Outside the Government: The Nightmare Man
It’s October 11th, 2010. Cee Lo Green is at number one with “Forget You,” with Bruno Mars, Kings of Leon, Katy Perry, and Robbie Williams also charting. Since Sherlock wrapped its first season, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stepped down as the leader of UKIP saying that he is “not much good” at party politics. Ed Miliband proved rather good at party politics, becoming leader of the Labour party and beating his own brother to the job. And the US removed its last combat troops from Iraq.
While on television, The Sarah Jane Adventures are back. But The Nightmare Man sees The Sarah Jane Adventures arriving in a very different world. It’s still ostensibly a spin-off of Doctor Who, something that will be stressed loudly in two stories’ time but the Doctor Who of which it is a spinoff is gone. It’s still overseen by Russell T Davies, but Davies no longer has the big show. And the big show has done its farewell to Sarah Jane. While one assumes – or at least, one assumed at the time, before Sladen fell ill – that Sarah Jane was an obvious choice of people to have show up in Doctor Who again, The End of Time went to great lengths to make sure that there was no obligation for any Davies-era characters to return.
So it’s a fundamentally strange thing when, following this, the entire Davies era returns like it’s never been away. This is, of course, a short-lived transitional period. The combination of Miracle Day failing to quite generate the expected audience and Lis Sladen’s unfortunate passing meant that the Davies era shuddered to a halt not too long into the Moffat era. Nevertheless, for the first two years the continued presence of the Davies era exerted an odd pressure on the Moffat era. And The Nightmare Man represents the start of that.
Equally, we should note that this is the nineteenth Sarah Jane Adventures story and the start of the show’s fourth season. It is, at this point, a known quantity with relatively little to do other than show up and be itself. Except, of course, for the detail that the other original member of its child cast, Tommy Knight, is dropping down to a recurring role, so it also has to rejig the cast in the first episode. The sensible way to do that, of course, is to focus the episode on Luke. This being Season Four it doesn’t have to go to great lengths to reintroduce the cast – it can just do a Luke-centered episode and then show him the door.
What’s interesting, then, is the nature of the episode. On the one hand, it’s solidly in children’s television territory, with a villain largely modeled off of a clown and a resolution that amounts to the power of friendship blasting the bad guy into submission. But as with the program’s high point, Lidster’s previous The Mark of the Berserker, there’s a second sense of a program grappling with relatively sizable issues. Even in Lidster’s Season Three misstep, The Madwoman in the Attic, attempts a grounding in more mature concerns. These are not, to be clear, adult concerns – The Mark of the Berserker was brilliant precisely because its concerns were genuinely those of pre-teen children. Rather, they’re weighty, sizable concerns, as opposed to trite morals. Lidster has a genuine knack for capturing a young person’s existential crises in monster form.
Here, though, he really does go for a slightly older sort of crisis. The Nightmare Man is about being afraid of going away to college. The central premise is that Luke’s anxieties over leaving for college a year before his friends channel and bring a force of nightmarish darkness to Earth through his mind. There is, of course, content here for younger audiences – fear of change and the nature of nightmares are hardly unprecedented territory for children’s television. But the central premise of the episode puts Luke, and indeed the entire cast at a bit of a remove. If Luke’s off to college and Clyde and Rani are just a year behind then these aren’t kids anymore – they’re people on the cusp of adulthood.
Another way of looking at this is to note that The Sarah Jane Adventures is a program that’s aged with its audience. That’s fair, and even good practice. If we imagine the target audience of The Sarah Jane Adventures when it started to have been ten, then by this point anyone who’s been watching the whole time is thirteen or fourteen. That’s not a small gap. In many ways one of the paths J.K. Rowling took to make sure that Harry Potter never lost steam was to age the books with their initial audience, so that the last book felt like a book for people about ten years older than the ideal audience for The Philosopher’s Stone. Because getting teenagers to still like something that they liked when they were ten is, by any measure, difficult.
