5.3-4 The Curse of Clyde Langer

[matthewsee]

Quite a pun that Clyde makes about things being fishy when it was literally raining fish.
A very good opening episode to this story about the titular curse which Clyde got due to him being bitten by a totem pole which results in everyone (except Sky probably because she is an alien) turning against him when they say, hear or read his name.
With everyone who has said, heard or read his name (except Sky) turning against him Clyde eventually accepts help from a girl which marks a not bad cliffhanger for the first episode.

The concluding episode has more been about Clyde’s isolation than with the menace that is the totem pole.
It was pretty good way it played out the human interaction between Clyde and Ellie which rather shows that one can find friends in the unlikeliest of places.
It was also pretty good that having only been introduced in the story that bears her name, Sky is the one, as she was the only one of the Bannerman Road not to turn on Clyde, who comes up with the solution that frees Clyde from the curse.
The showdown between Clyde and the aliens in the totem pole was very good and very climatic.
Unfortunately just as the totem pole caused Clyde’s isolation it is also what caused him to lose Ellie as he had no time to let her know where he was going when his friends came for him.
It is tragic that Ellie seems to be lost forever because like Clyde’s use of a fake name, Ellie is not her real name as it was one that she read off a poster and therefore cannot be traced. While the loss of Ellie was tragic it probably wasn’t in the production team’s mind to have another new regular character so soon after introducing Sky.
It is rather curious seeing the homeless here (especially the statement made by Sarah about them) in SJA’s fifth season. This is because Lis Sladen was a fan of The Wire and in the fifth season of that show it also featured the homeless. However while the fifth season of The Wire was always intended to be the last for that show, SJA’s fifth season became its last only because of Lis Sladen’s passing.

Next Time trailer for The Man Who Wasn’t There: It seems that Luke is making a substantial return to SJA for this the last story and by the look of this trailer and the title of the final story seems to refer to a man who is actually a hologram.

[matthewsee]

Playing the homeless girl Ellie in The Curse of Clyde Langer was Lily Loveless. It is really hard not to think whether her surname had an influence in her casting as Ellie considering that homeless people are not thought about a lot by non-homeless people in general.

[matthewsee]

In The Curse of Clyde Langer, Doctor Madigan mentioned the Curse of Tippecanoe otherwise known as Tecumseh’s Curse.
As explained by Andrew Pixley in DWM’s The Sarah Jane Companion Volume Three the curse suggests that US Presidents who have been elected or reelected in years divisible by twenty would die in office beginning with William Henry Harrison elected in 1840 but served only a month after his inauguration in 1841 when he died of pneumonia. I would leave to people to look up in detail why this curse came about.
Bizarrely enough seven of the eight US Presidents who had died in office (the exception being Zachary Taylor elected in 1848 and died in 1850) had been ones who had been elected or reelected in the years relating to the curse. In fact four of the seven presidential deaths came as a result of assassinations.
The curse however wasn’t completely successful because while attempts were made on the lives of Ronald Reagan (1980) and George W Bush (2000) both of them survived. Reagan died in 2004 more than a decade and a half after leaving office and Bush is still very much alive.