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The Doctor meets an old friend and faces a new enemy in a stunning amalgam of the 1970s series and the new Doctor Who.
The Doctor is posing as a teacher at a London comprehensive, while Rose works as a dinner-lady. Things are very strange at what at first sight appears to be a typical London comprehensive. Not only does one of the Doctor’s pupils seems unusually gifted, in fact he has knowledge ‘way beyond planet Earth,’ but the children are unusually well behaved, and frequently attend extra classes, which involve teaching via hypnosis off terminals – one can recite the measurements of the walls of Troy in cubits. There have been strange goings on at the school, ever since a recent UFO crash. About a dozen of the teachers went down with flu soon after, and were replaced with singularly abnormal. When word started to get out, Mickey called Rose and the Doctor. The sinister headmaster Mr. Finch (Anthony Stewart Head) brings a journalist around the staff room. Sarah Jane Smith is writing a profile on him for The (London) Sunday Times – except that from the tenor of her questions, she’s clearly doing a little investigation as well. That night the Doctor, Rose and Mickey break into the school to investigate. Sarah Jane has done the same, and in a quiet room finds the TARDIS, and standing behind her the Doctor. “You look incredible,” she says. “So do you,” he says. She shakes her head. “I got old,” she says. Rose is unhappy. “Talk about seeing the future,” she says. “Is that what’s going to happen to me? You’re going to go off and leave me?” This is a whole new situation for Rose; she may know in her head that he’s nine hundred years old, but it’s never occurred to her, that there may have been others like her before. Sarah-Jane’s life has been on emotional hold for almost thirty years, and she cannot understand why the Doctor never came back for her. He tries to explain to her that while he does not age, those all around him grow old. “You wither and decay. You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with you. That’s the curse of the Time Lords.” The next day Rose and Sarah Jane’s tension is mirrored by an electrifying spaghetti western stand-off between the Doctor and the headmaster. They stand toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball. “I used to have so much mercy,” the Doctor says not blinking. The women bicker and quarrel until they realize the silliness of fighting over an alien, and start to compare notes. “Does he still stroke bits of the TARDIS?” Sarah Jane asks, between fits of the giggles. There is the standard plot-line of the world in danger from an alien menace, and the Doctor is tempted by a Faustian bargain offered by Mr. Finch, that he can revive dead civilizations, and make Sarah Jane young again – but it is she who persuades him that what has gone has gone for good, and that to tamper with reality is inherently wrong. “Everything has it’s time. Everything has to end,” she says. Sarah Jane’s relationship with K-9 is a mirror of her relationship with Doctor, but both of them are able to transcend their limitations, K-9 perishing in a glorious finale. School Reunion is one of the very best episodes of Doctor Who; it shines new light on aspects of the Doctor’s life that have never been examined in detail before, and is more about relationships, and what it means to be human, to grow old and die. An outstanding script is bolstered by acting that is its equal: not only are Tennant and Piper at the very time of their form, but there are stunning performances from Head and Liz Sladen as a Sarah Jane grown old.
The copyright of the article Doctor Who Series 2: Episode 3 in Sci-Fi TV Episode Summaries is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Doctor Who Series 2: Episode 3 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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