The Day of the Clown

TARDIS Coordinates: October 6, 2008

It may seem a little weird that a woman who could tell Davros to stuff it would be afraid of clowns. I like ’em, myself, having been taken to a circus at a young age and being more interested in the clowns than, say, the elephants. However, I also know that phobias know no rationality; they’re a physical reaction at their core, a glitch in the natural, instinctive fight-or-flight reflex.

Doctor Who HAS dabbled in evil clowns before; witness “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” and Clara the Clown from “The Celestial Toymaker,” the harlequin in “Black Orchid” and the more recent Torchwood episode “From Out of the Rain.” The idea that there’s something sinister under the motley isn’t new. And as much fun as I have watching clowns at play, they can be said to reside somewhere in the uncanny valley, and that it doesn’t take much of a tweak to put something horrible in the greasepaint and screw up all the signals. The clown is, after all, the mask, half-concealing half-disclosing the intention of whoever is wearing it, and concealment is a tricky thing to play with.

The monster in this, Mr. Spellman/Odd Bob, actually turns out to be the Pied Piper of legend, himself a sort of evil clown who led the children astray. This serial isn’t so much the flipside of “From Out of the Rain” as a funhouse mirror reflection of it, brooding on the nature of the things we create to entertain us, and the idea that phantoms might hide within those entertainments to take advantage of our lowering our guard. (All eyes turn toward “The Wire” from “The Idiot’s Lantern.”) Lots of fantasy television, from “The Twilight Zone” to “Angel,” has questioned the morality of its own medium.

Years ago, I saw my young niece watching the Macy’s Parade in a state of complete rapture – eyes wide, mouth open, muscles slack, and if I had no knowledge of television and someone told me that the magic box was stealing her soul, I would have found a brick on the spot and let the evil spirits out. The warning is implicit: I am television, I am entertaining you, but there’s more to life than being entertained – there’s getting out there and being and doing and thinking for yourself. If you live your life being entertained, it’s not your life.

“Day of the Clown” introduces Rani Chandra, and it’s striking that at no moment does she come across merely as Maria’s replacement. She’s more active and participatory, meaning she’s got the longest, shrewdest nose on Bannerman Road and it takes about a minute and a half for the scales to fall from her eyes and her discovery of what the neighbors are up to. Where Maria just sort of fell into it, Rani sought it out, so the best bet was to make her part of the team and hope she could be trusted.

To be honest, I’m equally intrigued with her father Haresh, especially given his initial introduction and how at-odds it was with the rest of his character. He seems comfortable enough as the school’s resident dictator, laying down the rules like the warden at Shawshank and then coming home and being immediately undercut by his family, much to Clyde’s bemusement. Watching Clyde strip bare Haresh’s preconceived notions about him was telling for someone who billed himself as relentless and inflexible.

The Last Sontaran

TARDIS Coordinates: September 29, 2008

Doctor Who tends to be a bit more hardline against monsters than the Sarah Jane Adventures – not without good reason, given SJA’s target audience and the necessity of coming up with better responses to their schemes than “blow them the hell up.” The Daleks are not descending upon Bannerman Road, and, as was displayed so thoroughly in “The Stolen Earth,” you can’t really talk them out of being awful.

So to have a Sontaran lumbering stupidly around this show is something of a head-turner. They got a name-check in an earlier episode, and Sarah’s involvement with them goes all the way back to her – and their – first appearance in 1973, so they’re a natural for the series. Sarah has, in fact, hit all the Doctor Who high points when it comes to monsters – not only was she in the first Sontaran serial, she saw the Daleks created and the Cybermen destroyed, visited the end of the Universe and saw what Sutekh could do, had to face down a Time Lord dictator while blind, and has been possessed by baddies from the Great Spider to Eldrad. No matter what she sees in this show, she’s definitely seen worse. And yet, a Sontaran is oddly out of place. Too rough, too dangerous, too demanding.

The narrative finds its way around this by making this Sontaran alone, and desperate, and, dare I say it, a little bit frightened. It’s not enough to get off the planet if his own people won’t accept him when he returns, so he has to do something stupid to bolster his image. The show, therefore, is about the team trying to stop him from doing something stupid.

