Having gone recently nearly to one end of the ‘Sarah Jane’ era recently, the lads over in Classic Capitology thought it would be fun go to back to the beginning, as it were, with her introductory tale The Time Warrior. It’s all too easy to forget that Liz Sladen spent her first year with Jon Pertwee as she is better remembered with Tom Baker, but it’s all to her credit that she inhabits Sarah Jane almost effortlessly from the jump.
The ‘warrior’ of The Time Warrior are the Sontarans, making their debut as well. They were the last of the ‘big five’ classic Doctor Who monsters, the others being (in order in appearance) the Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti, and Ice Warriors. And curiously they may be the best served of these (excluding the Yeti of course) in nu-Who, mostly of course in the form of Strax.
In The Time Warrior Lynx was played by the incomparable Kevin Lindsay, who set the template for all to follow, as much as a sadistic experimenter than monster. This would come even more to the for in The Sontaran Experiment the following season.
With a plentiful dose of location filming the new caps for The Time Warrior are extra nice indeed.
Classic Capitology grades the next story as an E, but it’s not for effort … next time.
