The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

What a shame that this series of The Sarah Jane Adventures should end on such a light-weight story.

The Gift opened with Sarah Jane and her gang struggling to thwart the latest scheme of the flatulent Slitheen - until the arrival of the Blatereen, another family of giant, gangly aliens from Raxacoricofallapatorius, who say they are law-abiding citizens trying to clear the name of their planet by hunting down the Slitheen.

The orange-skinned aliens then ask Sarah Jane to be their 'ambassador' to Earth and present her with a plant, called rakweed, which they claim will solve the world's famine problems.

Of course, they are liars and the rakweed - when exposed to sunlight - spreads wildly, filling the air with its dangerous spores (Luke gets a lungful and is soon on death's door).

Clyde and Rani, however, discover that the sound of their school bell kills the weed and that pretty much wraps everything up.

The Gift was a pitifully weak story that (a) didn't actually require the involvemnet of Sarah Jane and co. as the Blathereen could have simply popped down to Earth, planted the rakweed and let it run riot and (b) relied way too much on the 'lucky break' of the school bell just happening to ring at a frequency that destroyed the plant.

The Slitheen are not the best aliens introduced to the Whoniverse since Russell T Davies regenerated it in 2005, but I guess there's something about their juvenile potential (Clyde gets to say that they "farted themselves to death") that makes them attractive to Sarah Jane Adventures writers.

The introduction of the Blathereen looked, for a moment, as though an interesting spin had been put on the aliens, but it never really developed further than them being ruthless farmers, addicted to rakweed.

Their whole 'scheme' to involve Sarah Jane and make her their "ambassador" was totally and utterly pointless, as was the dinner party they had with Sarah Jane and her young friends. In fact, it didn't even make sense as it was drawing Sarah Jane's attention to their booby-trapped plant, when it would have been so easy to have sneaked it onto Earth without anyone being any the wiser!

Sarah Jane also got to deliver - through gritted teeth - a half-hearted reworking of the famous Doctor Who quote: "There should have been another way" (The Fifth Doctor from Warriors Of The Deep), but its pathos was rather lost under a layer of Blathereen gunge.

Perhaps the only saving grace of The Gift was the further character development of Clyde (he's now half-decent chef as well as a great artist) and Rani (she's the most open to the idea that the Blathereen might be 'good guys' and appears to have a cheeky appreciation of Clyde using K9 to help him cheat in a biology test, despite her protestations).

Sarah Jane was driven by a desire to save Luke's life, which justified her teleporting blindly to the Blathereen craft in the Antarctic, but all these good touches were overshadowed by the disappointingly poor script by Rupert Laight; without a doubt the weakest in the show's three years.

The second episode did end with a nice, optimistic coda for the series, but, overall, The Gift was a paper-thin story filled out with a lot of running about to patch over the gaping holes in the plot.