DOCTOR WHO-SCHOOL REUNION

 

DOCTOR WHO-SCHOOL REUNION

“Oh my God, I’m the Tin Dog!”

 

ROSE: I don't mean to be rude or anything, but who exactly are you?

SARAH: Sarah Jane Smith. I used to travel with the Doctor.

ROSE: Oh. Well, he's never mentioned you.

DOCTOR: Oh, I must've done. Sarah Jane. Mention her all the time.

ROSE: Hold on. Sorry. Never.

SARAH: What, not even once? He didn't mention me even once?

MICKEY: Ho, ho, mate. The missus and the ex. Welcome to every man's worst nightmare.

 

DOCTOR: K9! Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, allow me to introduce K9. well, K9 Mark Three to be precise.

ROSE: Why does he look so disco?

DOCTOR: Oi! Listen, in the year five thousand, this was cutting edge. What's happened to him?

 

And in one hilarious moment:

MICKEY: So what's the deal with the tin dog?

SARAH: The Doctor likes travelling with an entourage. Sometimes they're humans, sometimes they're aliens, and sometimes they're tin dogs. What about you? Where do you fit in the picture?

MICKEY: Me? I'm their Man in Havana. I'm the technical support. I'm. Oh, my God. I'm the tin dog.

 

Love Noel Clarke.

 

Okay, David Tennant is a very good Doctor and compared to Matt Smith, he’s practically the God of the new series, though Chris Eccleson is shades better than both of them. Yes, David’s great but this episode has him walk that fine line he almost always did and one bit has him just about tumble over the line into annoying. The scene where he’s smiling like a loon lording it over Rose because she has to play lunch lady and doesn’t like it a bit. He’s really a jerk in that scene, The Doctor is but David goes too far in being the idiot enjoying her suffering. In every other scene, he’s spot on perfect, though almost bordering on annoying in his scene as teacher to the kids. Point is: he will never be Tom Baker. Nor will anyone. 

 

Ahh, yes, the kids. The story of Kenny is mostly dropped and we barely get to know him. Shot scenes of the kids and their conflicts were edited out and others removed from the script before filming and that’s a shame. Yet, the pace, once again in this era, is frenetic and lively, hiding any flaws the script might have, though it is harder to notice flaws in the RTD era as it is driven, fast paced, and just wonderful. This moves along nicely and never mind if you don’t like the CGI bat beings (I think they’re wonderful but could have been better, frankly I think the TIME AND THE RANI bat beings were superior but never mind), the episode is NOT about them really.

 

It’s not even really about Mr. Finch or whatever their leader’s name really is (the great Anthony Head of BUFFY). Head is so good in every scene really in what could have been a really cheesy role but isn’t. The “western” confrontation between Finch and the Doctor is wonderful and played out around the school swimming pool. AND when Head tempts the Doctor, both Tennant and Head make it so very believable, you almost expect the Doctor to take Finch up on his offer to mold the universe to the way the Doctor wants it: and reverse the Time War (uhm, did Moffat watch this episode; if so, he’s even more of a bad writer than I thought because Moffat’s awful DAY OF THE DOCTOR, while not ridding the world of the Time War, rids canon of the REASON the Time War ends so well but so upsettingly for the Doctor by his own actions; as Sarah Jane says to the Doctor, you have to move forward and Moffat never understood the show, the Time War, what RTD did, what the Classic did and how all of it was far better than anything he did in his own era).

 

Never mind all that Moffat Shite now. Sarah Jane and K9 are back and in a way, after all this time between this episode’s first airing and now, I think this episode has, if anything, become even better than most. It was good on first airing but now, with Liz Sladen gone and another K9 series long gone, it has an even more heart felt series of scenes between the Doctor meeting Sarah; Sarah stumbling into the TARDIS (her reaction is perfect) and the Doctor behind her well lit as she is not well lit (excellent scene and fantastic in every way). Well, almost every way. When the Doctor tells her everyone died, she…doesn’t press him further to explain THAT? Instead she worries about herself, “I thought you died!”

