While Buried Secrets took us to Italy and Snow Blind to the Antarctic, the third installment of Sarah Jane Smith's second season keeps us nice and local, in London. In this regard, David Bishop's Fatal Consequences is the second-season release most like his first-season triumph Test of Nerve-- and perhaps for that reason, a minor triumph in itself.

Fatal Consequences begins with a twist, and it never really stops having them. And the ending cliffhanger is brutal-- it took all my self-control to stop from putting on Dreamland right then. David Bishop has managed to pull together strands from the previous seven instalments of Sarah Jane Smith to create something I wouldn’t have thought possible.

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

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

Fatal Consequences pulls together most of the threads from the first two episodes and resolves them with the presence of Jacqueline Pearce (Servalan!) as the evil leader of the bad guys, and David Gooderson (the least impressive Davros, but better here) as her chief scientist, planning to wipe out the world by biological terrorism. Tremendous stuff, very fast-paced and exciting; and it becomes clear precisely which of the Classic Who stories this entire series is a PS to - luckily for me, I had seen it very recently. And we get horrible deaths including of established characters; all bets are off, it seems. ( )