Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments: Clyde Langer (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

(Note:  I'm out of town at the moment without access to my Sarah Jane DVDs, so I can't grab any screencaps.  I'll add pictures to this post tomorrow.)

 

I still have a few more recurring new Whocharacters to give a Top Five to, but I figured I might as well get started on the spin-offs.  There’s a lot to love about Clyde; here are five good reasons (spoilers.)

Deducing the Slitheen’s Weakness (Series 1, Episode 2 – “Revenge of the Slitheen:  Part 2”)

Mr. Smith has been disabled just before he can tell our heroes what common kitchen ingredient can destroy the Slitheen, and Clyde, in his first rodeo with Team Sarah Jane, works out what it is.  He remembers how the Slitheen disguised as his teacher reacted to the cold chip sandwich he brought to school and, reasoning that bread, salt, and potatoes are too ubiquitous to be the answer, realizes that it has to be the vinegar.  Not bad for a tagalong!

Communicating with the Outside World (Series 1, Episode 10 – “The Lost Boy:  Part 2”)

I love Clyde’s spidey sense about realizing when something’s not on the up-and-up, but it does tend to get him sidelined by the villains, since he’s not too discreet about revealing his suspicions.  Here, he’s trapped inside an alien computer (never mind how that works,) and he still manages to help, mentally sending a message to the Jacksons’ computer so the others will know who the bad guy/computer is.  (Also, bonus points for correctly visualizing the layout of a keyboard.)

Finishing Off Odd Bob (Series 2, Episode 4 – “Day of the Clown:  Part 2”)

Yes – using laughter to destroy an alien that feeds on fear is super cheesy, as are the incredibly lame jokes Clyde tells to get the job done, but I love this moment anyway.  Maybe it’s because Clyde has spent a lot of time getting criticized for being a “class clown,” with people confusing levity for trouble-making.  In light of that, I like seeing him use this quality to save the day, and I love how pleased he is with himself about it!

Realizing the Truth about Gavin (Series 4, Episode 8 – “The Empty Planet:  Part 2”)

More of Clyde’s spidey sense.  Gavin isn’t the villain here, but Clyde gets that something’s up.  He notes the lack of kid-friendly anything at Gavin’s flat – from the absence of DVDs and video games to the “rubbish biscuits” (cookie) – and while Rani takes that to mean Gavin’s life is rougher than theirs, Clyde sees it as something more, which helps lead them to the truth of who Gavin really is.

Standing Up to Frickin’ Nazis (Series 4, Episode 10 – “Lost in Time:  Part 2”)

Yep, this scene again.  Sick of it yet?  Me, neither.  Not only does Clyde call out an officer who’s racist to him, but he also taunts the Nazis with his foreknowledge of their eventual loss and buys himself just enough time to escape them by making them think his superior future technology (ie, his phone) is a high-tech bomb.  Clyde Langer for the win!

Character Highlight: Sky Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

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.

More Notes on Race and Time Travel (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures)

The Whoniverse’s spinoffs, with their lack of TARDISes, travel in time far less than the parent show does, but there’s still the odd time-travel episode here and there.  This offers a few more opportunities to explore race when 21^st-century characters of color visiting the past.

On Torchwood, “Captain Jack Harkness” finds Jack and Tosh transported to 1941.  Tosh, who’s of Japanese descent, is lucky to be in Wales in January rather than the U.S. in December, but it’s still a thoroughly-unnerving experience.  As soon as she realizes when they are, she gets anxious, and rightfully so.  “Jap” trips easily off of people’s tongues, and Tosh’s natural out-of-placeness from being displaced in time is interpreted by those around her as traitorous behavior.  She’s quickly suspected of being a spy, and without Jack asserting her loyalty to Britain, things might have turned very ugly for her.  For me, one of the hardest-hitting moments of the episode is when she worriedly asks Jack what will happen to her if they can’t get back, and Jack replies, “I’ll take care of you.”  Yes, it’s one friend looking out for another, but it’s also one friend acknowledging that the other will experience additional danger solely because of her race and that he, due to his privilege as a white person, will need to protect her.  Very sad, but very honest.

