Sarah Jane Smith
Sarah Jane Smith (occasionally rendered as Sarah-Jane), also known as Sarah Jane Morley in one account, was a companion of the Third and Fourth Doctors.
She held the honour of being one of the few people the Doctor considered one of his best friends. She reunited with him in his tenth incarnation and had adventures with him in his eleventh incarnation. Sarah met nine of the Doctor's incarnations in total: those already mentioned and the first, second, fifth, seventh and eighth.
With the exception of K9, Sarah spent most of her life alone after travelling with him, but maintained previous friendships with UNIT staff; her connections to the Doctor and the Brigadier afforded her enough pull with the group to call them in to mop up messes after a threat was averted.
By the 2000s, Sarah Jane had risen to become one of the top three journalists in the UK, thanks to her passion for investigation and moral compass allowing her to publish any news that would reveal the evil or selfish nature of others. All the while, she hoped that she would run into the Doctor again, believing he may be involved with stopping any alien threats that were beyond her ability to thwart.
In her later life, Sarah continued to repel any alien threats, while assisting more friendly ones. She eventually created a Xylok-based computer named Mr Smith to assist her by providing information. These adventures lead her to take on her very own companions, forming a surrogate family; this group consisted of her adopted children of alien origins Luke and Sky, and her young neighbours, Maria, Clyde and later Rani. Each had skills that helped Sarah in her adventures.
Despite keeping a low profile during her encounters with aliens, Sarah's efforts to help humanity would eventually be discovered. Along with her companions, a statue would be erected in her honour.
Biography
Early life
Infancy
According to one account, Sarah Jane Smith was born in May 1951 in the village of Foxgrove (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith) under the astrological sign of Taurus, (TV: Secrets of the Stars) though another account showed that Kevin W. Parker's well-respected biography of Sarah Jane, The Roving Reporter, stated that she was born in Liverpool on 1 February 1956. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter) Yet another account claimed that she was born in 1949. (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"])
According to one account, on 18 August 1951, her parents, Barbara and Eddie Smith, abandoned her in her pram and drove off in their car to protect the world from the Trickster. The Trickster had nearly tricked the adult version of Sarah into allowing him to manifest and then conquer Earth in an alternate timeline. A few minutes later on a country lane, Eddie and Barbara collided with a tractor and were killed.
The only thing Sarah was left to remember them by was a picture of her parents with a message written by Barbara to Eddie: "Mr Smith, I need you." Sarah would always treasure this memento of her parents. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith) However, The Roving Reporter claimed that the Smiths' death in a car crash took place in 1961, with Sarah Jane already five years old. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
Sarah was raised by her aunt, Lavinia Smith, a respected virologist. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith, PROSE: The Roving Reporter) She may have been close to her uncle, Africana. (PROSE: The Curse of Kanbo-Ala) She had another uncle named Hubert. (AUDIO: The Ghosts of N-Space) Her mother's younger brother, George Wilson, was the first husband of the Brigadier's wife, Doris. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time)
Childhood
Young Sarah developed a fear of clowns because of an old clown puppet that had belonged to her Aunt Lavinia. (TV: The Day of the Clown) When Sarah was five years old, (PROSE: Day of the Clown) it hung in her bedroom and stared down at her as she slept. It seemed to move in thunderstorms. Later in her life, Sarah learnt that it had been manipulated by the Pied Piper to induce coulrophobia in her for their future encounter. This fear stayed with her for most of her life. (TV: The Day of the Clown)
When Sarah was about eight years old, she lived in Wolfenden together with her Aunt Lavinia for roughly a year. There she also got to know the scientist Eddison Clough, who was a good friend of Lavinia. However, the alien Mrs. Hendrick stole Sarah's and Lavinia's memories. Sarah did not remember that she had been in Wolfenden. She did not even recognise that some of her memories were missing until Eddison wrote her a letter and explained to her that he had found several pictures of Lavinia, Sarah and himself in Wolfenden. Eddison has lost his memories of Sarah, Lavinia and Wolfenden as well. Even though Sarah never regained her memories, she saw several photos of her and Lavina's time in Wolfenden from Eddison. One of them shows Lavinia and Eddison Clough, another one shows Sarah and Lavinia. (AUDIO: The White Wolf)
In November 1963, Sarah went on a day trip to London with her aunt. While Lavinia was buying sweets for her, Sarah explored a junkyard and saw a police box there. After returning to her aunt, they walked by the junkyard and she caught a glimpse of a young girl entering it. (PROSE: Playtime)
Aunt Lavinia, doing her best to give Sarah Jane a good education, sent her to complete it at Caterham School for Girls, a strict and reputable establishment whose headmistress shared Lavinia's feminist convictions. Sarah Jane proved a bit of a maverick while at school, breaking any rule which she deemed pointless, but she was also remarked upon for her great communication skills and her talent at hockey. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
Sarah fenced for her school team. (PROSE: Housewarming) She had two childhood friends called Billy and Julie. (PROSE: Managra)
In 1964, Sarah had already decided to become an explorer, a famous scientist or a journalist. She wanted to explore the world. She wanted to see everything there was to see and more. Her best friend Andrea Yates told her that women couldn't become journalists but Sarah believed that the world was going to change and that soon women could do anything that men could. Sarah was a good student. She got top marks in every class. Sarah thought she was such a good student because she kept reading books like An Unexpurgated History of the Universe. (PROSE: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?)
