usuallyhats | SJA love (Reply)

Things I Love About the Sarah Jane Adventures
by shinyjenni aged 23 5/6

Spoilers for all episodes, probably. Not objective at all in any way. May contain nuts.

The way Maria's teacher tells her "well then, depechez-vous!" when he's sending her back to her lesson in The Lost Boy. I don't know why I love this line so much; maybe it's that it's such a spot on teacher-y thing to say, maybe it's the slightly flat accent he says it in, but it made me giggle.

CLYDE. He is just fantastic. He's so warm and funny, and he's trying to be cool but he's drawn to the weird kids despite himself. And there is this lovely video on the BBC website where he's trying to teach Luke to be cool and it is utterly adorable. (I would link to it but I'm at work and can't find it!)

The bit in Revenge of the Slitheen where our heroes all work out how to stop the Slitheen between them, all contributing what they know.

Just generally the way Sarah interacts with the children; she treats them as people first and children second.

Alan rushing in in The Lost Boy with the vinegar bottle held up like a gun. He is such a dork.

Alan's reaction to finding out that Maria saves the world in her spare time. Of course he reacts badly at first - what she's doing is probably horrifically dangerous - but I love that they don't make a whole plot out of it and instead have him calm down pretty quickly and think "well, if the world's in danger she's probably better off saving it than sitting at home waiting for the planet to explode. And she seems pretty good at it. (It'll look great on her CV.) Also it is way cool. I wonder if they'll let me play?"

My train of thought in Warriors of the Kudlak: "Ho hum, they've split into boys and girls again and the boys are off playing war games whilst the girls sit at home... wait, WELDING? OH HELL YES."

The end of Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? and the fact that there's no last minute reprieve for Andrea, because that's not how it works. She wasn't a bad person, she just made some bad choices, mostly out of fear, and in the end she stood up and took responsibility and did what she had to, even though it meant erasing her life again. But she wasn't magically allowed to live because of it. And in some ways it's enough that our heroes remember her and know about her sacrifice, and what she did. (They do remember her, right? Cos if not, that really ruins my point, doesn't it? The rest still stands, though.)

The same thing with Bea in Eye of the Gorgon - they can't make her young again, they can't cure her Alzheimer's and it's sad, but it's ok, that's just how the world works, anything else would be cheating. She got to have a great life, and now it's someone else's turn to do the same.

Sarah isn't magically a good mother due to her woman-powers, she has to work at it and she doesn't always get it right first time.

And above everything else, there's the fact that the action hero, the one who's scaling walls and breaking into places and pwning motorcycling ninjas, is a sixty year old woman, and that is fantastic.