Sarah Jane Smith travels to Antarctica where her friend, Will is part of a research team and a murderer is on the loose.
Sarah Jane Smith travels to Antarctica where her friend, Will is part of a research team and a murderer is on the loose.
SARAH JANE SMITH: SNOW BLIND
The problem with “whodunits” is a necessarily-limited group of suspects. If the central conceit of a drama is “who’s going around killing people?” then the answer is going to be a character the viewer has already met. This is the problem with “Snow Blind,” the second Sarah Jane Smith release of the second season: with such a small cast of characters, there’s very little mystery or tension. Logic dictates that Sarah and Josh obviously aren’t murderers, and the timing of the attack on Morgane (Julia Righton) eliminates both her and Munro (Nicholas Briggs) as suspects — so we’re already down to Jack (Jack Galagher) as the only possible guilty party. Credit to David Bishop, though, for credibly creating — along with sound designer Steve Foxon — an Antarctic setting and a sense of claustrophobia brought on by a storm. Bishop also continues to lay the groundwork of this season’s mythology with some fine twists — it’ll be interesting to see how things develop in the final two plays. The acting is uniformly strong, though even Jeremy James and Tom Chadbon struggle to pull off the silly jealousy-fuelled arguments over Sarah. Briggs is effective, too — I know some complain that his voice has become over-familiar in the past few years, but he’s a talented actor all the same. John Ainsworth’s direction is first-rate, continuing the fresh, confident feel of this new season. Ultimately, “Snow Blind” is not without its faults, but certainly none of them are serious.
7/10