and I still haven’t figured that mistifying change out.