An Hour of Who a Day: 01/14/15

January 14: "School Reunion"

The TARDISode: Mickey does some investigations online into UFO sightings and comes across a large flashing sign saying, "TORCHWOOD ACCESS DENIED", which lets him know he's on the right track. Nice job keeping secret the top-secret organization that not even the Prime Minister is supposed to know about, guys.

This is an episode where the script seems to be working at cross-purposes with the actual filming and direction. On paper "School Reunion" is meant to be an examination of how the Doctor enters people's lives and leaves them behind, and why Rose is different from the others -- and if you're coming to this episode as someone who started watching in 2005, you might get that feeling. But you'd probably notice that something about that feels off, because the story they're actually telling on screen has a different emphasis. The version we actually see is about the Doctor meeting back up with a friend from long ago -- one Sarah Jane Smith -- and working through some things so that everything is patched up by the end, while it becomes less and less obvious why we should be rooting for his current companion.

It's certainly clear which side David Tennant falls on. A lifelong Who fan himself (Doctor Who was what made Tennant want to be an actor in the first place), you can see how thrilled he is to be working with Elisabeth Sladen, and the chemistry they have is quite impressive -- Tennant is incredibly enthusiastic, and that translates to the Doctor himself, who seems genuinely pleased as punch to see Sarah again. Sladen herself is fabulous as Sarah Jane, still full of the same energy and presence that she had in the '70s. The only real problem is that the script requires her to play her relationship with the Doctor as like that between Rose and the Doctor, with Sarah having been hopelessly in love with the Doctor -- when a quick look at any of her stories would show that that's just about the least likely interpretation of their friendship. It's frankly a bit insulting to Sarah to reinterpret her relationship that way, but to her credit Elisabeth Sladen pulls it off. This is a Sarah who's slightly bitter about the Doctor leaving her at the end of The Hand of Fear and has just been spinning her wheels since the Doctor left (another insult, as Sarah seemed just about the most independent companion the Doctor had, with her own life outside the TARDIS and everything, and thus the least likely to be pining after him -- and besides, what about The Five Doctors?¹⁷⁰).

As I said, Sladen manages to make this work, presenting one of the Doctor's former companions in a new light -- but Billie Piper isn't as lucky, as she's been saddled with some frankly petulant and bitchy material. It's hard to see what they were going for -- clearly they want Rose to be different, to be the one that the Doctor wouldn't leave behind (it even comes up in the dialogue), so why do they try to make her as unlikeable as possible? She fights with Sarah, she's jealous, she really doesn't seem to want Mickey on board the TARDIS for some reason... and, perhaps most problematically, she doesn't have much to do in this episode; her purpose in this story seems to be to act as a counterpoint to Sarah Jane, but she's the one that ends up looking the worse for the comparison.

And it's really only Rose who fares poorly in this story: Mickey comes across as a dependable and rather fun member of the team, and his realization that he's "the tin dog" makes him step up in a way that causes you to cheer. And it's a welcome pleasure to see K-9 again after all this time, even if he is the worse for wear here -- and they even got John Leeson back to do the voice. Meanwhile, Anthony Head is fantastic as the evil leader of the Krillitanes, Mr. Finch -- he underplays everything, which makes him even more menacing, and his confrontation with the Doctor in the school pool is a fabulous dance between the two, beautifully shot by director James Hawes.

In fact, if this story works at all it's largely down to Hawes's direction, with some great visuals and clever shots as the cast interact with each other. Beyond the reintroduction of Sarah Jane and K-9, the script isn't the most terribly original thing ever (maths will change the universe -- Doctor Who already did that in Logopolis, albeit not with high school kids on computers displaying various permutations of the PC game Quake's logo), and the interesting idea of the Krillitanes is rather squandered. But Hawes makes these concepts work visually and gives a coherence to everything on screen, giving the impression that this story is better than it probably actually is.

So like "New Earth" and "Tooth and Claw" before it, "School Reunion" is a qualified success. There are some wasted opportunities here (like the Krillitanes, which to date haven't made a return appearance on screen) and some extremely problematic issues with one of our main identification figures -- as well as a need to grit your teeth and accept the revisionist interpretation of Sarah Jane -- but the confidence of the direction and the happy interplay among the Doctor, Mickey, Sarah Jane, and Rose (at times) makes up for this. In particular, Tennant and Sladen make this story stand out; their interplay alone makes "School Reunion" worth watching.

¹⁷⁰ So not only does Toby Whithouse get the relationship between the Doctor and Sarah Jane wrong, but the basic premise of the story needs Sarah to have never seen the Doctor since she was dropped off -- even though he sent her K-9 in K-9 and Company and saw her again in The Five Doctors. K-9 and Company clearly happened, but for a while it looked like maybe The Five Doctors had been removed from the continuity (the suggestions that The Hand of Fear was their last encounter and that the Doctor has regenerated "half a dozen times" since he last saw her, which, if Tennant is the tenth Doctor, would make Tom Baker the last Doctor to have seen her). Subsequent events have both addressed the "half a dozen" comment (the inclusion of the War Doctor) and definitively shown that The Five Doctors happened (in "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor still has the seal of the High Council that he took from the Master in the Death Zone -- an event that Sarah was present for) -- so why doesn't Sarah remember that here? Well, it's remotely possible that, as she was taken out of time by the Time Scoop, those events were erased from her memory once they were over. Or maybe Sarah didn't realize that Peter Davison was a later Doctor; after all, Tom Baker wasn't around, and she knew Jon Pertwee was the Doctor from her past, so if she never learned that Peter Davison was the fifth Doctor then she might think he's actually a pre-Pertwee incarnation, and that the events in the Death Zone happened in his personal past and thus didn't really count as him seeing her again. This would require her to have not really talked to any of the other companions while in Rassilon's tomb and for her to not be paying attention when Troughton calls Davison "the latest model" -- a bit of a stretch, but just about plausible enough to be workable. Either way, this is more thought than Whithouse appears to have put into things.