The Sarah Jane Adventures “The Mad Woman In The Attic Part 1”

Wait…”The Mad Woman in the Attic”?  Is that a Jane Eyre reference?  If so, color me impressed.

If not…well, color me impressed anyway since I thought it regardless.

Well, we do have two women as regulars on the show (Rani’s mom doesn’t count), so which one is the Mad Woman in the Attic?

It’s Rani!  50 years in the future!

Damn!

She’s living in Sarah Jane’s old house when some kid named Adam comes in to see her.  She’s been up there alone for a while.,  Even Mr. Smith stopped working.  How the heck did this all happen?

Well, she decides to tell this stranger.  Since it is 2059, aliens are known to exist, even the scary ones, so what happened to put Rani up there?  Well, apparently, she got tired of being dismissed by Sarah Jane, Luke, and Clyde when she thought she found evidence of aliens, but Sarah Jane says was just lightning.  The boys, meanwhile, are catching up with Maria.  Feeling rejected, Rani went to see her old friend Sam, an orphan who, for some reason, Rani told all about Sarah Jane and aliens and stuff.

See, Sam knows of some alien-ish activity in a nearby funfair, and he convinces Rani to go look.  Then he left before she went in, so he’s helpful.

Sarah Jane eventually figures out she was rude, and she isn’t happy Sam knows about aliens.  Meanwhile, Clyde didn’t have any issues for telling his father. so what the hell Sarah Jane?

Regardless, the old man working at the funfair, Harry, is acting a little suspicious, but that gets more so when four missing homeless people silently march out with these deep red eyes and then each go off to enjoy a different ride.  It seems there is an alien girl in there, one who sometimes speaks through mirrors to Harry, and Harry takes Rani in there.  Rani seems to connect with this lonely red alien named Eve.

Yeah, this can’t go bad.

Well, Sam is kind of a jerk, but he does tell Sarah Jane where Rani went, and Luke of all people thinks he can get through to Sam and find out what he’s hiding.  Sarah Jane and Clyde then go to the fair, and things seem…odd.

Until that Eve talks through mirrors to Sam, leading to her possibly connecting to both Luke and Sarah Jane–no one ever seems to want to connect with Clyde, but he takes his role in life well–and she shows Rani her future…in the attic as the old woman!

Wait, is this gonna go really meta?  Like Old Rani isn’t real or something?  That could be very cool.  Unlikely, but really cool.