The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Last Sontaran

There's a moment in this two-parter when our heroes are being held-up at gunpoint by a Sontaran in the middle of a wood. So Maria points behind said extra-terrestrial nasty and shouts "Look – U.N.I.T!" The villain looks behind him, and our heroes run away...

Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures is back for a second series, and on the basis of this opener it's still a breath of fresh-air from the other two franchises. While the above scene hopefully conveys the show's sense of fun, it doesn't represent the story's complexity or depth of characters.

With such a well-known parent show, there's also no fear of SJA's audience failing to have seen The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky, enabling this cross-series sequel to function without fear of, um, alienation.


Fig. 1: Zombies.

There are several formulaic elements to this that threaten to deaden the proceedings (last series' opener was also a sequel to a recent Who story, which also featured zombies, a girl-character with divorced parents, and people failing to realise how long light is supposed to take to travel across space) but this was all outweighed by good stuff by the end.