Sontarans would say that they don’t know fear, but it might be more accurate to say that Sontarans just don’t know what fear is, even if they feel it all the time. Kraagh doesn’t stand a tinker’s chance against the combined forces of the planet he’s trying to devastate – and for no other reason than to save face. His reaction, in human terms, is a fear reaction – desperate, reflexive, unimaginative, and immediate. He has to do what he’s doing, as quietly as possible so UNIT doesn’t show up and jam every gun in the world down his probic vent, and he’s not good at quiet – especially as his situation grows thinner. Kraagh wouldn’t recognize his feelings as “afraid,” but there they are.

This was Maria Jackson’s last serial, and she takes her Dad Alan with her. Her task was introductory, a sort of everykid who walks out of the real world and into Sarah Jane’s wonderland. Sarah Jane’s somewhat childish initial reaction to her leaving was a bit of a surprise, but she later adopts the more maternal response one hopes to see from SJA’s mature Sarah Jane. There’s something unpleasant in there that points to the thought that Sarah Jane tends to take people for granted, to assume they’ll always be there even when they have their own agendas. Conversely, it might just be lingering feelings of abandonment following her own unceremonious booting from the TARDIS, an event she played off in “The Five Doctors” but which clearly defines her here. I’m glad she snapped out of it.

The Lost Boy

TARDIS Coordinates: November 12, 2007

In one of the Matrix sequels, a recently-freed Agent Smith comments to Neo, “There’s no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us.”

What happens to a bad guy that loses his purpose? Evil takes motivation, after all. Evil is hard work. It takes energy to propose a plan, put it into action, maintain it, and see it through to its inevitable conclusion. Left with no reason to perpetuate a plan, what happens to the bad guy? Does he stay bad? Does he find another reason to go on, one a bit less egregious?

I had a genuine problem with Mr. Smith when he was revealed to be a Xylok infiltrator. For ten episodes now, we had come to trust him as a profound and meaningful source of information as well as a character in his own right, so suddenly determining that he’s been gaslighting Sarah Jane and the children all this time came as a complete shock. Far from just that, however, I even found it difficult to subsequently trust him, rewritten and repurposed as he was. No matter what else Mr. Smith was, throughout the course of the series, he had still been a Xylok infiltrator who tried to destroy the world, and I found insufficient reassurances in his programming to indicate that he would no longer be a threat.

Alan Jackson has just been brought into the fold via his unwitting and unwilling participation in the previous episode, and it’s shaken him deeply. Maria struggles to convince Alan that she knows what she’s doing and that, though it’s a bit dangerous, she feels needed, and that’s important to her. She needs to know about this brave world of Sarah Jane’s, because she won’t stop looking for it, which is natural; but only Sarah Jane can give her the support she needs to face it on her terms. It’s a good argument, and it briefly mollifies Alan – until the news reveals that Luke is no alien spore, but a kidnapped child named Ashley.

The revelation breaks Sarah Jane’s heart, and she indicates that maybe Alan is right, and her life is no place for children. Fortunately, the narrative doesn’t dick us around as much as the characters, as it’s clear almost as soon as “Ashley” returns “home” that his “parents” are up to no “good.”

Chrissie is spectacularly unhelpful and gosh isn’t she fun to have around; Alan is a bit less canny, unwilling to believe that Sarah Jane is some kind of monster, yet, being new to the Scoobies, uncertain as to what to do with his knowledge. This is a very, very hard storyline for anyone to watch,  because, as the Internet might say these days, it has all the feels.

Mr. Smith is eventually restored to his narrative purpose, as assistant to Sarah Jane and the kids in their explorations. Alan is part of that family now as well, which I think was a good move – the whole “masquerade” thing can get old very, very fast. The story ends with those family ties stronger than ever, and with an experienced crew. It’s a great place to start Season 2.

Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?

TARDIS Coordinates: October 29, 2007

Every once in a while, you get a Doctor Who episode where the viewer leans back, puts his feet up, and says to the screen, “Well. How are you going to resolve this one, you smug git?”

“Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane” produces the same effect – the story is so tight and so frightening that at times it seems impossible that there’ll be a resolution without some kind of inexplicable magic to save the day, as so many Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes used. However, this sense is contained within the additional particulars of the show itself: how the hell is “The Sarah Jane Adventures” going to handle this conflict and still remain true to all we find beautiful in “The Sarah Jane Adventures?”

The answer is that it won’t, not neatly, not tidily, not cleverly; it’s going to resolve its plot, but not without sacrifice and pain, and it’s still going to be true to “The Sarah Jane Adventures.”

