The Tao Connection
The latest in a series of disappearances of young men hits close to home for Sarah’s friends, and she decides to investigate the matter herself. With Josh in tow, Sarah finds that the missing men have become unwilling contributors to an experimental anti-aging serum which can only be replenished with the blood of living donors. At the center of this web of intrigue lies the eccentric Will Butley, determined to keep himself alive even at the expense of others – but even Sarah can’t begin to guess at how long his obscene experiments have been going on. And then Josh becomes his next “donor”…
written by Barry Letts
directed by Gary Russell
music by David DarlingtonCast: Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), Jeremy James (Josh Townsend), Sadie Miller (Natalie Redfern), Caroline Burns-Cook (Claudia Coster), Juliet Warner (Ellie Martin), Mark Donovan (DI Morrison), Moray Treadwell (Will Butley), Steven Wickham (Mr. Sharpe), Jane McFarlane (Nurse Jepson), Robert Curbishley (Read), Wendy Albiston (Meg Hawkins), Toby Longworth (Wong Chu), Maggie Stables (Mrs. Lythe)
Notes: Sarah apparently picked up a few of the finer points of Venusian Aikido from the third Doctor. Department C19’s Glasshouse, a top-secret government covert ops unit mentioned in the novels “Who Killed Kennedy?” and “The Scales Of Injustice” – gets its first audio mention here.
LogBook entry by Earl Green
At her home, Sarah receives a package – a live rat in a glass cage, with a note attached. When Josh removes the note from the cage, a mechanism seals the cage completely and fills it with nerve gas, killing the rat. If that isn’t ominous enough, the note promises that the same will happen to all of London unless Sarah “finds the truth” in 24 hours. Sarah next gets a visit from James Carver, a man whose name has been in the news recently after being detained and questioned by police following a scuffle with a member of Parliament. Carver, seeming nervous and unstable, claims to have gotten hold of enough sarin gas to kill the entire population of London – and even shows real proof. He claims that he’ll release it in the London underground during rush hour if certain demands aren’t met by six in the morning. Natalie insists that Sarah call the police, but Sarah tries to make use of her contact within the C19 agency instead; shortly after confirming that Carver is dangerous and is in possession of the sarin capsules, Sarah’s contact is found dead and Sarah herself is framed for the murder. And while she’s in police custody, answering questions, Sarah’s losing precious time …and so is London.
Sarah leaves the country on assignment, ignoring frantic warnings from Natalie that a reporter from Sarah’s former employer, Planet 3, is tailing her. Even when those warnings become even more ominous ones that the Planet 3 reporter is not, in fact, a Planet 3 reporter, and even after Sarah has met the “reporter” and figured out that something doesn’t add up, she forges ahead with her story. Josh is at Sarah’s new home when the place is robbed, and even though the robbers rough Josh up, he sees them take the non-functional K-9. Natalie discovers more evidence about the “reporter” Sarah has befriended, discovering that she has a connection to a group whose former members could be out to destroy Sarah’s career, if not Sarah herself. But Sarah isn’t looking ahead for these signs anymore – only over her shoulder.
Two years after Hilda Winters’ attempt on her life, Sarah suddenly finds herself relieved of the obligation to testify about the incident – Winters herself is murdered while awaiting trial. Josh, still overprotective of Sarah, marks the occasion with a bitter “good riddance,” but when a letter from Winters arrives – apparently written before, and yet predicting, her death – Sarah is spooked. When Sarah shows up for a yearly rendezvous with her fellow former TARDIS traveler Harry Sullivan, Harry doesn’t show, but a man claiming to be his stepbrother, Will Sullivan, shows up instead. Due to leave for a 13-month stay at an Antarctic research base (which, coincidentally, happens to have been funded by Sarah herself with the money she inherited from her late Aunt Lavinia), Will is also looking for Harry. Sarah’s friend Natalie has moved on to become a research assistant to a prominent forensic scientist, though an excavation into a crypt that should contain a body thousands of years old turns out to hold the body of a very recent murder victim, and Nat herself becomes a suspect. When Sarah and Josh go to visit her in Italy, Sarah discovers that the Book of Tomorrows mentioned in Hilda Winters’ posthumously delivered letter is very real – and it belongs to a secret order that believes Sarah herself is playing her part in an ancient prophecy. And one member of that order wishes to help Sarah complete her prophetic role by killing her.
Two months after her brush with death in Italy, Sarah is still recuperating from being shot, and planning to pay the Morgan expedition in Antarctica (and Will Sullivan) a visit. Josh insists on going with her, not quite trusting how conveniently a close relative of an old friend has insinuated himself into Sarah’s life. When they arrive there, however, all is not well – Will is sporting a black eye, tensions are running high among the small team at the isolated Antarctic base, and it seems that Sarah can’t get a straight answer to any straight questions. She begins to worry that another Krynoid seed pod has been found, but something else is happening behind the scenes – something deadly, and something that has a connection to the secret order whose members tried to murder Sarah in Italy.
After returning from another brush with death in Antarctica, Sarah, Josh and Will pry into a research company with ties to Hilda Winters – and to the secret society that has twice tried to kill Sarah. Protests fill the streets outside the company’s research center, where Josh finds his environmentalist friend Maude worried about her daughter, who managed to get inside the building but never returned. Will uses his medical credentials to gain access to the center, only to discover that he is expected. Sir Donald Wakefield, a terminally ill multimillionaire who has made recent news headlines by planning to be on the first passenger flight into space, contacts Sarah and reveals that he heads up another faction of the secret society, and warns her that one of her closest friends has orders to kill her. When the society’s more violent faction starts a countdown to the release of a deadly bio-engineered plague, they name their price for stopping the outbreak: Sarah must lay down her life willingly.
Sarah off in what she thought was Croydon. In 1981, Sladen and John Leeson starred in the first spinoff of Doctor Who to make it to production, K-9 & Company, in which she found a gift from the Doctor – her own K-9 unit. Sarah and her K-9 appeared in one further Doctor Who story, 1983’s The Five Doctors.
Once again, Sarah’s life is saved by Josh, though this time, in addition to killing the Keeper, he’s also killed Will Sullivan. Sarah puts as much distance between herself and Josh as she can, but he still tries to stay in touch with her, even showing up at Will’s funeral. Just when Sarah’s had about enough, Sir Donald Wakefield shows up too, inviting her to join him on the first passenger flight into space – a flight that will coincide with Earth passing through the tail of a comet that last approached the planet 500 years ago, a comet whose return now was predicted in the writings of Count Giuliano. Sir Donald also reveals that Josh is his son – and an operative of the pacifist chapter that follows Giuliano’s writings as prophecy. Sarah and Nat take Sir Donald up on the offer and are flown to the launch site – a place the rest of the world knows as Area 51. But while Sarah is undergoing training for her first visit to space since her travels with the Doctor, there’s a change of crew: Sir Donald’s cancer returns with a vengeance, and on his deathbed, he asks Josh to replace him on the flight. But once the passenger spaceship launches, something goes wrong. The pilot exposes himself as one of the Keeper’s last operatives, carrying out his mission to deliver Sarah to death’s door. Josh and the pilot exchange gunfire, damaging the controls in the process and leaving Sarah as the only survivor as the ship pushes into a higher orbit than it was designed for – and straight into the path of the comet.
