The Gift (The Sarah Jane Adventures)
18 – The Gift | |||
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The Sarah Jane Adventures story | |||
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Starring
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Others
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Production | |||
Directed by | Series 3 | ||
Running time | 2 episodes, 25 minutes each | ||
First broadcast | 19 November 2009 | ||
Last broadcast | 20 November 2009 | ||
Chronology | |||
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The Gift is the sixth and final serial of the third series of the British science fiction television series The Sarah Jane Adventures. It first aired in two parts on CBBC on 19 and 20 November 2009.
The story features Tree and Leef Slitheen-Blathereen, descendants of an offshoot branch of the Slitheen family of Raxacoricofallapatorius that the protagonist Sarah Jane Smith has faced several times before in the series. They gift Sarah Jane and the Earth a Raxacoricofallapatorian plant that spreads spores to both quickly grow and wipe out humanity for profit.
Plot
Tree and Leef Slitheen-Blathereen, who are descendants of an inter-clan marriage of the
The next day, Luke stays at home after inhaling the spores, while Clyde and Rani go to school; Clyde surreptitiously takes
Continuity
- Sarah Jane visited Antarctica once before with the Fourth Doctor serial The Seeds of Doom.
- The The Monsters Insideby Stephen Cole.
- This is the first reference to the Raxacoricofallapatorian family known as the Racdeen.
- Part 1 includes K9's second reference to his hover mode, the first being in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, Part 1; he has never been actually seen hovering.
- Sarah Jane uses a dog whistle to call K9; a trick used by the Fourth Doctor in the episode The Ribos Operation.
- The use of plants as a weapon could be a reference to the deadly Varga plants in the episode "Mission to the Unknown".
- Mr Smith hacking into millions of personal electronic devices and causing them to simultaneously emit a unified signal was done before, during his guest appearance in the Doctor Who episode, "The Master in "Last of the Time Lords". After this episode, Sarah Jane and Luke briefly appeared in The Tenth Doctor's final story, "The End of Time".
- Upon defeating the Blathereen, Sarah Jane says "There should have been a better way," as part of an atypically sombre scene where the characters are experiencing a pyrrhic victory. This is similar to the Fifth Doctor's final comment in the serial Warriors of the Deep, in which that story's enemies also suffered an unnecessary death and the death of the human race was narrowly averted; in the case of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the cause for despair is given a more comical twist for the programme's target audience.
- In Part 2, a news reporter mentions the "unidentified tropical infection" (Rakweed) had affected Perivale. Perivale is Ace's home neighbourhood. He also mentions that the Rakweed has affected Chiswick as well, the area where Donna Noble lived.
Broadcast and reception
"Part 1" was seen by 822,000 viewers, while "Part 2" was seen by 788,000.[1]
Novelisation
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References
- ^ Green, Kris (22 November 2009). "'Sarah Jane Adventures' ends run with 790k". Digital Spy. Retrieved 7 April 2012.
- ^ "BC Gold B/2B Sarah Jane Adventures: Blathereen Dream". pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk. Retrieved 8 February 2018.
External links
- "The Gift" at IMDb
- Blathereen Dream title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database