The Trickster has rewritten time – on a beach outing in 1964, thirteen-year-old Sarah Jane Smith and her friend Andrea Yates were playing on a closed pier, when Andrea fell into the water in a senseless and fatal accident that left Sarah Jane devastated. Now, though, Andrea Yates has bargained for her life with the Trickster and taken Sarah Jane’s place. Sarah Jane is now lost in time, and only Maria remembers her. She never grew up, never became a journalist, never met the Doctor or went to space or acquired K-9 or an attic full of mysteries, and Maria’s investigation forces Andrea to remember the bargain she made – a bargain demanded of a scared thirteen-year-old girl who had no idea what was being asked of her.

Having remembered, Andrea is asked if she wants to dispose of Maria as well, and Andrea’s affirmation sends the Graske to fling Maria into the same Limbo. Now, however, only Alan remembers his daughter. Now it’s not an overwrought teenager trying to convince her Dad that her best friend isn’t imaginary. Now it’s a terrified grown man slowly losing his sanity as he tries to cope with the worst nightmare any parent can ever have – and no one believes him. This is not small, it is not trivial, and Joseph Millson doesn’t play it as if it is.

There is no way out of this without someone getting hurt. Only one life can be lived, and Sarah Jane lived it; a thirteen year old girl is lost and her father wants her back and doesn’t care what it takes. Cornered and terrified, Andrea agrees to renege on the deal, sacrificing not just her life, but the life she’d already lived, to rescue Sarah Jane and Maria and save the world.

This is the Sarah Jane Adventures doing it the hard way. If it’s going to give you the ending that it’s tried to avoid until now, it’s not going to make it easy for you. In the end, there’s an extraordinarily bemused Alan demanding an well-deserved explanation, and we don’t blame him one bit.

Warriors of Kudlak

TARDIS Coordinates: October 15, 2007

One of the things that bothered me about Clyde Langer’s persistent “how to be a socially-acceptable teenager” lessons is that Clyde is just a little bit too much of a jerk to be a role-model. Not that his swaggering arrogance is entirely out of place for his perceived age or his character – in fact, it’s nice to have a character in the ‘Verse who can have his head on straight while still being impressed by the wonders he sees, and even summon the courage for a wisecrack or two, but when he starts showing a naif like Luke how to rock adolescence, my immediate reaction is, “Yikes.”

Clyde takes Luke to a laser tag center called Combat 3000 for a little recreation. What unfolds is a plot used in the film “The Last Starfighter,” as well as the Doctor Who novel “Winner Take All” and even the Orson Scott Card classic “Ender’s Game.” Far from being a cliche plot, though, such stories tap into one of the deeper realities of play, and its importance in education – many games are simulations of adult activities transformed for children, a metaphor that persists in every civilization, whether it’s a game of Monopoly or the march of the little plastic Army Men. Today’s video games offer more than just eye-hand coordination and the occupation of a lively attention span – studies have shown that children who play video games grow up better able to make real-time decisions in dynamic environments. What the stories remove is a sense of awareness – those who play Combat 3000 are wholly unaware that they’re auditioning to be in someone else’s army, which makes the subsequent teleportation a bit of a shock to all involved.

Kudlak, the kidnapper, is eventually convinced that the war is over, but his battle computer wasn’t programmed with a knowledge of “peace,” so it disregarded the message. Kudlak rebels against his computer, frees his victims, and swears to spend the remainder of his declining years finding other recruits and returning them home. One of the most important things this demonstrates, in “The Sarah Jane Adventures’s” quest for the better way, is that it sometimes requires stepping outside the box a bit: were this an ordinary narrative, the heroes would dispose of Kudlak and send all the kids home and that would be the end of it. However, to ensure the survival of the antagonist, they had to give him depth and dimension and conflict, eventually leading to sympathy.

This kind of storytelling is incredibly important, though there’s a temptation to dismiss it as being juvenile, given that it lacks the satisfying final strokes of a well-tempered vengeance. And it’s important that the Sarah Jane Adventures uses it, given the temperament of its audience. It makes the writers work harder, gives us better characters, and presents an alternative to the usual grim victories so prevalent in modern storytelling. It is not simple, it is not juvenile, it’s magnificently complex and nuanced in its presentation, if not its eventual execution. Sometimes Doctor Who forgets that it has that kind of power. I think we need the Sarah Jane Adventures to prove to us that the ‘Verse still has room for it.