'Invasion of the Bane' by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts

Following her parents’ divorce, young Maria Jackson moves to her new home on Bannerman Road, Ealing, with her father, Alan. One night, Maria is woken by a strange, unearthly singing; sneaking out of the house she follows the song to the garden of the house opposite, where she sees her mysterious neighbour, reporter Sarah Jane Smith, using a small, heart-shaped device to commune with a beautiful, fairy-like creature, an Arcateen; before Maria’s startled eyes, the glowing being flies off into the night sky… The next day, Maria receives a visit from Kelsey, a hyperactive, fast-talking girl from next door, who whisks her off to a visit to a local factory where the latest craze, a popular fizzy-drink called Bubbleshock!, is manufactured. Although Maria is one of the few people who hate the drink, she agrees to accompany her new friend, but as they board the Bubbleshock! Bus, they are unaware that Sarah is following behind in her car. Arriving at the Bubbleshock! factory, Maria and Kelsey join a tour group; turning off their phones as instructed, they are subjected to a security scan –elsewhere, the results of the scan are fed to a sheet-covered figure lying on a laboratory table. The children are then given free samples, although the tour guide, Davey, is unable to get Maria to accept hers. Sneaking into the factory through a side door, Sarah is promptly captured by guards and brought before the manager, the beautiful but sinister Mrs Wormwood. Verbally sparring with her guest, Mrs Wormwood refuses to be drawn into revealing the source of Bubbleshock!’s ingredient, Bane, despite Sarah’s suggestion that the reason it resists scientific analysis is due to its extraterrestrial origin. As Sarah leaves, Mrs Wormwood orders her secretary to kill her, but the reporter manages to escape into the depths of the factory. Kelsey sneaks off to call a friend, but her phone sets off an alarm and triggers an emergency evacuation; Kelsey then screams in horror at the sight of a huge, cyclopean eye glaring down at her from the ceiling. As the tour guests leave the building, Maria looks for Kelsey, but when she tries phoning her friend, the signal from her mobile causes an energy surge in the secret laboratory, waking a young boy lying under a sheet, and sending him fleeing in terror. Furious that ‘The Archetype’ has escaped, Mrs Wormwood sends her guards to retrieve the boy. Maria, Sarah and the boy converge, and together they escape out a toilet window; Sarah uses a ‘sonic lipstick’ device to open the factory gates, and then drives them to safety. Back at the factory, Mrs Wormwood wades through Kelsey’s incessant jabbering and learns Sarah’s home address; she then spitefully terrifies the girl by showing her true form, before wiping the whole incident from Kelsey’s mind and sending her on her way. Dropping Maria home, Sarah takes the boy to her house, where she discovers he is only six minutes old, has no belly button, and is able to learn at an incredible rate. Maria and Kelsey arrive at Sarah’s just as the house is attacked by Davey, now transformed into a huge, one-eyed, multi-tentacled monster. After Sarah sees the creature off with a special spray-device, the children inveigle themselves into her private loft – where they discover a room filled with high-tech equipment and alien artefacts. Sarah explains that she once travelled in time with a friend of hers, but now she helps stranded aliens to return home, and sees off extraterrestrial threats. Also in the loft is a portal into space – behind which a mechanical dog named K-9 is busy on a mission to seal off a black hole inadvertently created by a team of scientists in Switzerland – and a sophisticated computer called ‘Mr Smith’. When Sarah’s equipment detects alien life in the room, she determines that Bubbleshock!’s ingredient, Bane, is a living creature secreted by the Bane Mother. Using Mr Smith, Sarah hacks into the Bubbleshock! System and orders Mrs Wormwood to leave the planet; having just eaten Davey for failure, the evil woman is in no mood to listen, and flatly refuses to comply with Sarah’s wishes. Instead she awakens the Bane Mother, the gigantic alien creature in her factory, and asks it to activate the parts of her ingested by consumers all across the country. With Kelsey, Alan and everyone else around them transformed into mindless, shuffling zombies, Sarah, Maria and the Archetype head for the factory; using the Bubbleshock! Bus, Sarah drives through the building’s wall and confronts Mrs Wormwood and the Bane Mother. Having explained how she created the Archetype so that he could advise on how to make her deadly drink appeal to everyone’s tastes, Mrs Wormwood tries to kill the boy with a control device; as the Archetype collapses, Maria uses her mobile phone’s signal to hurt the Bane Mother, but this only succeeds in driving it into a frenzy. However, the Archetype links the phone with Sarah’s alien communication device, and, setting it to the frequency Mr Smith used to hack into the factory’s systems, he creates a sonic wave that causes equipment everywhere to explode. In the confusion, Sarah, Maria and the boy escape just as the building blows up, killing the Bane within, and freeing the population from the aliens’ control. Some time later, after the Bane invasion has been explained as a hallucination from a chemical leak at the Bubbleshock! factory, things get back to normal. Over a drink of normal fizzy pop in her garden, Sarah tells Maria that with Mr Smith’s help she has adopted the Archetype, now named him ‘Luke’. Together they look forward to more adventures…

Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), Yasmin Page (Maria Jackson), Thomas Knight (The Archetype / Luke), Porsha Lawrence Mavour (Kelsey Hopper), Samantha Bond (Mrs Wormwood), Jamie Davies (Davey), Joseph Millson (Alan Jackson), Juliet Cowan (Chrissie Jackson), Rungano Nyoni (Secretary [Lesley]), Philip North (Technician), John Leeson (Voice of K-9), Alexander Armstrong (Voice of Mr Smith), Sydney White (Bubbleshock Girl), Olivia Hill (TV Reporter), Konnie Huq, Gethin Jones (Themselves)

Directed by Colin Teague
Produced by Susie Liggat
Executive Producers Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner
A BBC Wales production

TX:
1st January 2007 @ 4.50 pm

Notes:
*Featuring Sarah Jane Smith, K-9 Mk IV and introducing Maria Jackson, Kelsey, Luke and Mr Smith

*This special is sixty minutes in duration