On 13 July 1964, Sarah was on a school outing with Andrea, who slipped off a pier to her death. The Trickster later altered this event to create a timeline in which Sarah died rather than Andrea. Many years later, this doomed the planet Earth. In the normal timeline, the event changed Sarah, impressing on her the importance of life. She never forgot Andrea. She also met one of her future companions, Maria Jackson, due to Krislok's blunder and was given a vague warning about Andrea's death before being taken hostage again. Memories of this may have been why Sarah later gave Maria the Verron puzzle box. (TV: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?)
In 1969, Sarah followed various news reports about the ongoing Vietnam War by journalists based in Saigon. Fascinated, she finally resolved to become a journalist herself. (PROSE: Interesting Times)
In 1971, Sarah visited the Sistine Chapel on a tour. (PROSE: Managra)
On the way to adulthood
When Sarah was a little older than eighteen, she was studying at university, (AUDIO: Judgement Day) specifically Liverpool University. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter) One day she was sitting at a large lecture hall listening to her favourite professor Edward Sheppard. Professor Sheppard talked about his favourite subject: the power of the press. He asked the young Sarah what she would do if she found out something that was a threat to national security. Sarah replied that she would publish the story, as a good journalist always had to reveal the truth. She said she would not care about the consequences. Sheppard replied that it might put a spy and his family in danger. He asked her if she would still publish the story if it would put innocent lives at risk. Sarah replied that she had to think about that. Sheppard said that he sincerely hoped so. (AUDIO: Judgement Day)
It was during her first university year that "boys" first began to pay serious attention to Sarah Jane, to her initial confusion. Her first boyfriend was Andrew Lofts, a lad a year ahead of her with ambitions of becoming a television journalist — though Sarah Jane would later note that he did not especially influence her own career choice, as she'd always thought of journalist as the thing for her, independent of any model or influence. They were, at any rate, briefly engaged, but Sarah Jane put an end to it when "Andy" asked that she prioritise helping him with his career over furthering her own. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
Early journalism career
Sarah began doorstepping when she was nineteen years old. (TV: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith) When she began in journalism, her editor was Lionel Carson. He had romantic feelings for her that she did not reciprocate; despite this, Sarah remained fond of him. (TV: The Man Who Never Was) At some point in her early career, Sarah was mentored by James Stevens. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)
Whilst working for Metropolitan, Sarah received an old postcard postmarked 1924 seemingly written in her own handwriting, assuring her she would be fine. (PROSE: Scratchman)
Five years prior to meeting the Doctor and UNIT, Sarah was in a relationship with a Royal Navy officer named Sammy Brooks, who had red-gold hair. They split when he was given command of the Cuffley. (PROSE: Island of Death)
Travels with the Doctor
First meeting with the Doctor
While working as a journalist, Sarah posed as her aunt (who was away in the United States at the time), an accomplished virologist, to infiltrate a UNIT-controlled facility where scientists had gone missing. She met Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT's unpaid scientific advisor, the Third Doctor, who was also using an alias- the name "John Smith". The Doctor quickly cut down her fake identity and sparked her willingness to take initiative and impress him. Once Professor Rubeish disappeared, she peered inside the Doctor's police box, which he claimed housed his equipment, hoping to find him hiding inside. Instead, she was stunned to discover that it was bigger on the inside. When the Doctor piloted his ship into the past, Sarah had no choice but to stow away in his TARDIS. (TV: The Time Warrior) She was roughly twenty-three at this time, by her own account. (TV: Invasion of the Dinosaurs)
