May 18: Lost in Time Part Two (SJA) / "Hound of the Korven" (K-9)

No, this episode is just as odd as the previous one.  We don't get much in the way of complications beyond things like being recaptured; instead, this is a way to have adventures in history with the thinnest of plot rationales.

Sarah Jane and the shopkeeper look at the time window. (Lost
in Time Part Two) ©BBC

The Sarah Jane portion has the least to do with a time period, but the stuff with the future echoes (to borrow a Red Dwarf term) is kind of nice.  I also like the subtle idea that, from the future kids' point of view, they were rescued by a ghost (as Emily must have appeared to them).  But other than that, we get Clyde's brush with a Nazi invasion and Rani learning a bit about Lady Jane Grey and what she was like as a person.

It does help that everything is done really well; for such a small amount of screen time spent in different eras, they do a good job of evoking the time periods, both in sets and in performances.  Everyone behaves the way we sort of intuitively expect them to behave, and this helps carry the day in terms of story and such.

But ultimately the plot is just an excuse to have some time travel without the Doctor or the Rift, and they haven't done a great job of disguising it as any more than that.  The shopkeeper is suitably mysterious, but that sense of mystery regarding his true identity and the nature of the chronosteel does mean that there's little there to hang the plot onto.  Fortunately the actors and the direction help carry the day, but it is a story that leaves you wanting something a bit more substantial afterwards.

But now it's on to K-9, which is almost over.  This penultimate episode, "Hound of the Korven", feels at the time like it should be very significant, but while it ends on something of a cliffhanger and changes the nature of our understanding of much of the show, there's still a sense of unresolvedness here (although hopefully the next episode will address that).

It starts well, actually taking some time to address the events of the previous episode, as Darius sees his father trapped in a VR prison after his arrest last time around.  Thorne wants K-9's regeneration unit (which, you may recall, he was also interested in in "Robot Gladiators") and he's willing to return K-9's memory chip in exchange for it.  There's also some stuff involving Lomax, the head of the Department, ordering that the sewers be mined and filled with a stun gas, even though June argues that there are civilians (three guesses who) down there.

The best part, however, might be the reveal that the Jixen (marked as enemy number one since the beginning of this series) are actually benign.  The conversation between the Jixen and Starkey is pretty good in its exploration of this misunderstanding, and the hints that suggest that K-9 was actually being used by the Korven to hunt the Jixen are interesting.  There are also some extra details to suggest that the Jixen aren't bad (such as the fact that their war with the Meron was apparently an effort to reclaim their home), which are welcome.

But once we learn that, we get a stand-off between the Jixen and a Korven-controlled K-9 (of course the memory chip thing was a scam) that only narrowly avoids killing everyone (although we see that K-9 has a sense of humor: after he overrides the Korven programming telling him to explode in the presence of Jixen, he then resumes the countdown just to see how everyone will react.  "Four.  Three.  Two.  One.  Bang," he says).  It's done decently, but it leaves a lot of unresolved questions.  This means there's quite a bit of pressure on the series finale to wrap some of this up.

However, what we get here is reasonably compelling and surprising, and it leaves the viewers wanting more.  It may have taken the entire run, but it really does look like K-9 has gotten to an objectively interesting and worthwhile place.