But equally, there’s a sense of the audience starting to fragment here. With the series having lost at least some of its direct connection to Doctor Who, its reason for existence is fraying. The Doctor Who to Sarah Jane Adventures pipeline isn’t an entirely straightforward one, which, again, there’s a more obvious place to discuss this coming up, but is still worth noting. And the original audience of The Sarah Jane Adventures is getting older. The show’s raison d’etre is fraying. Which is fine – it’s the fourth season. This is the territory in which good shows often start to falter and need to reinvent themselves because they’ve already used up 80% of the brilliant ideas that come from their premise.
There are, of course, options available – a second generation of Bannerman Road residents, for instance, could reinvigorate the show for a year or two. This is the point in a series where nobody would be surprised if Sarah Jane upped and left Bannerman Road. It happens. The wisdom (or lack of wisdom) of any of these options is of course up for debate, and one imagines that they were. But that is in many ways besides the point. Even without Lis Sladen’s untimely death, The Nightmare Man would still visibly mark the point where The Sarah Jane Adventures entered its autumn years.
Given this, there’s something genuine to applaud here. The decision to start using the plots that an aging cast opens instead of running from the consequences of everyone growing up is brave. And the results are good. Julian Bleach, in his third fabulous outing, delivers a well-tuned performance that elevates a commonplace villain to something properly interesting, lurching between being genuinely disturbing and being a broad and silly comedy villain. The decision not to focus too much on where the villain comes from and to let Bleach’s performance carry things pays dividends, with the script being able to spend a proper amount of time on Luke’s fear instead of on the monsters. The detail of Luke not being able to tell anyone is marvelous, and pushes this to a real and satisfying sort of horror.
So what we get is a story about how growing up is actually really hard, done in the context of a show that is, for better or for worse, doing just that. It’s an episode that only could exist in the context of a children’s show in its dotage, and one that uses the nature of the show to effect. Plus it has the last and culminating set of gags about how Mr. Smith and K-9 don’t like each other, including a moment of unexpected sentiment that frankly makes it worthwhile to blame and hate the entirety of the BBC for never giving us a Mr. Smith/K-9 spinoff. Surely we at least deserved a holiday special.
It’s difficult to find a way to finish this without sounding vaguely dismissive – I am, after all, essentially suggesting that The Nightmare Man works because The Sarah Jane Adventures is getting near the point where it should be brought to an end. But endings aren’t bad things, and in some ways the existence of a bit of the Russell T Davies era that has a thoroughly healthy and reasonable relationship with the idea of endings is a welcome tonic after what was kind of a rough denouement to the era. The Nightmare Man is exactly what an aging spinoff from the previous regime of Doctor Who should be doing, and it does it with satisfying aplomb.
It also marks the last time we’re going to end up looking at anything by Joseph Lidster, and that deserves at least a brief comment. Lidster is never going to be one of the great and heralded writers of Doctor Who, I fear. But what’s TARDIS Eruditorum for if not having the expansive space to take a moment to give credit to unexpected people. He’s only got four stories – three Sarah Jane Adventures and the episode of Torchwood that pissed my wife off so much. (She was, entertainingly, similarly peeved by the handling of death in Master, so at least she’s consistent.) It’s not a haul of utter classics, although writing a solid contender for the best episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures deserves more applause than it gets. But Lidster is an odd writer – one who came to television through Big Finish. Indeed, he’s the only writer to take that path outright – Rob Shearman may have been hired because of his Big Finish work, but he didn’t jump straight from Big Finish to television. Lidster did, and serves as a pleasant reminder of what discovering a skilled new writer and giving them a chance can do for a show. And although he (tragically, frankly) has never made the jump to writing Doctor Who proper, he’s also an advertisement for one of the real benefits of having spinoff shows, which is that it gives new writers a place to break in while allowing Doctor Who to maintain its on balance sensible policy of not being anyone’s first TV credit. So hooray for Joseph Lidster, and welcome back to The Sarah Jane Adventures.
Darren K.
