The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith

Chapter the 320th, where we imbibe a little Tennant extra. 

Plot:

Sarah Jane Smith's adopted son Luke wonders what his Mum is up to after she lies about where she's going a couple of times. He has Mr. Smith the computer track her. It turns out that she's dating handsome silver fox Peter Dalton. A few weeks go by, when Luke, Clyde and Rani have to hide a few extra-terrestrial shenanigans from Peter. He then proposes, and Sarah Jane says yes. The engagement ring once on her finger seems to exert a power over her: she mothballs Mr. Smith, and focusses on the arrangements for a wedding in less than two weeks' time, rather than on saving the world. Luke is very happy, but Clyde is suspicious. He and Rani go to Peter's house and find it empty, with evidence that it has not been lived in for some time. On the day of the wedding, Clyde smuggles K9 into the venue. The guests sit, the bridal party arrives, and Sarah Jane walks to the front to join the officiating registrar and Peter. Before anyone can say 'I do', the Doctor rushes in to stop the wedding. The Trickster appears and most of the wedding party disappears. Sarah Jane and Peter are trapped in one space/time trap, the Doctor, kids and K9 in another, in the same place but stuck in a different second of time. The Trickster uses the others as hostages to coerce Sarah Jane to agree to wed Peter. This has been arranged by the Trickster to make Sarah Jane turn her back on protecting the Earth and plunge things into chaos; Peter should have died some weeks back in his home, but the Trickster intercepted him at that point; Peter thinks the Trickster is an angel and was tempted by a chance to find love. With artron energy that Clyde absorbs from the TARDIS, plus Peter's self-sacrifice, the trap is broken, and the Trickster banished.

Context:

As usual when straying a tad beyond the strict boundaries of Who canon, I asked myself a set of questions about this Sarah Jane Adventures story. Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, the decision was made to blog the story. Despite the evidence of this blog over the years making it look like I'm an obsessive completist, I have never ever purchased any of the Sarah Jane Adventures home video releases, so I had no choice but to watch this from the BBC iplayer. I couldn't interest the Better Half or the kids in such a curio, so watched it alone one afternoon towards the end of January 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed seven Doctors' televisual eras proper (the fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 33 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7, 8, 10-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

2009 was Doctor Who's first so-called gap year since it had relaunched for the 21st century. The previous four years from the relaunch in 2005 onwards had each seen a full series of 13 episodes plus a Christmas special aired, but that momentum couldn't be - or at least wasn't - maintained. It later became a much less big of a deal that Doctor Who wasn't being shown much or at all in a particular year; for this first time, though, those that made the programme clearly felt they had to do something extra. At that point, of course, a couple of Doctor Who scripted spin-offs were in production (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on this). They and the main show did a few special things to span the year, so that Who or Who-related content didn't disappear for that long: an Easter special episode of Doctor Who was shown in April, Torchwood's third series was a big event with its episodes stripped across a week of BBC1 broadcasts in July, the third season of The Sarah Jane Adventures had a guest appearance from David Tennant as the Doctor in October, then more special episodes of the main show followed in November and in the festive period at the end of the year. Broadcasting in a children's TV slot, and airing just before bigger and more memorable episodes like The Waters of Mars and The End of Time, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was the easiest to miss and probably the most forgettable even if you didn't miss it. I can't remember that first viewing with any clarity, but it would have likely been with the Better Half, watching the episodes from a PVR recording made while I was at work. I don't think that either of our then only two children were old enough to appreciate the show (they were three years old and two months old at the time).

Reaction:

