The Sarah Jane Adventures: Mona Lisa's Revenge

Mona Lisa's Revenge was a very strange story; strange in a good way, with some moments of sheer genius marred only a couple of moments of poor judgement.

The tale begins with Clyde winning his class a trip to the International Gallery in London for the first viewing of the Mona Lisa outside of France ( Clyde's interest in art is a great development of his character, adding depth to the 'joker in the pack'. A particularly nice touch was that he won The Artists Of The Future competition - which is a section of the official Sarah Jane Adventures website).

The International Gallery also featured in Planet Of The Dead, which gets a passing mention, and other adventures of Sarah Jane's gang are referenced (is this, and other continuity references in earlier episodes this season, the hand of script editor Gary Russell at work? If so, kudos, sir, I love anything that create the verisimilitude of the Whoniverse), however one noticeable ommision is any links to City Of Death, where The Doctor became tangled up in the creation of the Mona Lisa.

Some might say that this Fourth Doctor adventure contradicts Mona Lisa's Revenge, but given the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey nature of time in the Whoniverse (and this isn't the first contradiction fans have had to deal with over the years), I'm pretty sure both can be accomodated.

The arrival of Clyde, Luke, Rani and their classmates for the unveiling of the Mona Lisa coincides with her 'awakening', which we later discover is due to her proximity with a painting in the museum's vaults: The Abomination.

The story goes, according to scriptwriter Phil Ford, that the Mona Lisa was painted using the same paint that Leonardo da Vinci's "neighbour" Guiseppe Di Cattivo used to paint his notorious Abomination - a picture so foul that it drove the artist mad after he sealed it forever in a crate locked with a Chinese puzzle box. A painting supposedly acquired by the International Gallery in Victorian times and then lost in its old vaults; becoming an urban myth - its very existence thought to be the stuff of legends.

I was kind of enjoying Mona Lisa's Revenge - although finding the comedically common character of the animated painting slightly grating - until it came to the quite Lovecraftian backstory of the mythical Abomination ("a painting that shouldn't exist") and then I was hooked.

Where the programme went slightly wrong for me though was, even briefly, showing the claws and the back of the head of the Abomination when it started to emerge from its imprisonment. I realise this was probably to diffuse some potential nightmares among the show's young target audience, but I'd have found it far more terrifying for the Mona Lisa's "brother in paint" to have remained totally unseen.

The biggest disappointment with the story though came in the use of K-9 as deus ex machina to save the day - it was one thing for Luke to cleverly trick Mona Lisa into bringing the tin dog there to defeat the Abomination, but for it then to be able to dispel the other animated paintings seemed a too easy solution.

But, as always, these are minor quibbles. Mona Lisa's Revenge was a surprisingly good and entertaining story - especially given Sarah Jane's virtual absence from the second episode (spending most of the duration trapped in a painting), thus leaving the leg work to the younger cast members.

It started off on slightly shaky ground and had some strangely mature moments during the first episode, as well as some great character stuff (I've already talked about Clyde's development, but I liked the idea of Luke growing in the role of a teenager and thus sparking the usual teenage rows with his adopted mum, Sarah Jane), and just got better and better as the plot unfolded.

If it hadn't been for the rather pat resolution and the overexposure of the 'indescribable' Abomination, this could have been a truly classic story line in the annals of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but even so, it's still a very strong couple of episodes.

Next Week: Season Three concludes with The Gift.