May 14, 2014 @ 1:57 am
Sorry to be a pedant – but is Luke going away to college or university? You say college, but that doesn't really make sense. In the UK, college and university are vastly different things and it is very rare that anyone goes away for college – the US equivalent, sort of, of grades 11 & 12. College, as Americans seem to call it, is university in the UK, which (at least in years past, before rising tuitions and shrinking grants), students were expected to go away for.
Lewis Christian
May 14, 2014 @ 3:48 am
Joseph Lidster wrote more for Wizards vs Aliens – given the very tenuous links to Who (although it's arguable that WvA is a vague spin-off of SJA, in a production crew sort of sense), I'm guessing you're not going to cover WvA?
Alan Moore
May 14, 2014 @ 5:00 am
Ah, the British education system.
Let's see: I know some people who went to Deeside College as a sixth-form college (aged 16-18). The same location was also a vocation school for over 16's, adults included.
I went to Lancaster University, which is a degree-issuing University (three years for an Honours degree in the UK one extra years for a Master's, thankyouverymuch). That's the equivalent of 'college' in the US.
To complicate things, Lancaster, like Oxford, Cambridge and Durham, is a 'collegiate' university, i.e. split into colleges/houses. I went to Furness College in Lancaster University.
In later years, my wife went to The Welsh College of Horticulture, which is a sixth-form college, a vocational school and an undergraduate college, but cannot issue its own qualifications. The University of Aberystwyth provides the degrees.
So…. what kind of college was Luke going to?
Lewis Christian
May 14, 2014 @ 5:20 am
He's going to Oxford University.
That was easy! Next question?
Lewis Christian
May 14, 2014 @ 5:24 am
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Lewis Christian
May 14, 2014 @ 5:25 am
Also, interestingly:
The BBC had originally approached Russell T Davies and asked him to make a character gay in the show. Davies planned for this character to be Luke, and intended to begin foreshadowing it from The Nightmare Man. However, Davies chose to cut one line which hinted more explicitly at this more development. The line which is cut is from the scene in which Luke saying goodbye to Sarah Jane as he departs for university.
Sarah Jane: Have a lovely time at university. You’ll grow up, you’ll find a girlfriend.
Luke: (off-handedly) Oh, could be a boyfriend!
Sarah Jane: Well, as long as it’s not a Slitheen, I don’t care!
—Cut lines from "The Nightmare Man," as remembered by writer Russell T Davies.
That off-hand remark never felt right to me anyway; comes out of the blue and feels 'random' or shoe-horned in, even if the plan was to develop it. But at the same time, it's nice to know they were after a gay character in what was essentially a kids' show.
Seeing_I
May 14, 2014 @ 5:42 am
Plus, why shouldn't he date a Slitheen? If he were a nice Slitheen, that is. Why couldn't Luke be a chubby chaser?
Adorable Gay Luke ™ is another thing I'm sad we never got to see with the untimely end of the Sarah Jane Adventures.
Anton B
May 14, 2014 @ 6:56 am
I so want you to be the 'real' Alan Moore casually outing yourself as a middle class postgrad.
Galadriel
May 14, 2014 @ 7:27 am
Can we just mention Clyde and Rani's nightmares here? Rani feels torn between her journalistic ambitions and her secret life hunting aliens–a thread that is also used in the SJA audio "Judgment Day."
Clyde's scenario is fascinating. He's trapped in a dead-end job, compared to Luke, and Sarah Jane is there. She's old, losing her memory–a call back to Mad Old Woman in the Attic, and foreshadowing of Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith
John
May 14, 2014 @ 7:47 am
It seems like it should be at least a pop between realities.
Jarl
May 14, 2014 @ 7:49 am
Well, I can honestly say I wasn't ready to see this thumbnail when I clicked on the blog bookmark this morning. Especially after several hours of Stalker: Call of Pripyat. The obvious visual link with any villainous clown must be either the Joker at one end or Pennywise at the other, and I'm definitely seeing more of the former (in fact, with the Kubrick stare he's giving, I'd specifically say Ledger's Joker), but my first thought upon seeing it was of the mystery man played by Robert Blake in Lost Highway. Again, maybe I'm just in a frame of mind to get spooked today, I dunno.
