Neha Patil (Editor)

Prisoner of the Judoon

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Directed by
  
Joss Agnew

Script editor
  
Gary Russell

Written by
  
Phil Ford

Production code
  
3.1 and 3.2

Produced by
  
Nikki Wilson Phil Ford (co-producer)

Executive producer(s)
  
Russell T Davies Julie Gardner Piers Wenger

Prisoner of the Judoon is the first serial of the third series of The Sarah Jane Adventures. It was first broadcast on the 15 and 16 of October 2009. It features the Judoon, the intergalactic police introduced in the 2007 Doctor Who episode "Smith and Jones".

Contents

Part 1

Sarah Jane Smith continues to live her life on Bannerman Road. Investigating a nanotechnology company, she is thrown out and goes back to her house, when suddenly, an alien space pod crashes into a building. Sarah Jane and the gang take a trip to the building, where Judoon Captain Tybo is shooting at an alien escaped prisoner, Androvax, a Veil, who soon possesses a little girl. Luke and Rani team up with the Judoon Captain, while Sarah Jane and Clyde meet the little girl. Sarah Jane becomes possessed and Clyde is put out of focus. Luke, Rani and Captain Tybo locate him and he is awakened.

Meanwhile, Gita and Haresh (Rani's parents) pay a visit to the nanotech company to help improve Gita's flower business but they are arrested. The Judoon Captain, Clyde, Luke and Rani arrive at Bannerman Road to discover that the possessed Sarah Jane Smith has ordered Mr Smith (Sarah Jane's supercomputer) to self-destruct with a one-minute countdown.

Part 2

Luke talks Mr Smith out of self-destructing ; the team heads over to the nanotechnology laboratory to save Sarah Jane and for Captain Tybo to bring in Androvax who must be executed for the destruction of 12 planets. The evil Sarah Jane Smith has released the nanoforms, to build a spacecraft for Androvax, threatening to destroy the Earth in the process. Gita and Haresh are arrested by the guards. They easily escape and are then confronted, scanned and catalogued by newly arrived Judoon troopers. Androvax/Evil Sarah Jane explains that the spaceship design is based on the crashed Roswell spaceship, and then reveals that he wants to destroy everything, since he was upset when his planet's sun burnt out and wants to destroy all inhabited worlds believing that destruction is the way of the Universe.

Clyde and Rani use a ruse to lock Captain Tybo in a lab room and use fire extinguishers to freeze the nanobots which were eating through a door. The troopers free Captain Tybo and then everybody converge in the now completed spaceship control room where Androvax is arrested by the Judoon platoon. Luke uses the ship's controls to deactivate the nanobots. The Judoon charge Clyde and Rani with interference, but take the pair's assistance and motives as mitigating factors, limiting their punishment to a bar to extraterrestrial travel. The Judoon leave with their prisoner, and the gang as well as Gita and Haresh — who have not seen that their daughter and her friends were involved in the events they have witnessed — return to Bannerman Road. Gita and Haresh are left in shock to have seen real aliens.

Continuity

  • The Judoon seek out and arrest Androvax; Captain Tybo commandeers a London Metropolitan Police vehicle and aggressively enforces English car stereo volume limits (threatening a human violator with deadly force); and he and his colleagues summarily sentence Clyde and Rani to restriction to Earth as punishment for their interference. The Tenth Doctor, however, explained to Martha Jones in "Smith and Jones" that the Judoon had taken her hospital to the Moon because they have no jurisdictional authority on Earth.
  • The Judoon also appear in "Smith and Jones", "The Stolen Earth", The End of Time, "The Pandorica Opens", "A Good Man Goes to War" and "The Magician's Apprentice".
  • Sarah Jane was previously possessed in Planet of the Spiders, The Masque of Mandragora and The Hand of Fear.
  • The space ship design was said to be taken from Area 51 and based on the 1947 Roswell UFO crash. The animated Doctor Who story Dreamland shows exactly the same design. The Tenth Doctor himself briefly pilots it.
  • Androvax returns in the series 4 story The Vault of Secrets.
  • Despite being restricted to Earth by Judoon order, Clyde finds himself on an alien world in Death of the Doctor and a space ship in Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith.
  • The Judoon order is the reason that Clyde and Rani are the only two humans left on Earth in The Empty Planet.

    • References

    Prisoner of the Judoon Wikipedia
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