Sarah Jane Smith
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Personality
As a companion, Sarah was confident, inquisitive and possessed a sharp mind as well as a sharp tongue. She was also something of a feminist — in her first appearance she was infuriated when the Doctor asked her to make coffee, and she often verbally sparred with fellow companion Harry Sullivan, who had an old-fashioned, chauvinistic and unintentionally patronising attitude towards her. Her feminism was more practical than fanatical, and did not get in the way of forming close friendships with Harry, however, and a more personal feeling for the Doctor himself. These views became less prominent as the series went on, but Sarah never gave the impression that she was less than capable. In spite of the dangerous and frightening situations she often found herself in, she loved adventure and risk, and in spite of her outward complaints, was always thrilled to go off in search of more adventure. She shared a strong rapport with the Doctor, and her subsequent life has been shaped by her finding him a tough act to follow (DW: School Reunion).
Travels with the Third Doctor
In her capacity as a journalist for Metropolitan magazine, Sarah posed as her aunt, Lavinia Smith, a famous virologist, in order to infiltrate a UNIT controlled facility monitoring the whereabouts and status of a group of scientists.
Following a brief meeting with both Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT's scientific advisor the Doctor, she came to believe that the Doctor was responsible for the kidnapping of the scientists and followed him into his TARDIS where it travelled back to medieval England. (DW: The Time Warrior)
Whilst there she was confronted with both the reality of time travel and of extraterrestial life as she encountered Linx, a Sontaran Commander. She then assisted the Doctor to stop Linx and help the kidnapped scientists back to the 20th century. (DW: The Time Warrior)
When Sarah and the Doctor returned to Earth they returned to an evacuated London. Sarah took it upon herself to investigate various people including Charles Grover in a conspiracy involving time travel and dinosaurs in central London. (DW: Invasion of the Dinosaurs)
Sarah then found herself working with the Doctor and UNIT on a number of occasions. Believing he must defeat the Great One at any cost, the Doctor left Sarah Jane on Earth. Lost in the Time Vortex and dying from radiation exposure, the Doctor did not return for several months, during which time Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart believed him dead and Sarah maintained he still lived. The TARDIS materialized, the Doctor began to change and Sarah was present when he regenerated into the Fourth Doctor.(DW: Planet of the Spiders)
- The exact placement of Sarah's adventures with the Doctor is part of the UNIT dating controversy.
Travels with the Fourth Doctor
Traveling with with the Doctor, Sarah would encounter Cybermen, antimatter creatures at the edge of the universe, robotic mummies in 1911 England, ancient evils in 15th century Italy, and many other dangers. Crucially, she would be there at the start of the events that would lead to the Last Great Time War (DW: Genesis of the Daleks)
Eventually, the Doctor received a summons to his home planet to which she was forbidden from accompanying him. Attempting to deposit her near her flat in South Croydon (DW:The Hand of Fear), the Doctor typically got the coordinates wrong and left her in Aberdeen, Scotland.
The Doctor would later suggest he did not return for Sarah because he feared becoming too attached to any individual human, given that the differences in their life expectancies meant he would almost inevitably have to watch them grow old and die (DW: School Reunion)). There is also evidence that he believed Sarah was growing too detached from her terrestrial life and it was in her best interests that she return to it. (DW: The Face of Evil (Novelisation))
The Wilderness Years
The Doctor did not forget Sarah, but rather sent her K-9 Mark III as a companion and keepsake. Together they uncovered a murderous Pagan cult in the village of Moreton Harwood (K-9 & Company).
Many contradictory accounts exist of the birth, deaths and marriages that occur or do not occur in Sarah's life following this adventure. This is perhaps to be expected as she has been present at number of points where history has been altered -
- Sarah accompanied the Third Doctor to Dust where the involvement of Faction Paradox caused him to regenerate an adventure too early. (EDA: Interference).
- This timeline was further muddied by the Faction Paradox's actions on Gallifrey. (EDA: The Ancestor Cell)
- Sarah was involved in the earliest stages of the Last Great Time War (DW: Genesis of the Daleks). As Time Wars invariably involve past victories and losses being rewritten and refought (BNA: Walking to Babylon, FP: The Book of the War) then her presence at such a key strategic moment will likely have caused her past to be altered several times.
- Mortimus implies at one point that UNIT's contradictory chronology is a product of his meddling with history (NA:No Future). This would necessarily involve alterations to Sarah's past.
- The Council of Eight altered history by seeming having Sarah die in 1997, well before her time (PDA: Bullet Time). This seems to have been undone by the Doctor's eventual defeat of the Council (EDA: Sometime Never...).
- The Trickster caused Sarah to drown when she was thirteen years old and extracted her adult self from time (SJA: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?).
- Given so much potential damage to her personal history, the Doctor's truly ecstatic reaction to meeting her again in his tenth life might be considered to come from not just his pleasure at seeing an old friend, but from elation at the fact her timeline still exists and that she's recognisably still the woman he cares about.
Sarah Jane Smith continued to work as an investigative reporter following her departure from Planet 3 and her aunt's death. (BFA: Comeback)
She has been depicted as having married a man named Paul Morley (NA: Christmas on a Rational Planet, EDA: Interference) and having both a daughter called Lauren and a grandchild called Lily (ST: Lily).
Sarah had numerous adventures during this time; travelling to the Death Zone to participate in the Game of Rassilion (DW: The Five Doctors), accompanying the Seventh Doctor to a jazz concert in the Albert Hall (DWM: Train-flight) and assisting him against the Cortez Project in in Hong Kong (PDA: Bullet Time). She worked with Victoria Waterfield and the Brigadier to deafeat the Great Intelligence (MA: Downtime) and with Sam Jones against international human rights abuses (EDA: Interference).
By the time she encountered the Tenth Doctor then much of this would seem to have been lost from her timeline. Her husband was never married and her children never born as she instead considered the Doctor to have been the only man for her. Similarly her solo adventures appear never to have happened, traded in for a normal life of rain and electric bills. That, however, was all about to change.
Reunited and Refocused
In the early Twenty-First Century, Sarah-Jane and Bernice Summerfield enjoyed a coffee together and shared reminiscences of their time in the TARDIS (BFBS: A Life of Surprises: A Mutual Friend), a time that for Sarah was shortly to be revisted, as an inspirational reunion with the Doctor (DW: School Reunion) put her life back on track.
In the year and a half following this, Sarah acquired a sonic lipstick, a watch to scan for alien life, a sentient supercomputer assistant and various other futuristic and extraterrestrial devices that the Doctor had left in K9's side compartment. Using these technologies and her experience she has helped the Earth and its alien visitors in a much less violent way than organisations such as UNIT and the Torchwood Institute, who in her estimation tend to go in "all guns blazing". Her ameteur operation has more in common with that which Issac Summerfield ran during the Ninteen-Eighties, being as likely to assist stranded aliens in returning home or in integrating as it is to oppose hostile incursions.
Keeping her investigations into alien life a secret, Sarah developed a reputation on Bannerman Road for being unsociable and quiet, and with K-9 away closing off a black hole, only occasionally passing close enough to contact her, she was left entirely alone. The Bane invasion changed all this as its events exposed her secrets to her young neighbor Maria Jackson and left Luke, the living product of a Bane experiment, in her care. Befriending Maria and adopting Luke as her son, Sarah is no longer content to live alone and continues her adventures alongside her young friends. (SJA: Invasion of the Bane)