Daibhid C
May 14, 2014 @ 8:10 am
Further confusion:
I went to Inverness College to get a National Certificate in Science so I could get a physics degree at Edinburgh University. My uni career imploded messily, and I'm currently back at Inverness College doing a HNC in Admin, with the option of continuing to get a degree, also from Inverness College.
Except that between these courses, Inverness College has become part of the University of the Highlands.
Daibhid C
May 14, 2014 @ 8:20 am
I feel I should add that I actually have no idea is the UHI is a collegeate university or if something about its procedures or the circumstances of its founding make it a different thing
Daibhid C
May 14, 2014 @ 8:26 am
a second generation of Bannerman Road residents, for instance, could reinvigorate the show for a year or two
…although it shouldn't be as blatant as, for example, an episode that revolves around "Look! It's Girl Luke, only younger!" That would probably be a mistake.
Alan Moore
May 14, 2014 @ 9:10 am
@Anton B
I am nowhere near old or hairy enough to be the real Alan Moore. Also, I dropped out after 2 years and never got a degree. Sorry.
Alan Moore
May 14, 2014 @ 9:12 am
My first thought at that picture was 'I'm in your house. Call me'.
elvwood
May 14, 2014 @ 9:15 am
OK, the next question is, which college? For some people it really matters.
BerserkRL
May 14, 2014 @ 9:37 am
In the u.s., a college is typically an institution that offers a bachelor's degree or lower. A university typically offers not only a bachelor's degree but graduate degrees as well; the part of the university that offers bachelor's degrees is often called the college. (So for example Harvard College is the undergraduate division of Harvard University.)
BerserkRL
May 14, 2014 @ 9:38 am
I'd be very surprised if it doesn't get an entry.
encyclops
May 14, 2014 @ 9:38 am
Is there any boy in the world who has ever outed himself to his mother that casually? Even the coolest mom in the world?
If so, I envy him.
BerserkRL
May 14, 2014 @ 9:39 am
So he's not going to college, but he is going to a college.
encyclops
May 14, 2014 @ 9:39 am
my first thought upon seeing it was of the mystery man played by Robert Blake in Lost Highway
Mine too. Brrrrrr.
elvwood
May 14, 2014 @ 10:30 am
Exactly!
Seeing_I
May 14, 2014 @ 10:52 am
Is there any way to see this in the US?
Alan
May 14, 2014 @ 11:00 am
"Hi, I've come to apply for the doctor's job. I can assure you my credentials are top-notch, I've just graduated from Harvard College Yale. I aced every semester, and I got an 'A'." — Dr. Liz Asher during her "job interview" at Darkplace Hospital.
Lewis Christian
May 14, 2014 @ 11:32 am
I didn't know anyone was /that/ specific. He's going to Oxford University; that's blanket statement all we need to know.
dirkmalcolm.com
May 14, 2014 @ 11:25 pm
" They all went to Oxbridge University, wherever that is, and go poncing round in their great big suits going 'Ooh look at me I work for BBC2 do you like my glasses they're like John Lennon's' "
– Alan Gordon Partridge
Spacewarp
May 15, 2014 @ 12:42 am
To be fair certain membes of the UK public do still use the term "college" when they mean "university". I've often heard people saying "oh, he's off to college in September!" when the person is plainly going to Uni.
Spacewarp
May 15, 2014 @ 12:44 am
"cough" torrent "cough"
Spacewarp
May 15, 2014 @ 12:48 am
The long established Luke/Clyde shippers would have been pleased at this.
quislibet
May 16, 2014 @ 8:34 am
He looks like a direct callback to the (known or likely) inspiration for several of the above characters, Conrad Veidt in "The Man Who Laughs."
Daru
May 18, 2014 @ 10:23 pm
I do love this episode and do find the performance by Bleach quite brilliant – agree with the resonances of Lynch above.
Terry Branna
July 13, 2015 @ 2:31 am
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