The Sarah Jane Adventures
I recently decided (after watching Avatar and a particularly gory episode of Supernatural) that the baby doesn't seem to appreciate loud noises or adrenalin in my system, and I don't much enjoy the kicking and wriggling that are the Robin's response to those things. So I've had to stop watching loud or scary things until I can do so without disturbing the baby.
Since rather a lot of MrM's collection that isn't straight comedy (for which I have limited tolerance) tends to the spooky, this has made DVD selecion in the evenings a bit tricky. But he bought The Sarah Jane Adventures on a whi recently, and that's turned out to be quite a good compromise.
Being a child of the 80's, Tom Baker was THE Doctor for me, and Sarah Jane and Romana (the first) were the companions I remembered. (I seem to have missed the Leela episodes somehow.) So although Sarah Jane, like all companions, did seem to do an inordinate amount of running off in completely the wrong direction and getting herself into trouble from which she then needed to be rescued after screaming her way through a couple of cliff-hanger episode endings, I was very pleased when she showed up in a Doctor Who story a couple of seasons ago, and interested to see what Russell T. Davies would do with the character in a spin-off series. And because it's aimed more at the original Doctor Who audience, being children, I've been able to watch it with minimal disturbance to the child-in-residence.
Sarah Jane lives alone in a big house in Ealing, and doesn't see to have a day job: she calls herself a journalist, but that seems to be mostly a front for poking around places that turn out to contain aliens; I have yet to see any evidence of her doing any actual writing! The series opens when 12 year old Maria and her much too young-looking father move into the house across the road. Maria naturally stumbles across Strange and Alien Happenings that very night and gets drawn into an adventure. World-saving shenanigans ensue (of course) and by the end of the adventure Sarah Jane has found herself responsible for a brilliant but socially backward boy called Luke.
The show looks good, although the "alien" effects are not as realistic as I've got used to seeing Doctor Who itself - I'm not sure if that's due to a smaller budget, or a deliberate design decision to avoid scaring the kids too much. The directors follow the tradition set by the early Doctor Who episodes of avoiding melodrama and playing the non-comedy bits straight, no matter how ridiculous the scenario or unbelievable the effects (although whoever writes the score seems to have decided to ignore that memo occasionally).
Maria's relationship with her father adds some emotional depth to the ridiculous alien storylines, as do her mother's regular disruptive intrusions into their lives. A third young cast member, Clyde, is added in the episode that follows the pilot, filling the role of cheeky and amusing if not terribly bright sidekick. And the guest actors who play the villians are clearly having a wonderful time chewing up the set. I'm a bit disappointed that K-9 has only made a cameo appearance so far - he's apparently out in space somewhere tidying up after some stellar disaster, but I gather he plays a larger role later on. Sarah Jane herself is initially presented as quite closed off, unwilling to allow herself to care for anyone in case they get hurt, but she changes her mind on that one pretty quickly (perhaps a bit tooo quickly to be psychologically believable) when she realises that although allowing other people into her life carries the risk of losing them, it can still be worth it. Particularly when they help her save the world.
My main complaint about the show is how heavy-handed it is with its morals: the pilot might just as well have been subtitled "Everyone Needs Family"; the message "War is Bad" was equally blatant in a later episode. But other than that, the show is entertaining.
.
Since rather a lot of MrM's collection that isn't straight comedy (for which I have limited tolerance) tends to the spooky, this has made DVD selecion in the evenings a bit tricky. But he bought The Sarah Jane Adventures on a whi recently, and that's turned out to be quite a good compromise.
Being a child of the 80's, Tom Baker was THE Doctor for me, and Sarah Jane and Romana (the first) were the companions I remembered. (I seem to have missed the Leela episodes somehow.) So although Sarah Jane, like all companions, did seem to do an inordinate amount of running off in completely the wrong direction and getting herself into trouble from which she then needed to be rescued after screaming her way through a couple of cliff-hanger episode endings, I was very pleased when she showed up in a Doctor Who story a couple of seasons ago, and interested to see what Russell T. Davies would do with the character in a spin-off series. And because it's aimed more at the original Doctor Who audience, being children, I've been able to watch it with minimal disturbance to the child-in-residence.
Sarah Jane lives alone in a big house in Ealing, and doesn't see to have a day job: she calls herself a journalist, but that seems to be mostly a front for poking around places that turn out to contain aliens; I have yet to see any evidence of her doing any actual writing! The series opens when 12 year old Maria and her much too young-looking father move into the house across the road. Maria naturally stumbles across Strange and Alien Happenings that very night and gets drawn into an adventure. World-saving shenanigans ensue (of course) and by the end of the adventure Sarah Jane has found herself responsible for a brilliant but socially backward boy called Luke.
The show looks good, although the "alien" effects are not as realistic as I've got used to seeing Doctor Who itself - I'm not sure if that's due to a smaller budget, or a deliberate design decision to avoid scaring the kids too much. The directors follow the tradition set by the early Doctor Who episodes of avoiding melodrama and playing the non-comedy bits straight, no matter how ridiculous the scenario or unbelievable the effects (although whoever writes the score seems to have decided to ignore that memo occasionally).
Maria's relationship with her father adds some emotional depth to the ridiculous alien storylines, as do her mother's regular disruptive intrusions into their lives. A third young cast member, Clyde, is added in the episode that follows the pilot, filling the role of cheeky and amusing if not terribly bright sidekick. And the guest actors who play the villians are clearly having a wonderful time chewing up the set. I'm a bit disappointed that K-9 has only made a cameo appearance so far - he's apparently out in space somewhere tidying up after some stellar disaster, but I gather he plays a larger role later on. Sarah Jane herself is initially presented as quite closed off, unwilling to allow herself to care for anyone in case they get hurt, but she changes her mind on that one pretty quickly (perhaps a bit tooo quickly to be psychologically believable) when she realises that although allowing other people into her life carries the risk of losing them, it can still be worth it. Particularly when they help her save the world.
My main complaint about the show is how heavy-handed it is with its morals: the pilot might just as well have been subtitled "Everyone Needs Family"; the message "War is Bad" was equally blatant in a later episode. But other than that, the show is entertaining.
.