The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith is not just an example of a spin-off, but also of a slightly different beast, a crossover. This had happened in the opposite direction the previous year, with the main show featuring appearances from Sarah Jane, K9 and Luke Smith, as well as members of Torchwood, in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. There was a policy decision that the Doctor, a children's hero, would not appear in the post-watershed Torchwood, but the favour could still be returned in the other spin-off aimed at younger audiences. From viewing The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith again, it feels to me that, once the decision to feature David Tennant's Doctor in a crossover appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures had been made, nobody thought that they needed to do much more than that. The first episode is a lot of individual scenes, almost sketch-like in places, marking time until the wedding ceremony. The second is mostly just the Doctor hanging out with younger members of the cast. This becomes almost meta; in the scene towards the end, are the young characters excited to be allowed into the TARDIS, or is it that the actors are excited about visiting the set? Maybe it's a big bit of both. The script calls for Tennant only to bring his generic set of Doctor tics - rushing around, gritting his teeth, saying Allons-y, waving his sonic around, and so on - not to do anything innovative or stretching. The most fun moment for him is near the end of the first part, and must have proved irresistible for the writer: the Doctor runs in to stop the wedding (appearing for the first time after having been teased by the sound of the TARDIS popping up on the soundtrack throughout the episode leading up that point) just after the officiant has asked if anyone has just cause and impediment why these two people can't be wed, etc., etc. 

The bitty first episode is there to establish the budding relationship between Sarah Jane and her beau Peter Dalton (played by Nigel Havers who, like Tennant, is just being asked to do the thing he always tends to do with no straying outside the boundaries). To keep things engaging, there has to be some conflict, but the story can't decide at what level to pitch it. Is this a comic farce where Luke, Clyde and Rani have to prevent Peter from seeing anything extra-terrestrial that might put him off? Well, yes, every third scene is like that, including the moment that Luke pretends K9 is a high-tech toy, or the scenes with the CGI slug that Sarah Jane buys on ebay so that she can send it back to its home planet (the CGI for the creature being, alas, some of the worst ever scene in the Whoniverse). Is the conflict more at the internal or inter-personal level, where the threat of the change to their lifestyles that Sarah Jane settling down will mean causing upset to the younger regular characters? Yes, it's that too, with a couple of good scenes along those lines (Tommy Knight's slightly desperate need to have a Dad is really well-played and creates some nice moments between him and Daniel Anthony as the more suspicious Clyde). Finally, is the conflict more along the lines that there is clearly something more to this romance, and that it all could be a con? Yes, it's that too. It's difficult to reconcile these different levels of conflict in a coherent way, so the story instead just shuffles them in with one another, each new scene and the next cutting between these different approaches. It damages the romance that should be central to the piece: is it real or is it based on some hypnosis done by the Trickster?

The engagement ring glows and seems to control Sarah Jane's behaviour, confusing the issue. There's a quite nice scene with Peter reminding her that she fell in love with him before the ring went on, but is such a papering over the cracks really needed at all? The story would be much more powerful if no such glowing inducement was required, and Sarah just started to neglect her saving the world sideline as she's preoccupied with real life falling in love stuff. That would present a real sacrifice at the end, as the happiness would be genuine, but she'd nonetheless have to pass it up, as she needs to be on duty to stand up to the Trickster or baddies like him. There are a few issues with doing that plot, though. First, it wouldn't really leave room for the Doctor to return; second - and don't hate me for bringing this up, majority Doctor Who fandom, as for some reason you don't want to see this, but - Lis Sladen is too limited an actor to do emotion well enough to sell that she's really in love (sorry, but it's true); third, a straight plot would be too similar to previous Sarah Jane Adventures stories. The script already hangs a lantern on this by suggesting that this is the Trickster's M.O., but having Sarah Jane responsible for cutting short the magically extended life of someone who should be dead is exactly what happens in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? by the same author from the first series, and Sarah Jane being tempted by a situation that's contrary to the laws of time is exactly what happens in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith by the same author in the second series. Without the need to shoehorn Tennant in, it might have proved to be the emotional finish to that trilogy; but without him it would probably not be felt to be as special as it is in its final form.

Connectivity:

Both Dark Water / Death in Heaven and The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith pointedly don't feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier; he's represented - even typing this now, I still can't fully believe it - by an extra in a Cyberman suit in the Capaldi story; for the Sarah Jane story, Courtney was unwell and couldn't be part of proceedings as originally planned, so he was written out with a line stating that the Brig is in Peru.  