With the Third Doctor
Sarah travelled to 13th century (TV: The Time Warrior) England, where the Doctor had followed the disappearing scientists, including Rubeish. She initially believed the Doctor was responsible for this since the Doctor was capable of travelling back in time, but learnt this was the work of the Sontaran commander Linx, who had stolen the scientists to help repair his ship. She helped defend the Lord Edward of Wessex's castle from Linx and the robber baron Irongron's men by throwing stink bombs at them, causing them to retreat. Sneaking inside Irongron's castle while posing as a friar, Sarah drugged the food at Irongron's castle to make everyone fall asleep while trying to stop Linx from launching his ship. Lord Edward's archer, Hal, shot Linx in his probic vent with a bolt, killing him. As he died, Linx triggered the launch mechanism of his ship, resulting in a huge explosion as the rockets fired. Sarah and the Doctor fled Irongron's castle before it was swallowed by the force of the liftoff blast, and set off for Earth, where the Doctor intended to return her home safely. (TV: The Time Warrior)
A large cloud of deadly gas nearly destroyed Earth, but the Doctor discerned that it was not natural, but was an attempt by the Zircon to invade Earth. He and Sarah warned the Brigadier and the Prime Minister and used the satellites of Earth to set off an explosion to destroy the cloud and apparently the Zirconian fleet. According to another account, this adventure was had by the Fourth Doctor and Joan Brown, having warned the Prime Minister and General Maxwell-Lennon. (COMIC: Doomcloud)
The Doctor and Sarah accidentally travelled into a parallel Earth where they encountered human criminal versions of themselves. They escaped by travelling to a primitive Earth, where they left their counterparts, returning home. (COMIC: Who's Who?)
The Doctor, Sarah, Jeremy Fitzoliver and the Brigadier went to Space World, a new amusement park, to investigate a death that had occurred nearby. The park was run by Naglons from the planet Parakon disguised as humans. They wanted to hypnotise the humans to do their bidding. The aliens left Earth, but not before they captured Sarah and Jeremy. Sarah put up resistance and discovered that her captors were too aggressive for either her or Jeremy to successfully make an escape. The Doctor and the Brigadier travelled to Parakon to retrieve them, and the group later helped to foil a devious plot employed Freeth, chairman of the Parakon Corporation to get rich by waging war on other worlds and use the fallen victims of these battles as fertiliser for rapine, a very valuable commodity that would make him highly wealthy. (AUDIO: The Paradise of Death)
Sarah was eager to come back to Earth, expecting the Doctor to set the TARDIS' course to the scientific research centre. The Doctor saw no point in going back there with the suspicious activities resolved, instead aiming to land in UNIT HQ, but he got the coordinates a little off, finding himself in an empty park. The Doctor and Sarah arrived in 1970s London to find it had been evacuated because of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were brought to London by a time machine in a plan to revert London and the entire world to a pre-technological level, which would undo the existence of all living things around at the time. Sarah tried to interview Charles Grover, but when she got too nosy, he kidnapped her and placed her on a "colony ship", peopled by individuals who thought they were heading for a new life; Sarah convinced some of the crew that the "spaceship" was fake and was able to escape. The Doctor reversed the polarity of the time machine, causing Grover and his accomplice, Professor Whitaker, to accidentally send themselves on a one-way trip to the pre-technological era.