 

Okay, so the Sarah Jane and K9 stuff is warmly chilling and goosebump nice feels. BUT…and I had these complaints more then than now: Sarah was always dropped off at home by the Third Doctor AND the Fourth Doctor. We do not know how much time goes by in most Classic Series stories between stories or even between some scenes in some stories. SO, most of the emotional back story, in conjunction with the classic series, makes only the smallest of sense. Sarah met the Fifth Doctor in THE FIVE DOCTORS but do any of the companions (and/or earlier Doctors?) remember any of THE FIVE DOCTORS (the earlier Doctors in particular should NOT otherwise it makes no sense, too). Okay, I can take that she didn’t meet the Doctors after the Tom Baker Doctor. That she forgot THE FIVE DOCTORS.

 

At the time, I felt there was some canon that everything was canon including the comic where she met the Seventh Doctor and the double novel where she met the Eighth Doctor, though the novels are problematic at best because Sarah also DIES TWICE in them or is said to be dead in one or two of them. Sigh. Well, Ace dies three times, I believe in the comics and novels (please don’t ask me to find which ones right now).

 

Even worse than all of that is the fact that Sarah Jane waiting for the Doctor is wrong on so many levels. It makes her look like a loser that she didn’t marry someone else or at least find a life beyond the Fourth Doctor.

 

Her spinoff series, THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES while, initially great (and all five seasons are okay really) though repetitious after season three, makes the situation even worse. She seems like a shut in weirdo to everyone else and only the new kids and her clone son Luke (LOVE Tommy Knight, what a great addition to the canon) draw her out of herself. NONE of that gels with the personable, down to Earth (!) Sarah Jane Smith of the Classic Series.  

 

While some fans and fan fic writers would totally disagree, I NEVER saw the Doctor (Third or Fourth) as romantically liked or linked to Sarah Jane. I never felt, as I do with Rose, that Sarah was I love with the Doctor or looked at him as anything other than a great friend. It was all very platonic in a way that Rose and 9 and Rose and 10 (more so with 10) were NOT. Thus, having her “wait for him” and “never marry” doesn’t sit well.

 

 

It’s also jarring that the Doctor NEVER visited Sarah AT ALL after he left for Gallifrey. It makes him not only a jerk but a bad friend AND a loser, too. That he can’t come to terms with the fact that he will age and the companions will not, while realistic IF HE’S HUMAN MINDED, also doesn’t gell well either.

 

Somehow I always thought, without most evidence or any evidence at all, if I’m honest, that the TARDIS, if the Doctor chose to keep someone around long enough (let’s face it, he CAN keep them ALL around if he wanted to), would someone allow the companions to age slower and make them almost on a par with the Doctor’s age eventually. None of them ever stay around long enough for that.

 

Dramatically, all of it works but it jars if you are a classic fan of Sarah and the old show. Realistically it mostly works, too. It just makes a lot of fan fiction seem not possible as there are literally hundreds of stories about the Doctor revisiting old companions and not just as a stalker who’s dying (END OF TIME) and feeling sorry for HIMSELF. Many of these are great, too. There are also probably a bunch of professionally released short stories, too, about this very idea.

 

SO here we have what might be a different version of Sarah in an alternate universe who pined away for the Doctor, waiting for him to turn up and what…have a love affair with him? Her saying to him in this story “You were my life,” while shockingly good in the context of this episode is shockingly poor in the context of the classic series and…well, everything else, too. The Sarah we saw in the classic series would NEVER just wait around for any man (or woman) and would get on with her exciting, very full life. Instead, it’s as if the Doctor crushed her spirit in this story and between it and when she left in THE HAND OF FEAR.

 

Never mind. The rapport between all of them does work. Making Rose and Sarah initially jealous of each other (and to be fair to Rose, Sarah Jane starts the entire rivalry thing) and then bonding over the Doctor and how lower than them he is (like two women who fought over a geeky guy who then realize his faults) is VERY fun and funny. Rose being startled and impressed by THE Loch Ness Monstah! is also funny.

