Part 1
In the year 2059, a boy named Adam sneaks into the attic of 13 Bannerman Road to meet the mad woman he'd heard so much about. He finds the old woman, who introduces herself as Rani Chandra and reminisces on her time with Sarah Jane Smith.
Back in the present day, Rani finds a suspicious occurrence on the news and excitedly goes to tell Sarah Jane about it. However, Sarah Jane brushes her off as Mr. Smith had already verified that the phenomenon was not alien in nature. Sarah Jane, Clyde, and Luke then excitedly talk about how Maria had been helping aliens hide from the US government. Jealous, Rani returns home where she gets an email from her old friend Sam, asking to meet her at an abandoned amusement park where a "demon" had been sighted. Four homeless people had disappeared. Still angry at the others, Rani goes alone. Sam takes her to the amusement park but refuses to go in with her. Rani is caught by Harry the caretaker and pretends to have a twisted ankle so that she can go into his office and ask him questions. She hears a voice saying "Playtime has begun" and runs out to investigate. She sees the four homeless people, under mind control, walk out of the haunted mine attraction and get onto the rides. Meanwhile, Harry is contacted by a red face that appears in his mirror.
Rani goes into the haunted mine where she runs into an alien named Eve, who Harry had been caring for. Eve, using her ability to read a person's timeline, empathizes with Rani's insecurities concerning her parents and her jealousy towards Maria. Eve explains that her people were caught in the middle of a great war, implied to be the Last Great Time War, because of their time-sensitivity. Her parents sent her to Earth as a refugee. Harry does not allow her outside due to her appearance, so she possesses people who she considers to be her friends. Rani gets a sudden phone call from Luke and says "I wish they'd just leave me alone."
Eve offers to show Rani her future. Rani sees herself as the lonely mad woman in the attic and is frightened. She then offers to help Eve leave.
Part 2
Sarah Jane realizes that Rani had lied to her parents, telling them that she would be at Bannerman Road. Clyde sneaks into her room, where he finds Sam's email. They track Sam to the orphanage where he had been staying since his parents died. Clyde and Sarah Jane follow Rani to the amusement park. Meanwhile, Luke stays behind at the orphanage, hoping to get more information from Sam. Sam runs off, leaving a note saying that Rani was not the one that Eve wanted.
Rani leads Eve outside for the first time in years, where she sees that Eve has brainwashed four homeless people into being her friends. Rani is outraged but Eve possesses her as well. Sarah Jane and Clyde reach the fair, meeting Harry and finding out what Eve had been doing. However, Eve was unable to control her powers, which is why Harry kept her inside. Sarah Jane and Clyde consult the face in the mirror, which turns out to be Ship, the AI controlling the ship that brought Eve to Earth. They bring Eve to Ship, who is able to heal her.
Ship reveals that the only thing that can power her is a black hole. Sarah Jane tells them about the black hole that K-9 is working to close. Ship absorbs the black hole's power, allowing K-9 to return to Earth, much to Mr. Smith's displeasure.
Eve invites Sam and Harry to come with her into space. Both of them accept. Before leaving, Ship offers to grant Rani's wish. Taking Rani's earlier remark "I wish they'd just leave me alone" literally, Ship erases Sarah Jane, Clyde, and Luke from existence.
Back in 2059, Adam reveals that he is in fact the son of Sam and Eve, which gives him powers similar to Eve's people. He corrects Rani's timeline so that Ship never granted her "wish." In 2059, Rani now lives in Bannerman Road. She has a son named Shuresh, three grandchildren, and is still friends with Luke and Maria.
Tropes
- Aborted Arc: Due to Elisabeth Sladen's untimely death in 2011, the series would not have a fully-realised conclusion that gave absolute closure to the series. However, this episode provided a glimpse of Rani Chandra's future in a timeline that could be considered the true ending of the series. The question of whether or not she got together with Clyde Langer is also hinted to be true, considering the mixed ethnicity of her children.
- All There in the Manual: Eve says that her people were "exterminated" in a war. The alien file on the website confirms that the Daleks and Time Lords did the exterminating.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Ship claims that it is "rather...improbable" that there is a robot dog hovering in an alternate dimension keeping a black hole from sucking up the Earth. This despite the fact that it is an Artificial Intelligence belonging to an orphaned alien with the ability to alter time and control and read minds and that it runs on black holes.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Rani feels left out when the rest of the team start reminiscing with former member Maria, so after running away when her old friend calls her to investigate supernatural activity, she wishes that they (Sarah Jane, Luke, and Clyde) would "leave [her] alone". Later on, after the group restore Eve's ship, the ship decides to grant Rani's earlier wish, to thank her for her help. This results in Sarah Jane, Luke, and Clyde, being erased from existence. Cut to about fifty years later, and Rani is living alone in Sarah Jane's attic, still resentful of the wish she made, until a kid named Adam comes along and, after listening to her story, decides to undo the wish for her, sending her back to the moment the ship regained power.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Eve
- Continuity Nod:
- The old Rani mentions Daleks and Cybermen.
- When Ship looks into Sarah Jane's past, clips of her childhood from "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith", "The Day of the Clown" and "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?"; these are followed by scenes of her time with the Doctor from "The Time Warrior" (her introduction) and "Planet of the Spiders", and when she returned to Earth in "The Hand of Fear"; she is also shown with K-9 Mark III from "The Five Doctors" and with the Daleks in "The Stolen Earth".
- Eve says that she is the only survivor of her species after they were "exterminated" by the Daleks in The Last Great Time War.
- Sarah's reference to the Terrible Zodin is a continuation of a running joke — Zodin is referenced on screen but never seen — dating back to "The Five Doctors". Although various Doctors and companions have claimed to have encountered her, this is the first time Sarah had made such a claim.
- Conveniently an Orphan: Sam, meaning he can go into space to be with Eve without his family worrying about him.
- Foreshadowing: This episode foreshadows Luke leaving for university in "The Nightmare Man", and the events of the next story.
- Future Me Scares Me: The title character is a future version of Rani, who is appalled at the sight of her.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Adam.
- Interspecies Romance: Sam and Eve.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Eve
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Clyde tricks Harry into admitting that he had met Rani.
- Literal Genie: Rani gets angry at her friends and shouts, "I wish they would just leave me alone!" Later on, a sentient alien spaceship is grateful to Rani for helping its passenger and grants her wish, making all her friends disappear forever. Fortunately, fifty years later when Rani is a lonely old woman living in Sarah Jane's attic, she gets the chance to take it back.
- Literary Allusion Title: To The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which in turn is referring to Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.
- Meaningful Name: Adam and Eve who turn out to be connected, of course.
- No Antagonist: This is the only episode of the series to not have an actual villain per se, as neither Eve nor Ship are depicted as having ill-intent, despite their actions.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Luke's role is minimalised, due to Tommy Knight having to sit his GCSEs.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Possible inversion, since neither Eve nor her possessed "friends" are at all malevolent, just creepy.
- Shout-Out: Danemouth was the fictional town in The Body in the Library.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: About half of Sarah Jane and Clyde's dialogue is them snarking at each other.
- Also Mr. Smith and K-9.
- Timeshifted Actor: Souad Faress plays the older Rani.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Where the cruk is Clyde at the end?