Unfortunately, Sarah would have to face the departure of a friend at UNIT, Captain Mike Yates, who was convinced to join the cause of the Operation Golden Age group and assist them, betraying his colleagues. When Yates saw the error of his ways, he quickly reconciled with UNIT, but had caused enough trouble and distrust that it signalled the end of his career with them. Lethbridge-Stewart prevented him from facing legal repercussions by arranging for him to have extended sick leave and a chance to resign quietly. (TV: Invasion of the Dinosaurs)
Desperate for a scoop, Sarah used her authority at UNIT to break into the Ministry of Defence at Whitehall. She found information about the death of Dr John Smith, the alias of the Doctor, in 1950. Terrified that the Doctor was going to die, Sarah kept the secret to herself. However, the Doctor's investigation of a crash site soon led the pair back in time to the Isle of Wight, where Sarah witnessed the death of John Smith. Delighted that it was not the Doctor, she confessed all to him. (PROSE: Numb)
Mysteriously drained of all power, the TARDIS landed on the planet Exxilon. There, they encountered Marine Space Corps members seeking Parrinium, a cure for a space-plague. A group of Daleks also landed for the same purpose. The Doctor and the Daleks discovered the Great City of the Exxilons, a large city with a power-disrupting tower preventing technology from working. The Doctor sought to disrupt its functions and remove the power-disrupting facility. The Daleks ordered humans to place bombs around the city's central tower to destroy it. The city was destroyed, as was the Dalek spaceship. (TV: Death to the Daleks)
Trying again to travel to Florana, the Doctor and Sarah arrived at Cerulean, which was being attacked by missiles from the planet Sedna. The Doctor created a better barrier, but soon realised that Cerulean was in fact Neptune and Sedna was a tenth planet, yet to be discovered in Sarah's timeline. The aliens began to speak of peace and asked that the Doctor represent the planet Cerulean, but before he was able to, he detected another TARDIS about to crash into his. He left and indicated that the other time machine was a future version of his own. (PROSE: Neptune)
The Doctor and Sarah finally arrived on Florana in 5968, just as the Chelonian Empire was to sign a treaty with humanity. The Doctor was mistaken for one of the delegates and Sarah went sunbathing. She overheard two Chelonians discussing how one had poisoned the Emperor's drink. Sarah went to warn the delegates, but the guards would not let her pass. Noticing the Emperor's strange actions, the Doctor poured a bucket of water down his throat, thus removing the poison. The Doctor and Sarah left Florana for Earth. (PROSE: The Hungry Bomb)
At some point during her travels with the Third Doctor, they visited Bob Dovie at 59A Barnsfield Crescent in Totton, Hampshire on 23 November 1963. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
The Doctor and Sarah were called back to Earth by Liz Shaw, the Doctor's former assistant at UNIT. The Brigadier was acting strangely, giving orders to reassign UNIT troops "in a haphazard, unpredictable manner". There had also been flooding occurring worldwide. When the Brigadier ordered the Tower of London to be sealed off and flooded, Liz finally decided he was unfit for duty and gave him a check up. The Doctor deduced that the Brigadier had been possessed by a Remoraxian, a species that wanted to flood the world to allow them to colonise. The Doctor built a de-remorator to remove the Remoraxian from the Brigadier.
The Doctor, Sarah, Liz and the Brigadier went to the nearby UNIT seabase along with Agent Paul of the CIA. There, the Remoraxian Prime was orchestrating its plot to flood the world. When the Remoraxian Prime sent the Doctor and the Brigadier to the bottom of the sea, Sarah and Liz saved them from drowning.
Discovering that the American government authorised the nuclear bombing of Great Britain to stop the threat, the Doctor was given 29 minutes to negotiate with the Remoraxians. After the Brigadier persuaded the Remoraxian Prime that the Americans would follow through with the attack, the Remoraxians left Earth, ending the storms, and Agent Paul called off the bombing.
