So, Sarah Jane is back in town. And Sladen is a bit less awkward in her acting.

I like the way (new showrunner) Phil Ford accounted for a rather tough list of ingredients — writing out Maria, giving a big role to all the Jacksons, reusing props and effects from Who, setting up some recurring story threads, following up on recent and ancient continuity without relying on it — and churned out a rather solid, pacey adventure at the same time.

Maria’s departure could have been handled so many ways, all trite, yet it felt organic, truthful, and not at all cloying. And I love the way it folds into the A plot, effectively giving her whole family a big farewell.

It’s all rather… snuggly. A shame to lose Maria and (especially) her dad. Ah well.

I quite like, also, that the story isn’t predicated on “big reveals”. Both the Sontaran thing and the America thing are unveiled halfway through the first episode (not that either was a secret coming in), leaving the rest of the story for the development of the characters’ reactions to these facts, and for the Sontaran’s own story. (The flashbacks are pretty great, too — especially the injury.) And those reactions (to start with, SJ’s coolness to Maria; the boys’ nervous yet restrained reaction to the Sontaran) were both pleasantly atypical and, again, true.

Chrissie is another example — how she gets roped into the story. Again sidestepping the tedious, she just squints at Alan and says she believed him, because his mouth didn’t twitch. Which was a bit pat, yes, but it both fit her character’s line of thinking and for the first time illustrated a good side to the way she processes things.

The story’s full of subtle little things like that, making grace of moments that should have been annoying. It was as if the story elements were there to explore how the characters might react, rather than the characters behaving in a particular way so as to allow Things to Happen.

Even the corridor-running has a nice lateral energy to it.

The only criticism I have, really, is that whoever did the production design for the inside of the radio telescope, and the computer graphics, really… sucks.

That’s something that always bothers me, the bizarre TV/cinema notion of how computers and computer displays work. It’s kind of amazing, considering that everyone working on this show and nearly everyone in the audience must use a computer constantly. What’s the point of the wacky-flashy graphics?

You have to shrug off some things, of course — the dad’s “hypnotized” acting, “totally creeped-out to the max”, constant potato jokes. Kind of the price of admission.

. . .

So consider this. The next full series of Who isn’t airing until 2010, leading people to label 2009 the “gap year”. Between December and then, there will be just five specials, a half-series of Torchwood, and probably a third series of SJA.

At twelve half-hour episodes, a season of SJA is nearly the length of a McCoy season of Who. This is more or less what aired each year, between 1986 and 1989.

At five hours, so, actually, is the rest of Davies’ Who run, through 2009.

At five hour-long specials, so is the length of Torchwood 3.

Altogether, that’s about 900 minutes (or fifteen hours) of Whoniverse programming in 2009. That’s compared with ~1000 minutes per season in the ’60s, 650 minutes in the ’70s to mid-’80s, and 350 in the late ’80s. And, of course, a total of 90 minutes between 1989 and 2005.

Some gap year.