Mona Lisa's Revenge

Mona Lisa's Revenge is a two-part story of The Sarah Jane Adventures which was broadcast on CBBC on 12 and 13 November 2009. It is the fifth serial of the third series.

Plot[]

Part 1[]

Luke enters Clyde's painting for a competition and Clyde wins first prize. The prize is a trip to see the first showing of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in Britain for Clyde and his class. Luke does not tell Sarah Jane of the trip, since he was irritated that she criticized the untidiness of his room. While the class is at the International Gallery with its director, Mr Harding, the image of Mona Lisa comes to life, steps out of the painting and replaces herself with Mr Harding's assistant, Miss Trupp. She also is able to bring people and objects from other paintings to life and to transfer real people into paintings, which she does with the gallery staff and the police who responded to a call about the apparent theft. She also takes a Sontaran blaster gun that Clyde had unwisely included in his winning picture and commands Mr Harding to take her to find her "brother". Seeing the coverage of the supposed theft of the painting on television, Sarah Jane arrives at the gallery, encounters the Mona Lisa and insists she release those transferred into paintings. Instead, Sarah Jane herself is trapped in a painting.

Part 2[]

The Mona Lisa tries to unleash a monster, which she refers to as her brother, from a painting in the gallery's basement vault. The painting of this creature is locked up in special box that can only be opened using a puzzle box key. Despite his admiration for La Gioconda, Mr Harding destroys the key to prevent her from unleashing the beast on the world. Luke, Clyde, and Rani have to try to solve the problem without Sarah Jane as she is now trapped in a painting. The Dark Rider, a highwayman brought to life from another painting, captures Clyde and takes him to the vaults along with the Mona Lisa and Harding. Luke talks Clyde into drawing a duplicate puzzle box that the Mona Lisa can use as a replacement, using a photo in the gallery catalog. She brings the key into reality and opens the crate containing the painting of the beast. But before the beast can escape, a picture of K9 from Clyde's sketchbook also comes to life and fires at the beast, causing it to retreat into the vault. Both the Dark Rider and the Mona Lisa revert to being just works of art; and Sarah Jane, Miss Trupp and the others trapped in paintings are released. The story ends with the Mona Lisa restored to her frame and Luke promising to tidy his room.

Continuity[]

• The Mona Lisa painting played a key role in the Fourth Doctor story City of Death.
• Clyde painted Sontaran sidearms in his art, having encountered Commander Kaagh in The Last Sontaran and Enemy of the Bane.
• Lionel Harding mentions 'the fiasco at Easter', a reference to "Planet of the Dead", in which Lady Christina DeSousa steals the cup of King Æthelstan from the International Gallery.
• The concept of an alien force transforming living creatures into artworks (and vice versa) was previously explored in the Tenth Doctor episode "Fear Her" and would become an important and repeated plot device in the Eleventh/Tenth/War Doctor episode "The Day of the Doctor".

Novelisation[]

Pearson Education published a simplified novelisation of this episode by Trevor Baxendale under the title Painting Peril for school literacy programs in September 2010.^[2]

References[]

External links[]

• "Mona Lisa's Revenge" at IMDb
• Painting Peril title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database