A mysterious cloaked figure abducted Liz, Sarah and the Brigadier, leaving the Doctor a single message: "Say goodbye, Doctor." (COMIC: In With the Tide)
Along with all of the Doctor's other companions, Sarah was then kept in suspended animation, (COMIC: The Choice) before being released by Frobisher to fight the Tremas Master's Auton army. After Adam Mitchell had given his life to stop the Master's plan, Sarah and the Doctor returned to their proper place in time. (COMIC: Endgame)
The Doctor, Sarah, Jeremy, and the Brigadier travelled to San Stefano Minore and encountered ghosts crossing from Null-Space to Earth. (AUDIO: The Ghosts of N-Space)
The Doctor took Sarah to Peladon during the reign of Queen Thalira. At this point in Peladon's history, its feudalistic society had remained static despite the many decades since the planet's induction into the Galactic Federation, with the lower classes having access to neither socio-economic progress nor to advanced technology. At the time the Doctor and Sarah arrived, the uneducated Pel miners were in the middle of a joint trisilicate mining operation with the alien and technologically sophisticated Federation. The miners, fearing enslavement by the Galactic Federation and faced with the sudden appearance of and attacks by their deity, Aggedor, took Sarah hostage in an attempt to acquire advanced weaponry through blackmail.
Sarah escaped only to be immediately recaptured (along with the Doctor) and thrown into a pit by the conservative Chancellor Ortron. Thalira then successfully commanded their release, Ortron having previously ignored her requests. Shortly thereafter, Sarah had a conversation with her about gender egalitarianism.
The ever more discontented miners soon disrupted trisilicate production and the Galactic Federation, fearing the loss of a vital resource during its current war with Galaxy 5, sent in the Ice Warriors to force the mining to recommence. Since this was the Ice Warriors' only apparent purpose in sending an army to Peladon, Sarah convinced the planet's leaders to address the miners' grievances about the lack of social progress. In return, they would resume mining and no force would be necessary.
However, when the Ice Warriors arrived, they took over the primitive Peladon anyway. They had incited the riots which caused the Galactic Federation to send them there by using advanced technology to deceive the miners into believing their god was punishing them for the mining. After they conquered the planet and were then finally rebuffed, Queen Thalira asked the Doctor to be the new Chancellor. He recommended Gebek, the miners' leader, for the newly vacated Chancellor position. Seeing that Thalira was appalled at the Doctor's suggestion, Sarah pointed out to her the similarities between class and gender disparities. (TV: The Monster of Peladon)
Planning to return back to UNIT HQ, the Doctor and Sarah landed on an ocean planet on an old rig. They met an artist commune. She used her investigative journalist abilities to find out what had happened to Laurel and then about why the owners of the rig left sundenly. She discovered that something was off with Laurel and she had equipment from the enemy side in the war. Laurel tried to use her memories of Aunt Lavinia to get her tears, but she fought this off. (AUDIO: The Gulf)
Whilst the Brigadier ordered the Doctor to investigate the Dow Tor Research facility, she decided to look into local myths as well as writing a piece for Metropolitan magazine about how beautiful the area is in. Trying to rescue the Brigadier the TARDIS made and emergency landing taking the Doctor and Sarah back to 1855. After learning the local gossip from Plymtree, she was kidnapped by Basil Hexworthy's men, after escaping she encountered the Icewalker. (AUDIO: The Devil's Hoofprints)
One possibility regarding the identity of the time-travellers who foiled the War Chief from taking over the Roman Empire in 43 AD was that they included the Third Doctor and any combination of his companions the Brigadier, Liz Shaw, Jo Grant and Sarah Jane. The Colonel, Leora and their own companions may also have been involved, instead of or additionally to "the Doctor's party". This adventure, if it did occur to this combination of individuals, would have begun with the Doctor and his companions in flight in the TARDIS. (GAME: The Legions of Death [+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"])
Sometime later, the Doctor and Sarah travelled to Peladon again, and encountered Daleks. (AUDIO: Glorious Goodwood)
The Faction Paradox altered the Doctor's timeline twice while Sarah travelled with him. In one timeline, the Doctor died and did not regenerate on Dust. In another, the Doctor did regenerate, which should not have happened at that time and place. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two) Later, these events reversed, allowing history to take its natural course. (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell)
