Is Sarah Jane back in style?

After a vastly impressive first year and slightly uneven sophomore outing, much hope has been pinned on the latest season of the Sarah Jane Adventures to fill the void left by the near-absence of Doctor Who from our screens in 2009. Of course, it’s important to remember that the target demographic for this CBBC spinoff is significantly younger than its parent show, so it understandably adopts a lighter tone than some seasoned Whovians might hope for. Sadly, both kiddies and Who-deprived adults deserve better fare than the third season’s opening story ‘Prisoner Of The Judoon’.

This two-parter featured a lone Judoon teaming up with the Bannerman Road youngsters to pursue a deadly fugitive known as The Veil, who wasted little time in taking possession of Sarah Jane’s body. In an old-fashioned and stale race against time, the team sought to track down the villain before he could unleash a horde of little nanobots upon the world.

A noticeable drop off in quality occurred in the second part, which featured a largely inconsequential time-wasting subplot featuring the Chandra family and a horrific performance by Elisabeth Sladen as the Veil-possessed Sarah Jane. That gurning, panto-style manifestation of evil surely ranks up there alongside other bizarre Whoniverse turns such as Graham Crowden’s Soldeed in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ and Richard Briers as Kroagnon in ‘Paradise Towers’. Sladen undoubtedly had fun playing against type, but it really should have been up the story’s director to rein in her performance.

While the plot was very much by numbers and vastly underwhelming compared to many previous adventures, a barrage of amusing moments helped the action flow. The primary source of the humour stemmed from the culture clash between the law-enforcing Judoon and the ways of the planet Earth. It wasn’t so much fish out of water as rhino out of space.

Highlights including the Judoon confronting a noise-polluting chav, insisting that his allies ‘pay and display’, and the surreal sight of the large brute scooting around town in a commandeered police car. These delights were backed up by a steady stream of effective one-liners from Clyde, by far the most endearing and assured of the young actors. It also has to be said that Rani was significantly less annoying than last year, which bodes well for the future.

Failing to reach anywhere near the creative heights of previous adventures like ‘The Lost Boy' and 'The Temptation Of Sarah Jane Smith', ‘Prisoner Of The Judoon’ scuppers plenty of laughs and some great monster prosthetic work thanks to a script that peters out into an anti-climax bereft of tension and a terribly OTT turn by Sladen that reinstates the suspended disbelief that’s usually required to watch science fiction and fantasy.

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