School Reunion: Ranking - 100

                                 School Reunion

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose and Sarah Jane, 29/4/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: James Hawes)

Rank: 100

  'Don't look so glum Mickey, you're not the tin dog at all. You're the shape-shifter whifferdill named Frobisher that got stuck in the shape of a penguin!'

 

 Old and new collide for story no 100, in a story that’s a learning curve for two companions from different sides of the year 2000 that’s simultaneously a history lesson for fans new to the series about a key figure from its past and a catch-up for old fans arriving for the first time about how much the series has changed now. During ‘old’ Who in the 20^th century there was an unwritten rule that he series never referred back to past companions – the BBC never quite knew what to do with such a long running series as DW and figured that people watching in the present would be put off by references to the past (let’s face it, until the videos started coming out in the late 1980s there was no way anyone ever dreamed they could actually go back and see old stories, a handful of repeats aside). There was one big exception though, when Jo Grant unwittingly kicked off the events that led to the 3^rd Dr’s regeneration by returning a crystal he’d got from Metebelis 3 and once gifted to her. Sadly he’s not with new companion Sarah when he gets that message so we don’t know how she re-acts to finding out there were companions before her; we do however get to see what happens when she bumps into Rose in ‘The School Reunion’, a story inspired by a childhood memory Russell T Davies had of that very scene and how Jo was very much a part of the action even in her absence. In the 21^st century one of the selling points of DW is nostalgia and how parents and grandparents who loved the show the first time round can share it with their children or grandchildren, so a return to the past was, if anything, overdue by the second year. Interestingly though Russell didn’t keep the story for himself to write, nor did he give it to one of the big DW fans on the writing team (Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Paul Cornell or Steven Moffat) but future Being Human creator Toby Whithouse (who wasn’t not a fan exactly, but didn’t have the history of being involved with the series in different media the way the others did). Maybe Russell recognised that a fan would have felt too much pressure writing for one of their childhood heroes or maybe he recognised that at heart – and beyond the rather basic alien invasion plot – this is an emotional episode all about emotions, one of Whithouse’s great strengths as a writer. Sarah Jane, ex journalist turned investigator, has heard about the sudden and unexpected improvement of a formerly failing school and isn’t satisfied with the answers she’s been given so goes snooping. It’s exactly what she’d have done in the UNIT years and all too plausible as an episode of ‘K9 and Company’ had the junior Who show gone to a whole series. Mickey, too, has noticed the same thing and has been keeping an eye out for strange anomalies that the Doctor needs to know about – partly to help keep the world safe but also, you suspect, so he has an excuse to see Rose again now she’s cavorting across space and time. It’s a clever idea because the two bumping into each other doesn’t seem as forced as it might; the wonder really is that the Doctor doesn’t keep bumping into companions all the time. The 10^th Dr doesn’t quite know what to make of the reunion – he’s overjoyed to see Sarah but still guilty over how he abandoned her when he got a summons to Gallifrey back when he was Dr 4; for her part Sarah still thinks fondly of her best friend and longs to have bumped into him, but can’t help feeling angry at the fact a timelord with so much time on his hands never came back to see her and is more than a little jealous that she’s been ‘replaced’. For her part Rose is distraught: she’s been set up for a series and a bit as the single most important person in the Doctor’s life and she’s learnt not to ask too many questions about his past, so the realisation that there were many many ‘companions’ before her changes everything she thought she knew about her new life and the alien she ran off with. What could easily have turned into an episode of soap opera bitching is well handled though; Sarah Jane and Rose try and up each other with tales of things they’ve seen for a few funny scenes, but then settle on a truce where they can both gang up and tease the Doctor instead. However its Mickey who gets the most chance to shine in this episode, having adjusted to the fact that his girlfriend is running around time and space with a bloke he can’t compete with and realising how much of a part he can still play in keeping Earth safe. There’s even a brief but heartwarming cameo for K9 Mark III; Mickey’s realisation that his technical knowhow makes him ‘the tin dog’ of the Doctor’s current party is a very telling line, one that’s both funny ‘cause its true and part of the overall series arc as it spurs him to be more and more heroic. The play off between the characters is very clever indeed and its lovely to see Eliasabeth Sladen again after so long (she copes well considering she’d broken sprained her ankle not long before filming so doesn’t get to do much of the running down corridors stuff of her youth; and yes that is a very DW thing for a companion to do). Having the old and new collide on screen in such spectacular form was one of the things we wanted to see most and it feels really special, without the need for an anniversary plot or having too many characters and not enough screen time. Though Sarah isn’t in the best of places since we left her, the ending where she takes back control of her life with new inspiration is a very sweet ending without falling into saccharine and what could have been a very indulgent story about old times ends up being quite an uplifting one about the very Who theme of second chances again. Most of all it feels like sarah: anyone time-travelling from her last story in 1976 would very much have recognised in both the script and Lis Sladen’s portrayal. It’s the rest of the plot that doesn’t quite take fire. A school is another obvious setting for DW that they hadn’t really used much at the time (nowadays its just a relief it isn’t Coal Hill again), somewhere that, let’s face it, is an obvious place for wicked aliens to hang out without anyone noticing (I’m still convinced at least one of my teachers was a Zygon – and not in disguise either), somewhere the children’s audience watching at home can identify with and adults can remember. Alas this never feels like a ‘real’ life school with actual pupils (something they got so right with the very first story of DW in 1963). Most fans see the plot as a big rip-off of Grange Hill and Byker Grove, but its really more of a rip-off of Gillian Cross’ superb ‘Demon Headmaster’ series (Russell T must have known about it – he wrote a rather damning review for TV Zone, odd because it seems like precisely the sort of thing he would have liked given his other influences). Anthony Head is the headmaster, obvious casting perhaps after years of playing a teacher in Grange Hill, though I for one was sorry he didn’t turn out to be The Master in disguise as rumoured, (‘Anthony Head playing a Head...Master!’ After a 1980s spent looking out for Anthony Ainley’s name in anagrams in the Radio Times, surely it had to be...but sadly it wasn’t; strange as it seems for two such long-running characters they only ever met briefly in ‘The Five Doctors’ and we really needed a matchup, but alas it wasn’t to be). As for this week’s monster, The Krillitane, they’re another of those new Who CGI monsters that never quite feel as if they’re ‘real’ either and aren’t one of the more memorable designs, being basically bats with teeth (personally I wish they’d been more like the intelligent giraffes the Dr remembers meeting years ago). Their plan, to improve children’s IQ’s by dosing them with chips coated in an alien goo every lunchtime, also asks several questions: why pick on children not adults? What about all the kids who take packed lunches or don’t eat chips? And why make your plan to take over the world revolve around a substance that happens to be toxic to your own life-form? That’s just asking for trouble! As DW villains go The Krillitane really are bottom of the class in so many ways. All that said, this is one of those stories where for once you don’t care too much about the plot and its kind of good that its such a siple one it can stay in the background while we see our friends reunited. There’s more than enough action to keep things moving, lots of moving emotional drama, there are some really sharp and witty scenes too (Rose’s frustration at ending up a disguised dinner lady, feeding chips to other people, only a few stories after complaining that a life without the Doctor was only full of eating chips, is superbly under-played and maybe Billie Piper’s funniest scene) and this is one of those stories where there’s always something mad going on to catch your eye in pretty much every scene. Most school reunions are miserable affairs, reminders that the world that once lay at your feet has now buried you up to your neck, but this story is one of DW’s success stories, a very memorable and sweet little story about how you are never too old to care or to learn. This was a popular episode across the board too and in retrospect almost a pilot episode for the variable but mostly excellent spin-off ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’, which get really good in series three and four when Rani joins and everything knows what they’re doing.