Deeper Thoughts:

The Revised and Updated History of Spin. The previous time I covered a story from a Lis Sladen-starring Doctor Who spin-off featuring K9 (in this blog post from March 2019), I mused in the Deeper Thoughts section on the history of Doctor Who spin-offs. In summary, despite some ideas and attempts, the sum total of TV spin-offs in the classic era was one pilot episode that was never developed into a series. Obviously, the time wasn't right back then; it didn't take too long after the relaunch of the programme in 2005, though, for records related to Doctor Who spin-offs to be smashed again and again. From the off in March 2005, there was Doctor Who Confidential, a making-of documentary series that aired on UK channel BBC3 immediately after the latest episode of Doctor Who aired on BBC1. A year later, the launch of the second run of the relaunched series was additionally accompanied by a weekly Who-themed magazine show aimed at younger children called Totally Doctor Who. Six months after that, the first dramatic spin-off started; Torchwood, also debuting on BBC3, was aimed at a post-watershed viewing audience, and featured Captain Jack (who was in five episodes of the 2005 Doctor Who series), Tosh (who was in one episode of the 2005 series), plus a few other regulars, one played by Eve Myles (who was in one episode of the 2005 series playing a different part). Before Torchwood finished its first run, a second scripted spin-off debuted with a pilot episode, this one aimed at younger audience members. This was, of course, The Sarah Jane Adventures, featuring Sarah Jane Smith and K9 (who were both in one episode of the 2006 series, and loads of episodes in the classic era). For a short, fecund period, there were four programmes (two scripted drama, two factual) running in parallel to the main programme.

This didn't endure, but it was fun while it lasted. Totally Doctor Who ran until 2007, the other three all continued up to 2011. The Sarah Jane Adventures would have continued longer if not for the death of Lis Sladen (the team that made the show went on to create another for Children's BBC called Wizards versus Aliens to plug the gap, and that ran for three years). The main show still continued, but then found itself at the start of a long period where there were no regularly running brother or sister shows alongside it, but there were very occasional forays into the extended story universe. As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations in 2013, a docu-drama was created about the very beginning of the classic series, An Adventure in Space and Time. When Doctor Who embarked on its second gap year - with no Peter Capaldi stories bar a Christmas special airing in 2016 - there was another spin-off created and shown. This was Class, set in the Coal Hill School that had been the character Clara's workplace in the 2014 and 2015 seasons. The series focussed on a set of sixth-formers dealing with extra-terrestrial activity. It was pitched at a Young Adult audience somewhere between the ages of The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood's key demographics, a tricky set of TV viewers to reach, let alone to satisfy. Despite being the brainchild of award-winning YA author Patrick Ness, it wasn't deemed to be successful enough to get a second series. Throughout Jodie Whittaker's time as the Doctor, there were no TV spin-offs, though there was an audio drama series called Doctor Who: Redacted that ran for two series and is still available on BBC Sounds in the UK. I've still not got round to listening to it, but I will sooner or later.

There was a feeling from many fans that when Russell T Davies returned as showrunner there would be an explosion of new spin-offs. This was perhaps based on Disney+ money being involved, the streamer already hosting a plethora of shows connected to the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. Additionally, Davies had made comments stating that he felt Doctor Who should have a similar franchise presence on streaming services, with multiple spin-off shows available. Those fans waiting for a Paul McGann starring Time War series or similar are still waiting, but Davies did achieve something like what he'd suggested; he just didn't do it on Disney+. A sister making-of show in the Doctor Who Confidential mould immediately returned called Doctor Who Unleashed, with an episode created per story of the main show. There were also a couple of strands that presented classic era stories in new ways, the 'In Colour' re-imaginings of black and white stories, now colourised, plus Tales from the TARDIS. This second strand involved new material with stars of the original productions (and Daniel Anthony reprising the character as Clyde from the Sarah Jane Adventures in the one for The Three Doctors). All these new things, plus most of the stories and spin-offs from 1963 to 2022 came together as 'The Whoniverse', a section of the BBC iplayer that hosts that multi-show streaming franchise that Davies knew could exist. Most of that material can't be shown on Disney+, though, as they don't have the rights. The first spin-off they have funded is one that's currently being made, The War Between the Land and the Sea, with broadcast date unknown (though recent comments from Davies suggest it's a good way off). Whether it will be the only spin-off or the start of something bigger depends on whether Disney+ decide to continue their relationship with the BBC and Davies. Time (and money) will tell...

In Summary:

It's a fun crossover, but it's not much more than that