With The Sarah Jane Adventures, we have two PoC of different races with separate time-travel experiences, which are interesting to compare.  Rani visits the past twice and gets “exotic foreigner” reactions both times.  When she crashes a mid-century village in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” she causes quite a stir (to be fair, that’s partly because she’s wearing pants.  After she leaves, a villager exclaims, “Can that really be the fashion in the Punjab?”)  Rani has a bemused/weary acceptance of shocking the locals, replying, “Yes, hello.  Ethnic person in the ‘50s.”  Her other jaunt into the past is in “Lost Time,” where she, Clyde, and Sarah Jane are sent to different points in history.  Rani meeta Jane Grey, under the guise of being her new lady-in-waiting, and while one of Jane’s servants doubts the “foreigner” can be trusted, Rani uses the “mysteries of the East” thing to her advantage.  She plays off any out-of-time faux pas as Indian customs, and Jane, fascinated by but ignorant of Asia, easily buys her excuses.

It disappointed me that Clyde was the only one not to visit the ‘50s in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” and I was glad he finally got to time travel in “Lost in Time.”  Clyde is sent to the WWII era, where he and an evacuated boy thwart a group of Nazis planning an attack – he’s tossed right into the deep end, isn’t he?  I’ve already mentioned the main race-related scene here, when the Nazi commander calls him a Negro, and Clyde in turn amazingly calls the Nazis “a gang of bullies picking on others for what they look like” who will lose the war due to their “blind, stupid prejudice.”  (I love it so much.)  But what really strikes me is what I think may be the reasonClyde only time travels once, and then only to WWII.  I wonder if the writers were aware that, as a Black boy, Clyde would experience harsher, blunter racism than Rani would as a South Asian and wanted to be sure that racism came from obvious bad guys (Nazis, people.)  When 1950s villagers gawk at Rani, their exoticizing is more about ignorance than malice, but if Clyde had walked into the same crowd, he would’ve likely had a far colder welcome.  It’s ugly enough for a Nazi call him a Negro.  If he’d had that contempt from one those pleasant villagers?  From one of Sarah Jane’s parents, maybe?  Way worse, and harder for Clyde to push back against.  If the show really had that kind of understanding and planned Clyde’s one time-travel adventure accordingly, it shows a pretty unflinching awareness of history and race relations.

Favorite Characters: Luke Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

“I was born running…”  Does it get much more companion than that?

Anyway, this is Luke, adopted son of the one and only Sarah Jane Smith.  In some ways, he’s the “sci-fi shortcut” character, the easy way to fit in some technobabble or do the unexplainable on occasion.  But he’s also a great kid learning about the world and who he is within it, and his lovely relationship with Sarah Jane is made of win.  (A few pilot spoilers.)

Luke is “born” in the first episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures.  Though made from human DNA, he was bioengineered by a nefarious race called the Bane for the purposes of studying humans.  He’s been growing but dormant for some time, and it’s not until Sarah Jane and Maria come along that he’s activated and finally wakes to the world.

Given his unconventional origins, Luke isn’t your typical kid.  His Bane-made mind is both photographic and off-the-charts brilliant (shades of Zoe, without the occasional arrogance,) while his social skills are non-existent.  The latter isn’t surprising, since he’s experiencing everything for the first time and doesn’t know how people behave.  Now, socially-awkward geniuses are a dime a dozen in fiction, but the characterization really works for Luke.  Understanding people is his Achilles heel, and in interactions, he can be sweetly ignorant, startlingly earnest, or shyly hesitant, depending on the situation.  The difficulty of saying or doing the right thing can be a source of worry for him; while he’s not especially concerned with the usual teenage preoccupation of “fitting in,” he sometimes equates his social struggles with proof that he’s not “properly” human. 

These fears and frustrations really add to the character.  This archetype has a tendency to be portrayed as largely emotionless – particularly when you get up to walking-supercomputer-level geniuses like Luke – but he has a ton of emotions he’s still trying to figure out.  He can be scared, confused, and concerned, he can feel like an outsider who doesn’t know where he belongs, he can be curious, he can laugh, mess around, and be reckless, he can be stubborn and hyper-focused, and he can be caring, brave, and selfless.  He has intense reactions to getting into a quarrel or having to say goodbye because he’s never experienced these things before, and he’s not sure what’s going to happen.  In this way, despite his brilliance, he’s still kind of childlike.  His relationships with Sarah Jane, Maria, Clyde, and later Rani are so important to him, because to them, he’s not a lab rat or a weirdo or a freak.  He’s just Luke, and whoever that is, it’s okay.

Oh yeah, and he saved the world on the day he was born, did I mention that?  Luke is an instrumental member of the team, and, sci-fi shortcut or not, his knowledge is often the key to saving the day.  Whether he’s remembering a crucial, little-known fact of vital importance, doing insane mathematics in his head under extreme pressure, or rigging up neat bits of cool technology, the gang would rarely get the job done without him.