It’s hard to know if I would have grown to love Sky as much as the rest of the Sarah Jane gang. Due to Elisabeth Sladen’s sad passing and the show’s subsequent end, we only got six episodes with Sky, and she spent most of the first one as a baby. Still, I enjoyed what little we saw of her, and I liked what she brought to the group (a few basic Sky-related spoilers.)
The show’s final season opens with Sarah Jane acquiring a new child in the way only Sarah Jane does – unexpectedly, through alien shenanigans. While Luke was constructed by aliens out of human DNA, Sky is a bona fide alien herself, deposited on Sarah Jane’s doorstep as an infant to shield her from an interplanetary war. Of course, Sky had a little early-phase genetic tampering going on as well. Like Luke, she’s brought into being with the intention of using her as a tool to further her species’s less-than-savory goals. In Sky’s case, she’s a living bomb; inert in her infancy, Sky’s major-piece-of-work Fleshkind mother artificially ages her up to a tween as a means of priming her, but with the help of Sarah Jane and co., Sky rejects the path set out for her and is able to disarm. She stays on Earth under the guise of being Sarah Jane’s new foster child. (Point of interest: between Luke and Sky, one thing is clear – if the show hadn’t ended prematurely, Sarah Jane would have eventually acquired a third anomalous child and named him Walker.)
Sky’s role in the series occupies a lot of the same space as Luke, who at this point is off at university. Clyde and Rani(and before them, Maria) are the Awesome but Ordinary characters, the everyday boy and girl next door who, it turns out, fight aliens in the free time. Sky and Luke, however, are Definite Sci-Fi characters, the alien or alien-adjacent ones with skills that regular people don’t have. For Sky, that means electrical extra-sensitivity left over from her time as a bomb (as a baby, she could blow fuses when she was upset,) and although she doesn’t have Luke’s off-the-charts intellect, the combination of her alien biology and her forced aging allows her to remember everything she saw and experienced when she was a baby. She’s also immune to anything that specifically targets humans, which comes in handy big-time in “The Curse of Clyde Langer.”
Also similar to Luke, Sky doesn’t quite fit in to everyday life. Her learning curve has a double-whammy, since she’s only been alive for a very short time andshe’s from another planet. She has her reluctant or self-conscious moments (she’s very nervous about meeting Luke for the first time when he comes home to visit,) but in general, she delights in new things and excitedly bombards Sarah Jane, Clyde, and Rani with questions about life on Earth.
Being only much younger than the rest of the gang (she’s around 12 or 13, while Clyde and Rani are more like 17,) Sky brings a different vibe to the show. The kids have always been one another’s contemporaries, but Sky is like a kid sister; while Clyde and Rani (and Luke, in the finale) spend time with her and include her, she’s also viewed a bit separately from them, someone to look after. Fortunately, though, she never really feels like a tagalong, and the show avoids a Cousin Oliver dynamic. I imagine she was probably brought on as a way to return a little to the roots of the show, aiming for that younger demographic, but when the series was forced to end, that wasn’t able to bear out.
No comments:
Post a Comment