Let me start this entire article in a way that I probably shouldn't; I can entirely understand why Sarah Jane would appeal to a teenager who is entirely composed of awkward and hate for adults.  The sad part is that the people who wrote this script seem to have taken all of those ideas and crammed them into a series that feels as uncomfortable to watch as it would be to have to go to high school again, as an adult, who needed a date for prom, which is tonight.

Sadly that is all of the forms of praise that I can seem to muster from my seemingly cold and dead heart. 

Sarah Jane manages to find ways to make even the most believable aspects of Doctor Who - a show about a space man flying around in a box the size of a telephone booth that travels through space and time for zany based adventure- seem stupid and illogical, while making you feel bad for enjoying them in the first place.  This would be like a Robin comic that focused entirely around Batman's bed wetting problem and Robin explaining the uses of a Baterang to single parent children.  This comic would be entitled "Me Too".

But beyond just the shows failure of not being Doctor Who it also terrible.  Onto the problems with the show proper:

The show opens up with Sarah Jane basically talking about how great it was to travel through space and how she is now content just to find the mysteries that are here on Earth, which I assume is the same speech battered wives give as court statements on why they really do want to stay with their husbands.  All of this is done without saying The Doctor's name, because after all this is the first 30 seconds and that would seem a little needy.  That said, this is a show about a sidekick he had for three seasons 30 years ago, if she hasn't gotten over him leaving her yet she never will.

This show is for teenagers, hopefully retarded teenagers.  The next thing that is shown is a commercial for the "new" and "extreme" BUBBLE SHOCK! Soda(?).  It probably isn't that the last 15 years of television and movies have taught me that ten times out of nine a fake product shown during the course of a show will eventually be an end boss, but instead that the commercial flashes so much that producers are probably hoping to up their ratings by making the few people it would cause seizures in might stay for the duration of the show and still have a grasp of the plot.

Although making the teenagers feel cool and clever for figuring out that something must be wrong with the product that littered the entire world could be what they were trying to go for; after all these are the kids that are watching a Doctor Who spin off instead of going outside and hanging out with people, reading, or the less geeker activity of playing Dungeon and Dragons in their basement.  The BBC clearly isn’t concerned about ratings because both the people who falling into the demographic of "fan" are the ones so disabled that the only reason it is on is because their helper left it on when they disappear for an abnormally long smoke breaks. 

The show is supposed to be based around Sarah Jane, but instead the entire first episode is more about the person who moved in across the street from her, a plucky young girl who's parent's don't ever seem to understand her and dismiss all of her concerns as "normal kid stuff," which is about as generic as you can get for a lead character in a pilot episode.  Maria, as the amazingly interchangeable plot device is called, is new to the neighborhood and thus fills the niche of trying to explain who all these people are and why we should care.  She does this very poorly; probably because her agent described this job as "a good stepping stone" for her career, which in 4 years will be "fry cook" or "amazingly low rent hooker."

Maria does manage to introduce the watchers to Sarah Jane, the star of this show, briefly before she walks off camera like she is too good to be on this damn show.  This might sound bad, but this is before the audience is introduced to Maria's sidekick for the episode.

Kelsey is the most annoying person in any TV series ever made, ever.  She was so unpopular that after the first episode she was dropped and replaced with someone else.  I would not be exaggerating if I said that Kelsey had no redeeming qualities as a character, she is annoying, she happily stabs every single character in the back, and instead of pushing the plot along for the heroes she always seems just speed it up for the bad guys.  Kelsey is what Benedict Arnold would have been if he was alive today, a sassy teenage girl only out for herself, who uses so much British slang that even others her age are confused by it.

The one thing Kelsey does is make things happen in the show, which is odd because it almost seems like everyone else is trying to do the exact opposite of that.   After barging into Maria's house and telling her that her life is a joke, and the kids at school are indeed going to make fun of her, she tells Maria that they can go downtown on the free bus to the Bubble Shock! factory, which is strangely enough the same place that Sarah Jane has been researching for this entire episode. The audience is than treated to a riveting reenactment of what it would be like to take a tour of  said factory, only instead of finding out how stuff is made we get to listen to two young girls talk about how boring this entire thing is.

Then things start going badly, mainly because that bitch Kelsey can't help but be the most annoying person ever, and the entire factory starts to shake apart because of a cell phone call made inside of it.  Besides this being the worst weakness any species could ever evolve, it also makes taking over an entire planet that has cell phones possible only when no one makes a call, ever.  Because of this one call the factory literally starts to fall apart, waking some kind of proto-super boy that has all of the strengths of all of mankind.  While this is retarded, and makes no sense at all, the show then takes 30 minutes to introduce us further to the entire cast of characters that are best describe as "bad actors".  It seems odd that the entire episode stalls for the length of an entire normal episode of the show before the party goes back and defeats the aliens, but this may also be because it would be odd if they showed up with a device needed to beat them that was only just given to Sarah Jane.

  But that is how logic must work after The Doctor fries your brain with time travel:

Of course the proto-super boy who remains nameless is the only person who can use the device, and this isn't helped by the fact that he does so in such a way that it seems exactly like he is about to morph into a Power Ranger either.  The building then blow up. For no reason.

They also look like they are having fun when it happens( instead of, you know, terror).

The episode does go on, but in no real great interest to anyone ever.  And Sarah Jane is just another person sitting in the corner saying "Me too".