"Oh dear. Well, it was nice while it lasted. We have now left the Golden Age of The Sarah Jane Adventures."

...is what I'd like not to be saying. Unfortunately we're losing Maria's Gay Dad and getting Gary Russell as the ongoing script editor. Admittedly we've seen good stories made without the former (e.g. Warriors of Kudlak), but Joseph Millson was clearly the best thing about the series and it'll get weaker after he's gone. As for the latter, what I loved most about Season 1 was its thematic strength. Everything from Eye of the Gorgon onwards had been out-Buffying Buffy and giving us stronger themes and intellectual content than contemporary Doctor Who, let alone Torchwood. The Last Sontaran has a surprisingly good first episode, but only in the sense that it's treating its rogue Sontaran with unexpected seriousness and justifying the use of words like "creepy" and "dangerous". Structurally it's a dog's breakfast. After that, episode two doesn't really know what to do with itself and becomes a bit of a runaround. Overall I still like the story, but it feels slight.

Episode one works, though. Well, half of it. The half of it that doesn't involves a new job offer for Maria's Gay Dad and lots of discussion of this among the Jackson family. These aren't bad scenes, by the way. I'm always happy to see more Millson. However this plot thread's getting lots of screen time and yet has nothing to do with the main story. Why are we watching this? Answer: because Yasmin Paige is being written out of the series. In other words, it's entirely unrelated to the main story, either thematically or on a plot level, and you could edit these scenes into absolutely any story and they'd feel no more or less out of place than they do here. In fairness I'm glad that the characters got a proper farewell story instead of being married off to Andred or something, but I'd have preferred it to feel more organic.

Phil Ford has been trying, though. There's mirroring with two father-daughter relationships, while part two is talking about how the universe isn't so huge after all and goodbye isn't the end of the world. It's also worth noting that the production team have pulled out all the stops with Maria's mother, making her the most stupid, vulgar-looking 1980s stereotype imaginable while also giving her quite a cool last line that undercuts all that cartoonishness. In the end, she was a real person too. I can't pretend that I expect to miss her, but some strong, often abrasive choices were made in the creation of Chrissie Jackson and it'll be a blander show without her, too.

Anyway, I was talking about episode one.

Leaving aside the "writing out Yasmin Paige" subplot, episode one works. It's clear on what it's trying to do, i.e. Predator. Yes, the 1987 Schwarzenegger movie. Our rogue Sontaran can turn invisible like a Predator, it controls everything with a keypad on its forearm like a Predator and on taking off its helmet it even gets a Children's BBC equivalent of the "ugly motherfucker" line from Clyde. Just as important though is the tone of the episode, which is impressive in its patience. Look at all that build-up! We're sneaking around an astronomical facility from which the staff have gone missing and yet we're nearly a quarter of an hour in before we even see Commander Kaagh for the first time. It feels nervous and sometimes even creepy. A lot of that's the director, I think, but the important thing is that they're aware that this is a sequel to a pretty good Doctor Who two-parter and they're working hard not to undermine the original. Note for instance the scene in episode two where the monster is chasing our heroes along a corridor, which is the definitive cliche of both Doctor Who and the Sarah Jane Adventures... yet here it feels dangerous!

I also really like Sarah with Sontarans. There's a good case for saying they're "her monster", although she was in so much iconic 1970s Who that she could recognise most of the major races: Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors, etc. She's a big part of selling them as an alien threat, so on seeing one of their spaceships she's immediately trying to get everyone the hell out of there and call in UNIT. She knows that they're out of their league. She describes them as beyond anything they've faced so far and uses the word "killers", which shortly afterwards makes for a nasty moment. "Where's Lucy?" We even get clips of the Sontaran ship exploding from The Poison Sky, which adds a bit more perspective.

In Doctor Who terms, it's interesting to see how closely they're following the Helen Raynor template. They're still aware of the earlier stories of course, so for instance Sontarans bleed green blood. (That was surprisingly graphic; I liked it.) However I suspect that mind control is becoming a Sontaran trademark, while Kaagh can't stop saying "Sontar-ha". He's also distractingly blue. The second episode also makes a lot out of Commander Kaagh out-thinking his human opponents, which he does rather well and in the end is only defeated by something unforeseeable. Theoretically this is a clever Sontaran... but unfortunately he falls for a "look behind you" in episode one.

The problem is the actor playing him. I don't like Anthony O'Donnell's Commander Kaagh, who's neither sufficiently intense nor vicious. He needed to be scarier. Technically it's a good performance and he's certainly working harder than, say, Derek Deadman as Stor in The Invasion of Time, but for me he's the least satisfying Sontaran we've seen to date. It's only late in episode two that he finally gets pissed off. O'Donnell's Kaagh isn't really taking his adversaries seriously, which undermines the story even if it's a plausible attitude towards children and an old woman. For me he's the story's chief problem, whereas Derek Deadman isn't even the twentieth biggest problem with Invasion of Time. All that's a real shame, especially given everyone else's hard work. I liked all the regulars. Liz Sladen's giving her usual wholehearted performance, this week being particularly important for selling the danger of the Sontarans, but for some reason she's also started doing micro-reactions. For once, she's doing work that encourages you to watch her closely. The kids are all good and Clyde's "loser" made me laugh, while Maria's Gay Dad is yet again wonderful and gets a laugh from "Mr Smith, I need you." The teenager in the guest cast is poor though, despite the fact that she's been acting in films and TV since 1998.

Episode two wasn't so great. I quite liked it, but I can't see what it's trying to do except "Doctor Who runaround". There's a clever bit about the Sontaran number system and again some mirroring at the end with the parallel departures of Maria and Kaagh, but... no, hang on. How many of the target audience would even understand "base six"? Anyway, the episode has a clear message (farewells, distance, etc.), but structurally it's an episode of the usual nonsense that doesn't really mean anything, interspersed with scenes of Maria's parents.

Overall, this was a perfectly watchable story without ever making it up to "weighty" or "memorable". I'd love to know when they learned that Yasmin Paige was going. Did Phil Ford know about it from the beginning, or was he shoehorning it into a story that had already been written? If Season 2 is all like this, it'll be doing its job and I'll happily come back for Season 3... but it wouldn't be the kind of thing you'd start raving about and recommending to adults, like Season 1. For what it is, it's pretty good.