At Christmas, the Doctor and Sarah went to the Brigadier's Christmas party, but did not enjoy it. They went to New York, 1822, where they met Santa Claus. As they talked, they did not realise that they were being watched by Clement C. Moore, who then settled down to write "Twas the Night Before Christmas." (PROSE: A Visit from Saint Nicholas)
The Doctor and Sarah went to December 1952, where the Doctor discovered that poisonous smog was killing the citizens. He discovered that it was created by two Xhinns, a humanoid alien race who were usually peaceful. They wanted to cover their tracks. With help from local gangsters, he created a time bomb, which made their ship age to the point of disintegration. (PROSE: Amorality Tale)
Sarah went to Goodwood Motor Circuit, West Sussex, unaccompanied by the Doctor, who was taking a metabolism test on the Brigadier's advice. She encountered Daleks, whom she stopped with help from soldiers. (AUDIO: Glorious Goodwood)
The Doctor and Sarah met a man named Isaac, a composer who later became the Doctor's companion. He was stalked by two grey figures and apparently committed suicide. The Doctor tried to investigate, but was stopped by the Time Lord messenger, who informed him that he had to wait until he encountered the events himself. (PROSE: An Overture Too Early)
When the Dahensa invaded, Sarah Jane directed the Doctor to the Post Office Tower, fending off a guard long enough for him to set up a sonic manifold feedback loop that caused the invaders to withdraw. (COMIC: Invasion of the Scorpion Men)
At the request of Mike Yates, who had attempted to make amends for his betrayal of UNIT by becoming more spiritual and peace-loving, Sarah investigated a Buddhist meditation centre which was being influenced by the Eight Legs of Metebelis III. During her investigation, Sarah was accidentally transported to Metebelis III and was eventually captured by the Eight Legs and their human servants. After being rescued by the Doctor and returning to Earth, it was revealed that Sarah was under the psychic control of one of the Eight Legs. Under the instruction of K'anpo Rimpoche, Sarah escaped the Queen's control by staring into a Metebelis crystal and focusing on the concept of her own freedom. After this, the Doctor journeyed to the cave of the Great One on Metebelis III to return the Metebelis crystal he had stolen, where his body was wracked by deadly radiation. While he was dying and his TARDIS was lost in the Time Vortex, Sarah and the Brigadier awaited his return for three weeks. Sarah believed he had died, but the Brigadier kept faith. As the Doctor's TARDIS returned to UNIT HQ, he stumbled out and appeared to die before them, however K'anpo arrived and helped trigger his regeneration into his next incarnation, telling Sarah to look after him. (TV: Planet of the Spiders, Robot)
With the Fourth Doctor
Immediately after his regeneration, the Fourth Doctor was put under the care of UNIT physician Harry Sullivan. While he began to adjust to his new incarnation, Sarah went off to investigate Think Tank following several incidents where a machine had been breaking into various places to steal parts for a disintegrator gun. It was here that Sarah had her first encounter with Hilda Winters, leader of the Scientific Reform Society, a group of radical elites trying to establish a new world order using Professor J.P. Kettlewell's greatest creation, Experimental Prototype Robot K1. K1 could think for himself and make his own decisions, but was programmed with the prime directive to never harm a human. Regardless, Kettlewell had lent K1 to the SRS after years of putting up with a society that refused to heed his warnings about environmental protection.
Sarah, the Doctor and Harry became involved in an investigation which resulted in a confrontation with the SRS and K1, with the help of Lethbridge-Stewart, newly promoted Warrant Officer Benton and UNIT troops. Because Sarah showed kindness and sympathy to K1, it took a liking to her, and refused to harm her in any way. Despite the SRS' attempts to override its primary directive, K1's mind began to deteriorate from its conflicted morality. Kettlewell similarly faltered in his loyalties to the SRS, and tried to stop K1 from killing people. K1, in an act of confusion, killed his creator with the disintegrator gun built from the parts he stole. K1, no longer answering to a father figure, overcame an Oedipus complex and turned against the SRS. When the Brigadier used the disintegrator gun against K1, the robot instead grew to tremendous proportions and kidnapped Sarah.
