TV is the New Reading

‘Sarah Jane Adventures’

is family-friendly sci-fi

“Doctor Who” has come a long way since green foam-rubber hand-puppets rained from the sky in an alien attack.

At the height of the original series’ popularity in the mid-1970s, Tom Baker as The Doctor – a tall, lanky, floppy-haired gadfly Time Lord with the mile-long scarf – battled low-budget monsters and terrible computer graphics of all sorts, all in an endless effort to save the universe. He flew about in his time ship, a crazy blue phone booth no one ever notices called the TARDIS, which stands for Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.

The long-running series sputtered out in the ‘80s with a death rattle movie presentation in the early ‘90s. There were audio releases and books, but the screens had gone dark.

Cut to 2005, when Christopher Eccleston poked his head in the door as the newest regeneration of The Doctor. His writing was better, his storylines more complex and his computer graphics and special effects were more impressive. He had a great Companion – the Doctor always had companions traveling with him to get into trouble and provide exposition. Eccleston reintroduced the joy of “Doctor Who” to a new generation of science fiction fans, clearing the way for David Tennant to take over the role the following season as The Tenth Doctor.

Sarah Jane Smith

But what happened back in the 1970s? As I said, the Doctor always has Companions and at the height of the original series popularity, one of the best was Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, a reporter who fell in with The Doctor and had all sorts of adventures, flying around through time and space and encountering creatures good and bad.

Then, all of a sudden, she was left behind. She was left behind in part because The Doctor had a mission from his home planet to attend to and it would be too dangerous for Sarah Jane to come along.

But that didn’t fully excuse him from never tracking her down again to say a proper goodbye. So she was rightly indignant when – during the course of some investigative reporting – she encountered the Doctor, who’d infiltrated the teaching staff of a school run by shapeshifting aliens.

You could hear the fan response. That’s right. That was the “squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” you heard faintly in the distance when Sarah Jane and K-9 – the Doctor’s beloved robot dog – cropped up in one of the Doctor’s new adventures.

Family-friendly sci-fi

And how’s she been doing? Well, she’d naturally fallen in love with the Doctor way back when and he’s proved to be an impossible act to follow, so she’s lived on her own for the past 30 years. But she’s kept busy, and she’s kept her eyes open for alien activity, running it down and thwarting extraterrestrial evil on her own as a freelance investigative journalist.

That’s where we discover her in her own show, helping friendly aliens and exposing naughtier ones. Some of the weirdness that surrounds her draws the attention of her new neighbor girl, Yasmin Paige as Maria, and together they consider the strangeness of the world that surrounds them.

Centered around more kid-friendly misadventures, “The Sarah Jane Adventures” is much more family-friendly than “Doctor Who’s” re-energized series and its other spinoff, “Torchwood.” While the adrenaline level is still compelling, the violence is toned way down, the adventures are tamer and the sex nonexistent.

Which is just as well. There’s absolutely some room on the dial for smartly written, family-friendly science fiction.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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