Never Invite A Gift Horse Round For Dinner

The problem with Sarah Jane Adventures series 3 closer, The Gift, wasn't so much that it was terrible or anything... more that for a long time, most of the first episode, it looked as though it might be really good.

The Slitheen are a funny old monster. After vying with the Daleks for being the Ninth Doctor's signature foe in New Who Series One, it seems as though they might have been deemed a bit too kiddie-oriented for the mothership, and bequeathed to Sarah Jane instead. (Let's hope they never find their way onto Torchwood, as I just don't want to know what a notorious pansexual like Jack would find to do with a farting alien in a fatsuit.)

I didn't hate the Slitheen in Aliens of London/World War Three, despite the questions they raised about Russell T Davies' taste levels - the core concept is, after all, so crass that Hollywood has since spoofed it, in the "Fatties Fart 2" trailer in Tropic Thunder. And I actively warmed to them after Boom Town, when RTD brilliantly used Blon Fel-Fotch Slitheen to ask the question, are the monsters in Who people too?

So I was hoping for good things for most of episode one. In the first five minutes, a typically absurd Slitheen moneymaking plot is foiled... by the intervention of two new Raxacoricofallapatorians, the Blathereen, who have every appearance of being good guys. This seems canonically reasonable: we know that the Slitheen family are bad apples on their own planet, an exception rather than the rule. Leaf and Tree Blathereen come over for dinner, and despite displaying "humorously" disgusting table manners, are gracious enough to present Sarah Jane with a gift: an alien plant that will solve the problem of world hunger on Earth for once and all.

After the Blathereen depart, the regulars argue: Rani (increasingly the most impressive member of the gang) wants to trust them, Clyde is prejudiced against disgusting aliens and doesn't. Sarah Jane's head wants to trust the Blathereen, but her intuition tells her that there's something fishy going on. Mr Smith's scan detects nothing problematic about the Rackweed, so they keep it in the house - and then the following morning the plant releases a cloud of spore which make Luke very ill indeed...

And at this point this could still have been a great story. We are told that the Rackweed spores lead to coma and death for those that might stand in the way of their propagation. How interesting would it have been if they'd infected Luke for some reason related to him being a creation of the Bane? Sarah Jane would have had to choose between ending world hunger... or saving her own son. Of course there'd be no contest, and the "gift" of the title would not have been a no-effort get-out-of-jail-free card for the human race, but her child; it would have been a perfect contrast to the tragic climax of Torchwood: Children of Earth earlier this year.

But no, the spores are going to end all life on earth as we know it. The Blathereen turn out to be close relatives of, and basically indistinguishable from, the Slitheen. With all potential moral dilemmas now avoided, the story can be resolved and the villains dispatched in a completely standard and unmemorable way. Ho hum.

There were a few other little things to be annoyed about: after Clyde suddenly turned out to be a brilliant artist for the purposes of last week's Mona Lisa episode, it was gratingly noticeable that he suddenly turned out to be an excellent cook for this one. Fine, Clyde's a renaissance man, I have no problem with that, except that it's blatantly obvious that he's REALLY just a place that lazy writers turn to for cheap plot hooks. Would it be too much to ask them to find something for underused unearthly genius Luke to do for a change, instead?

Even more disappointing, for me, was the final showdown with the Blathereen. Sarah Jane gives them one chance to reform their wicked ways; "no, we love being evil!" the pantomime villains cackle; and so Sarah blows them up. This is (a) quite boring, because it's exactly the same exchange as the Tenth Doctor traditionally enacts, q.v. the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and (b) troubling, because it undoes all the good work Boom Town did in showing us that mercy is never wasted, not even on an incorrigible Slitheen recidivist.

I hope the writers aren't buying into the idea that Ten is some kind of shining paragon in the how-to-deal-with-aliens stakes, because I'd personally class him as a dangerously unstable egotist, bordering on the psychopathic. And after Sarah Jane only "almost" having sympathy for the Mona Lisa trapped in painted solitary confinement for eternity - shades of Sister of Mine in her mirror, at the end of Family of Blood - I'm worried they're bringing her right down to his level.

It just feels like lazy writing to set up an interesting, problematic scenario, and then reduce it to something simple and one-dimensional, conveniently just in time for the denouement. Remember The Unquiet Dead, also from Eccleston's first season? Alien asylum seekers come to Victorian London... but in order to survive they need to borrow human corpses to walk around in. That's a bona fide moral dilemma - but wait, it turns out the aliens are completely evil and want to eat the entire human race, so it's fine to let them die after all, roll credits.

As such, I'd label The Gift one of the largest disappointments of what has been, overall, the best series of Sarah Jane Adventures yet, despite having the fabulous Alice Troughton in the director's chair. I'd rank the six stories, from best to worst, as follows:

1. The Mad Woman in the Attic
2. The Eternity Trap
3. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
4. Mona Lisa's Revenge
5. The Gift
6. Prisoner of the Judoon

Here's hoping that Series 4 has no problems getting greenlit - there's plenty of life in the old girl yet...