Though the first season of Sarah Jane Smith was released in 2002, the second didn't come out until 2006, shortly before Sarah returned to our television screens in the Doctor Who episode "School Reunion"; the creation of The Sarah Jane Adventures shortly thereafter meant it was the last. Unlike the first season, which used five different writers, the entire second season was written by one person, David Bishop. Bishop was the writer of the previous season's Test of Nerve, one of the better releases.

The last Season One release, Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, set up that Sarah and company would continue battling Hilda Winters and her associates, but the first Season Two story, Buried Secrets, dumps that status quo very quickly with a news broadcast that establishes that Doctor Winters and her right-hand man, Mister Harris, are both dead. It's been a couple years since the events of the first season, and Sarah and her team are dispersed: Sarah is trying to avoid the publicity from the events with Winters, Josh has been working a succession of jobs none of which are as exciting as hanging with Sarah, and Nat has left her job at the Planet Three television network to assist with an archeological dig in Florence, Italy.

The jump is kind of jarring; it is plainly obvious that Bishop is dispensing with story elements either unavailable or uninteresting and replacing them with his own. In terms of its structure, Buried Secrets is actually quite a lot like the first season premiere, Comeback, in that it spends a lot of time setting up this status quo and very little time on its "plot" as such. Like the weaker installments of the first season, it's enjoyable enough for the characters, but its plot feels largely like setup for events to come. Hopefully, with this out of the way, Bishop will be able to give us another Test of Nerve later on.

You can read a longer version of this review at Unreality SF.

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1003998.html

Buried Secrets takes Sarah and her team (wheelchair user Natalie and gormless male sidekick Josh) to Florence, but with a detour for Sarah to meet up with Harry Sullivan's younger brother Will; a really poignant scene which brought back nostalgic memories of Season 12 thirty years before. Once we get to Florence, there is a certain amount of info-dumping which is necessary for the rest of the plot to develop, but generally it moves along pretty smartly, Natalie's relations with her archaeological colleagues nicely portrayed, and a suitably dramatic dénouement. ( )