Review: Sarah-Jane Adventures: Death of the Doctor

It's a well known fact that I'm not a big fan of Doctor Who's Softer and Lighter spinoff Sarah Jane Adventures, whose childish and light take on the Whoniverse really fails to connect with my age group. Coupled with RTD's inferior writing, this series' repetition and laziness means that I try to avoid it when I can. However, I only seem to sniff quality wherever the series crosses over with its parent programme, as here, and so I'm going to review the Series 4 episode Death of the Doctor.
     For the first time with SJA, I actually enjoyed the episode to a degree. The main reason for this was the overwhelming amount of fanwank involved with the process - an appearance is made by the Third Doctor's assistant Jo Grant (Jones now, apparently), leading to minutes and minutes of stock footage from the Classic series. There are also plenty of jabs at the fanbase, such as The Doctor ensuring everyone that the story is "neat and tidy" and mentioning in passing that he can regenerate "507 times" (Bollocks of the purest degree, of course.)
     The plot, of what remains after you strip away all of the fanwank, is that The Doctor has been dicovered dead by a race of Vulture-Undertakers called the Shan-Sheeth, who send the body back to Earth for his funeral. SJ and Jo Grant were invited, and neither seem to believe that he was dead. Sure enough, Eleven managed to swap bodies with SJ's companion Clyde (prompting an unfortunate instance of, "my hand isn't white!"), quickly explaining his regeration. You see, the Vulture people (very expensive animatronics) were trying to use the TARDIS to end death. Luckily, Eleven helped to save the day.
     While Russel's add-ons to continuity (Mentioning that Ten went back and visited all of his companions and not just the 2005-9 lot, explaining that some of the old series companions had very happy endings.) may have felt heartwarming, his misunderstanding of Eleven's character was quite irritating. RTD had a habit of treating his Doctors as Jesus himself, and under Moffat that just doesn't apply. Also, some of the jabs were a little petty, in particular his use of Eleven as an Author Proxy to appeal to the fans ("Nice and neat!").
     So, while overall the episode was easy to follow and contained some fun and heartwarming continuity, the cracterisation was totally wrong, the enemies were ridiculously made and the whole excercise had far too much fanwank to be a cohesive story. I'm sorry Sarah Jane. But you'll have to try again. Or not at all.

Thanks.