The second installment in Sarah Jane Smith's second season takes Sarah and Josh to Antarctica to see how a scientific research installation that Sarah is funding with her aunt's money is getting on. Not to mention that that's where Will Sullivan works-- and Josh thinks he may have reason to be jealous of the other man. But of course David Bishop's Snow Blind leads to more complications than that, as when they arrive at the base, tensions are rising...

Snow Blind aims for a tense, confined atmosphere in the snows of the Antarctic, and it mostly succeeds in this regard. The visual imagery-- from Lee Binding’s beautiful cover onwards-- conjured by the play is fantastic. There are a couple points where one wishes that the sound design and direction could be a little bit more tense, and that the script could create a little bit more of that feeling of isolation, but overall it works.

If there's any disappointment, it's that Sarah Jane's investigative skills are once more not on display. Having realized that something is up on the base, Sarah still follows an anonymous note to a meeting alone, and then does not solve the base's mystery herself-- the perpetrator is revealed to her by circumstances. On the other hand, Sarah acquits herself well, demonstrating her usual level of stubbornness and cleverness in extracting herself from some truly awful situations. Kudos to her-- and to both Elisabeth Sladen and David Bishop in making it work.

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

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

Snow Blind is the one that sounds at first like it's going to be a straight sequel to The Seeds of Doom, set as it is in Antarctica, but there is a massive twist as Sarah asks the key question about the buried seed pods and nobody knows what she is talking about. Indeed the whole plot leaps back and forth as we wait to see who the traitor is. All stories set in Antarctic bases owe a homage to John W. Campbell and H.P. Lovecraft, and this one wears that genre history proudly. ( )