+ I love the way story is written so that, if you’re a fan who grew up on the classic series you automatically side with Sarah Jane. A lot of series one has been about Rose’s relationship with the Doctor being ‘special’ but for us oldies we’ve mostly been shouting at our TV screens that we know better. Sarah’s return is sad in so many ways (she’s not done half the things with her life both she and the Doctor thought she would) but she’s turned her life around independently from him and proved she doesn’t need the Tardis to make a difference. If you’re a newcomer then you automatically side with Rose: it’s not her fault she wasn’t told anything about her predecessors and besides, this Doctor isn’t the same person he was back then – this one is much more of a ‘people’s person’. Rose has had quite enough of living that boring existence thankyou – she’s not letting this Doctor go for anything and she’s not dependent on the Doctor to live her best life the way Sarah still secretly does. It’s a fine but very clever balance that doesn’t upset either side. This episode is the equivalent of listening to Cat Stevens’ song ‘Father and Son’ – they’re both somehow right and they’re both somehow wrong and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

- I’m older than the generation seen in class in this episode (and the age of a lot of children watching at home on first transmission) so I can get away with saying it: they were so hard done by in this story, the contemporaries of these school pupils, just as they were in life. DW is one of the few series around in 2006 that parents watched with children. It’s one of the few series that, traditionally, takes the children’s point of view over the adults as a matter of course in most stories, showing that the world is a far more interesting and kinder place than grown-ups make it out to be and would be better still if the people in charge were, well, less grown-up from time to time (think of the Doctor’s showdowns with all those authority figures, even the ones he’s close to like Harriet Jones and The Brigadier). What’s more, the return of Sarah Jane was enough to lure more mums and dads who remembered her than usual. This story should have been a welcome opportunity to allow children shafted by their elders like never before to fight back: to put on screen everything they didn’t see except in Daily Mail columns chuntering about ‘ungrateful brats’: the low quality school dinners (the patronising Jamie Oliver debate was another of the story’s main inspirations after all), the long long list of exams their elders never had to face, the changing curriculum that was never the same two years running, the messed up exam results that seemed to be pulled out of thin air, the closure of youth centres that gave children nothing to do, the endless lectures about how badly behaved and ungrateful they were (when they weren’t, any more than other generations – particularly the baby boomers doing most of the complaining). What do we get instead? An episode that actually makes their stupidity part of the plot and where Kenny, the only likeable kid who sees through the baddy’s plan seems to keep getting under everyone’s feet and being in the way (and even then in the cut scenes – he’s barely in the actual episode). Even the Doctor dismisses them as being all ‘happy-slapping kids with hoodies and asbos’ in one scene and even though he’s clearly joking, you just know that so many adults at home assumed he wasn’t. This is the biggest chance to see the adult world from a child’s perspective outside the Capaldi-Clara Coal Hill School episodes (which are even worse from a child’s perspective!) and they blow it. Shame! C- See me after class. Had ‘An Unearthly Child’ made Susan out to be like this there’s no way DW would have lasted longer than the 13 episodes it was first intended to run for. Maybe everyone should have paid more attention to why the ‘Demon Headmaster’ series works. Mercifully, after an equally dodgy first series, ‘The Sarah Adventures’ series really gets this aspect right, especially the better stores revolving round Clyde, the most believable character who starts off the cool kid at school and ends the series as the team’s conscience with the biggest heart.