Sunday, May 6, 2018

Relationship Spotlight: Rani Chandra & Clyde Langer (The Sarah Jane Adventures)


I love all of the Sarah Jane gang – each of the characters is so great in their own right, and there are oodles of wonderful interactions between them, both various pairs/trios and the group as a whole.  But for me, my favorite duo is the one-two punch of Clyde and Rani.  Always fun and always rootable.

Although the show is about a group of young teens (I think the kids are about 15 when Rani joins the show in series 2,) romance has always been handled with a fairly light touch.  Clyde’s first instinct upon meeting Rani is to good-naturedly flirt with her, and there’s an undercurrent of their growing attraction to one another throughout the show, but the shippy scenes between them are infrequent, mostly confined to small moments.  Rani kissing Clyde on the cheek middle of a big alien crisis, prompting him to observe that he should be heroic more often.  Shots of hand-holding during scary scenes, Luke teasing them (in Morse code, no less!) with the shipper name he made up for them, “Clani.”

But foremost, they’re always friends and alien hunters, and I like that, especially on the latter front.  It can annoy me on genre shows when significant others want to hash out their relationship issues while the literal fate of the world is at stake, or otherwise suggest that the fate of the world is small potatoes compared to their boy-/girlfriend.  With Clyde and Rani?  Yeah, they like each other – albeit rather understatedly – but they have bigger stuff to worry about it, and at the end of the day, they’re always about doing what needs to be done.  Stopping alien threats comes before everything; dating can wait.  (On a side note, I also like that, while either is obviously worried whenever the other is in danger, there’s not an appreciable difference to the tone of their fear when it’s Luke or Sarah Jane, or later Sky, in trouble.  They mean a great deal to one another, but their more platonic friends are just as important.)

Really, they’re just fun together.  Rani’s practicality balances out nicely with Clyde’s recklessness – she knows when to pull him back from doing something stupid, just as he knows when to push her to take a risk.  Both bounce ideas off one another well, and both are good at teasing each other.  Clyde appreciates Rani’s smarts, and she gets a kick out of his jokes.  (Actually, looking at them that way, they’re maybe a tiny bit Ron and Hermione, but their relationship is always tighter, more chill, and less contentious than with those two – I root for Clyde and Rani hardcore, while I’m a little indifferent to Hermione/Ron.)

And, not for nothing, I like that they’re two people of color, of different ethnicities, who often share screentime together without the white cast members present.  The Sarah Jane Adventures doesn’t often address race specifically, usually preferring to simply and unspokenly highlight diversity and make the characters of color equal members of the gang.  Sarah Jane is the main protagonist, of course, but Clyde and Rani are both important, distinct, and valued characters on the show, and letting them be on their own onscreen is significant precisely in how casually the show presents it.  I don’t think there are too many shows without mostly-PoC casts that would feature a story like “The Empty Planet,” where Rani and Clyde are the only main cast members onscreen for the majority of the time.

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