 

I like that they initially have hatred but then bond. The actors play it perfectly all around and it makes sense from an emotional POV in ways that similar almost scenes in the Amy era do NOT, almost never play that way even though clearly Amy and the Doctor are also in love, almost as much as Amy and Rory.  

 

And while I can underline Rose’s selfishness in the scene where she mouths “Say NO” to the Doctor, wanting him to re-reject Mickey from traveling with them, it also makes sense she is jealous as she hopes, still, to F the Doctor and be his girlfriend. That she’s not brings her down quite a few notches from the obnoxiousness of her in BOOM TOWN and NEW EARTH (and I’ll throw in TOOTH AND CLAW, too). Even so, I love Rose for being that much more real a person than any companion (except maybe Adric) before her (and probably after her, too, though Ryan and Graham are very real, too). Of course, she loves Mickey, too, though it is NOT obvious until Mickey leaves a few stories from now in the Cybermen epic. She also seems HAPPY to have him around in THE GIRL IN THE FIREPLACE, the next aired story.

 

Mickey, in GIRL and here, has his joy on as he digs into Rose about the Doctor’s ex (Sarah) and current girlfriend (Reinette, though in real life Reinette was not so admirable, having left her husband and little girl---the girl dying early in her short life----to have an affair with the king or whatever he was then…well, they were French). Just the fact that the Doctor (to Mickey and to the rest of us) is like other men feels so…very good a story source but also wrong somehow can’t be ignored but in the light of the modern series makes sense to new audience members (especially the young girls who can’t abide by having a non romantic alien cold hearted Doctor who they have no chance with; gay men too, probably). This, like Tennant, borderlines on the precipice of (well, I don’t want to say slash fiction) romance fiction disguised as science fiction and/or fantasy and/or horror.

 

Yet, this might seem like a huge put down of this era and of this story, both. However, I love this era and this story for many reasons. It’s nice to see how brave the era is by having the Doctor compared to a lover and having him face, finally, the real reasons he doesn’t start anything with any of the females (I think there’s another reason and that he’s probably gay and does not want to be as he pushes the men away but tries real hard to impress and “be with” the females and it always fails when he does not follow through or they leave him (as Tegan does and in the novels, Ace does as well). It makes sense to mine all those emotions for drama AND for realism. Still, not sure I’d go there that way (in any fan fic I write that is).

 

On the whole, abandoning Classic Sarah’s real personality and relationship with the Doctor (oh and the Doctor here and in subsequent meetings with Sarah always calls her SARAH JANE when he did not as the Fourth Doctor) and the Kenny storyline (the other kids have hardly more than four lines between them other than Miles who had to have lines to show he and the others were turned into geniuses by the alien oil in the chips) abandoned as well, mean this story should NOT work at all but…the thing is: it does.

 

The menace, the chases, the night scenes, even the Doctor calling Mickey’s scream “Like a little girl…” and even K9’s death and revival ALL work. Mickey’s saving of the kids is a bit too rushed but even that works…do we really want to see any of the die? I don’t. In fact, it’s also odd that Finch kills the girl early on…thinking that her living in a children’s home means that no one would miss her, is flawed thinking on his part and probably also flawed writing…why wouldn’t someone check on her. Is that indictment of children’s homes? ABOUT TIME, I’m sure goes through why other things about this story are “things that don’t make sense” but never mind. It’s never going to be the best story ever (DOOMSDAY, LOGOPOLIS, PYRAMIDS OF MARS, CASTROVALVA, FULL CIRCLE, FACE OF EVIL, THE EMPTY CHILD, THE DOCTOR DANCES, etc) but it is fun, enjoyable, and exciting. AND it was great to see Lis back playing Sarah or Sarah Jane, even if she is playing her as written…from another universe.