It’s
hard to know if I would have grown to love Sky as much as the rest of the Sarah
Jane gang. Due to Elisabeth Sladen’s sad
passing and the show’s subsequent end, we only got six episodes with Sky, and
she spent most of the first one as a baby.
Still, I enjoyed what little we saw of her, and I liked what she brought
to the group (a few basic Sky-related spoilers.)
The
show’s final season opens with Sarah Jane acquiring a new child in the way only
Sarah Jane does – unexpectedly, through alien shenanigans. While Luke was constructed by aliens out of human DNA, Sky is a
bona fide alien herself, deposited on Sarah Jane’s doorstep as an infant to
shield her from an interplanetary war.
Of course, Sky had a little early-phase genetic tampering going on as
well. Like Luke, she’s brought into
being with the intention of using her as a tool to further her species’s
less-than-savory goals. In Sky’s case,
she’s a living bomb; inert in her
infancy, Sky’s major-piece-of-work Fleshkind mother artificially ages her up to
a tween as a means of priming her, but with the help of Sarah Jane and co., Sky
rejects the path set out for her and is able to disarm. She stays on Earth under the guise of being
Sarah Jane’s new foster child. (Point of
interest: between Luke and Sky, one
thing is clear – if the show hadn’t ended prematurely, Sarah Jane would have eventually acquired a third
anomalous child and named him Walker.)
Sky’s
role in the series occupies a lot of the same space as Luke, who at this point
is off at university. Clyde and Rani
(and before them, Maria) are the Awesome but Ordinary characters, the everyday
boy and girl next door who, it turns out, fight aliens in the free time. Sky and Luke, however, are Definite Sci-Fi
characters, the alien or alien-adjacent ones with skills that regular people
don’t have. For Sky, that means
electrical extra-sensitivity left over from her time as a bomb (as a baby, she
could blow fuses when she was upset,) and although she doesn’t have Luke’s
off-the-charts intellect, the combination of her alien biology and her forced
aging allows her to remember everything she saw and experienced when she was a
baby. She’s also immune to anything that
specifically targets humans, which comes in handy big-time in “The Curse of
Clyde Langer.”
Also
similar to Luke, Sky doesn’t quite fit in to everyday life. Her learning curve has a double-whammy, since
she’s only been alive for a very short time and
she’s from another planet. She has her
reluctant or self-conscious moments (she’s very nervous about meeting Luke for
the first time when he comes home to visit,) but in general, she delights in
new things and excitedly bombards Sarah Jane, Clyde, and Rani with questions
about life on Earth.
Being
only much younger than the rest of the gang (she’s around 12 or 13, while Clyde
and Rani are more like 17,) Sky brings a different vibe to the show. The kids have always been one another’s
contemporaries, but Sky is like a kid sister; while Clyde and Rani (and Luke,
in the finale) spend time with her and include her, she’s also viewed a bit
separately from them, someone to look after.
Fortunately, though, she never really feels like a tagalong, and the
show avoids a Cousin Oliver dynamic. I
imagine she was probably brought on as a way to return a little to the roots of
the show, aiming for that younger demographic, but when the series was forced
to end, that wasn’t able to bear out.
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