Sarah Jane Adventures: Invasion of the Bane
(1 episode, New Year Special, 2007)
The triumphant return of Sarah Jane Smith.
Maria Jackson and her family are moving into their new home on Bannerman Road. After watching an advertisement for Bubble Shock soda, Maria briefly meets Sarah Jane Smith and finishes moving boxes into the house. It turns out that Maria’s mother has recently divorced her father, so it’s just Maria and her father Alan in the house.
Later that night, Maria sets up her room while the soda commercial plays again. She turns out the lights and goes to bed, but she awakens around 2:30 am to a bright pink light pulsing from Sarah Jane’s residence. Maria investigates and finds Sarah Jane communing with a floating alien that gives her a glowing stone device. Maria runs home in fear.
The next morning, she obliquely asks her father about seeing strange things. Their neighbor Kelsey Hooper stops by to say hello, and the girls decide to go into town after brief introductions with Alan. Further introductions are made as Alan meets Sarah Jane, but Sarah Jane seems rather intrigued by the girls and rushes off.
Kelsey gives Maria the lowdown on Sarah Jane: She’s a journalist who rushes around like a madwoman. The girls board a bus dedicated to the Bubble Shock soda and take a tour of the bottling facility. Sarah Jane rushes the gate and sneaks in behind them, taking some readings on a wristwatch device. The girls go through a supposed security scanner, but the data it takes is transmitted to a strange science experiment behind the scenes.
Sarah Jane continues to sneak around, using her sonic lipstick to open a locked door. She’s captured soon after and taken to visit Mrs. Wormwood, the woman who was working on the Frankenstein experiment. Sarah Jane interviews Mrs. Wormwood, drawing parallels between Wormwood’s operation and the Book of Revelation.
Meanwhile, the girls continue their tour and receive free samples, but Maria rejects the soda. Sarah Jane is also offered a sample, and she also rejects it. The company is very aggressive about wanting every person on Earth to drink their product, adding special emphasis on the ingredient Bane.
Sarah Jane smells an alien influence. She’s also a bit put off when Wormwood suggests that Sarah Jane’s life alone has been wasted. If she only knew the truth. When Sarah Jane leaves, Wormwood signals her assistant to kill the journalist, but Sarah Jane escapes. Meanwhile, Kelsey leaves the tour group and tries to use her mobile phone, but the signals awaken a creature and set off alarms throughout the facility. As everyone evacuates the premises, Maria goes in search of her friend.
Kelsey is soon found by the tour guide. The man smashes her phone and declares that the creature is his mother. In fact, it is the mother of them all. Maria tries to make a call and sets off the alarms again, this time causing a feedback pulse that awakens and frees the young boy medical experiment, known as The Archetype.
The Archetype finds Maria and they work together to elude the factory personnel by hiding in the ladies’ restroom. Sarah Jane Smith finds them soon thereafter, but when Wormwood’s team arrives they are gone. Sarah Jane, Maria, and The Archetype escape, but Kelsey is left behind with Wormwood. Maria confronts Sarah Jane about the events at the factory and those of the previous night, but when Sarah Jane tells her to go home, she leaves in tears.
Wormwood reviews her scans of Sarah Jane Smith and finds residual artron energy, the results of traveling through spacetime. When Kelsey remarks that Sarah Jane lives on Bannerman Road, Wormwood reveals her true form and the girl faints. Wormwood analyzes Kelsey’s knowledge and sends Davey the tour guide (and a recently mindwiped Kelsey) to Bannerman Road.
Sarah Jane talks with The Archetype, who claims to be everyone, but their discussion is interrupted by a male voice from upstairs. Sarah Jane scans the boy to find that he is a human boy but is only 360 minutes old and has no bellybutton. Meanwhile, Kelsey arrives back at Maria’s house and Davey assaults Sarah Jane’s home. The girls find out that Davey is there and they rush to help only to find a tentacled creature that pursues them inside. Sarah Jane and the kids rush upstairs to safety. Sarah Jane uses some kind of aerosol to repel the creature and make it transform back into Davey. Davey runs off, Sarah Jane analyzes the remnants, and Kelsey snoops around in the attic.
Sarah Jane reveals her secret to the kids in the room surrounded by alien artifacts, pictures of the Brigadier and K9, and artwork depicting the TARDIS. She tells them of the Doctor and her travels, and how after she met him the second time, she dedicated herself to investigating alien influences on the planet Earth. Speaking of K9, the daft little metal dog, he’s working to seal a black hole before it destroys the planet. The portal between K9’s work and the attic is a concealed safe in the wall.
Back at the factory, Davey pays the price for his failure: He is eaten by the Mother. Sucks to be him.
Sarah Jane deduces that The Archetype is an alien experiment. As Sarah Jane and Maria develop a friendship, they discover that the soda (particularly Bane) is alien in origin. In fact, it is part of the creatures that they have been dealing with. Sarah Jane calls on Mr. Smith, her supercomputer, to hack into Wormwood’s office for a one-on-one video discussion. Wormwood is unwilling to bargain and declares war on humanity by using the Bane in everyone’s systems to transform them into the newborn Bane.
Sarah Jane, Maria, and The Archetype rush to the factory to find a solution. Sarah Jane sonics the gates to trap the soda zombies but the main gates to the factory are deadlock sealed, so she uses the Bubble Shock bus to break through the walls. Wormwood introduces Sarah Jane to the Mother and then explains that The Archetype is a combination of the strongest elements of each scanned visitor to the factory. The intent is to use the boy to fine tune the soda formula so that every human would drink it, but since he’s no longer needed, Wormwood issues a kill command in the boy’s DNA.
Maria fights back using her mobile phone, but the Mother swipes it away. The Archetype produces the communication device that Sarah Jane received the night before and programs it with the specific frequency of the Bane’s communications. Using that painful distraction, the humans run and the factory explodes behind them. The Mother is presumed dead, but Wormwood as escaped while vowing vengeance.
Everyone returns home to find that the world is restored. Alan meets The Archetype who Sarah Jane declares to be her adopted son. Sarah Jane and Maria reconvene later and deliberate over the boy’s future. Mr. Smith created official adoption documents, and Sarah Jane finishes them with a proper name: Luke.
There’s a nice touch here with nods to the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan while trying to name the newest member of the Smith family.
Sarah Jane waxes philosophically about her travels with the Doctor as the adventure comes to a close.
This is a wonderful pilot episode for the return of Sarah Jane Smith. It’s fantastic to see her continuing as a journalist with the added expertise of her travels with the Doctor. Knowing that this new series is designed with kids in mind, I find that the Bannerman Road Gang is easily relatable and adds a sense of innocence to the adventure. It’s almost as if Sarah Jane has become a mix of the Doctor and Torchwood, but with a much lighter tone.
It was nice to see Samantha Bond (Miss Moneypenny from the Pierce Brosnan era of James Bond, as well as Lady Rosamund from Downton Abbey) and I did love her turn as a villain, even with the over-the-top scenery-chewing performance. I also couldn’t help but draw a parallel between Luke Smith and Kyle XY, what with the lack of bellybutton as a tying characteristic.
One thing that I’m not a fan of is the tilted camera angles used in the factory. There are better ways to use the style and to inspire unease in the audience.
Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”
UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Smith and Jones
The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.