In UNIT HQ, the Doctor and Harry worked on developing a metal virus that would dissolve the giant robot using Kettlewell's research. Arriving with the solution, he dumped it on K1, and the robot corroded away until nothing was left of him. After the robot and its power-hungry controllers were defeated, Sarah felt saddened by the loss of K1, thinking it could have been avoided. The Doctor offered her some comforting words, along with a jelly baby, his new favourite snack. Choosing to duck out of the formal rituals that came with his job at UNIT, the Doctor wanted a fresh start in his fourth incarnation, and planned to leave UNIT behind. Sarah agreed eagerly to continue travelling with the Doctor to other adventures in time and space. Although sceptical, Harry Sullivan went with them, when he caught the two about to depart and didn't believe the truth about the TARDIS. As the TARDIS dematerialised, the Brigadier caught it just in time to watch it vanish and glumly faced the prospect of the Doctor ditching him, not yet aware two more of his personnel had followed suit. (TV: Robot)
Sarah's first trip with this Doctor was side-tracked when Harry interfered with the console controls. Instead of landing on the Moon as intended, the TARDIS materialised on Space Station Nerva far in the future, where humanity had been cryogenically suspended to await Earth's recovery from solar flares. The three of them quickly learned the space station had been robbed of its power supply, and as a consequence, its air supply. Sarah lost consciousness from the lack of oxygen, but slowly came to once the Doctor had fixed the power, reactivating the Nerva's oxygen generators. The Doctor and Harry unknowingly sat her down on a transmat chair, linked to the Nerva's hibernation systems, to recuperate. She was beamed to a tranquiler couch that lulled her to sleep, then put in stasis and transmatted to a cryogenic pod, outfitted in a crewmember's uniform.
After stumbling upon Sarah, the Doctor was unsure if he could revive her. Luckily, with power restored to the space station, the crew started coming out of cryogenic suspension, the first being Vira, the Nerva's level one medtech, to reawaken the rest of the crew. As more emerged from hibernation, one of them, Noah, was infected by an alien larvae on the space station and started transforming into a monstrous creature. The Nerva had been invaded by Wirrn, which posed a substantial threat to the return of humanity, in retaliation for their destruction of the Wirrn's breeding colonies in Andromeda. They wished to use the humans as food and incubators for their kind, and tampered with its inner workings to stop the crew from being revived.
Noah, resisting conversion into a Wirrn, gave everyone a chance to escape, if they fled the Nerva on its sole transport ship and left the dormant humans to the Wirrn. When the group refused, the Wirrn cut the Nerva's power again. Sarah put forth a plan to hook up the ship's power supply to the space station. To make it work, a power cable was fed from the ship to the cryogenic chamber through a conduit, safe from the Wirrn. A job meant for a mechanical cable runner, which the Nerva lacked, Sarah, being small and nimble, elected to crawl through the vents while in radio communication with crewmember Rogin as he instructed her movements using a map of the conduit systems. However, Sarah misjudged the size of the conduits and kept getting stuck. Upon approaching the exit port for the cryogenic chamber, she heard the Doctor's voice nearby, but got trapped, causing her to panic.
The Doctor, tired of Sarah's "whining", suddenly quit coaching her through the vents and berated her as a useless, stupid, foolish girl only pretending to act tough, lacking the guts to back up her promises. Strongly enraged at the Doctor's insults, Sarah, blinded by her anger at him, stopped thinking about being stuck in the vent, broke free and scrambled to the exit with intent of coming after him. As the Doctor helped her out, she wrenched herself away from his arms and attempted to smack him in anger. However, the Doctor revealed he was actually very proud of her and simply used reverse psychology on her. Realising she had been "conned again", Sarah called the Doctor a "brute", before forgiving him, knowing he meant no insult to her character. With Sarah's plan successful, the Wirrn were lured into the transport ship by Noah, who retained his humanity and tricked the Wirrn into suicide by making sure the rocket stabilisers were not set, destroying the vessel moments after liftoff. Rogin also sacrificed his life to send the ship into space, stepping in for the Doctor against his wishes when he tried to do so. On behalf of the space station, the Doctor went down to Earth with Harry and Sarah to fix the relay. (TV: The Ark in Space)
The trio found the Earth appeared uninhabited at first glance, but soon encountered survivors of a group of GalSec human colonists that had been tricked into landing on the planet, experimented on and slowly killed off. Sarah was protected from a robot patrolling the fields for humans to capture by Roth, a straggler from the marooned crew. Roth kept them both out of sight, having escaped from an experiment. However, the robot did another sweep around the landscape and found them. It brought them to a familiar-looking ship, and the Sontaran Field Major Styre emerged. He had been sent to analyse the weaknesses of humans before the Sontarans invaded the barely populated planet. Sarah initially mistook him for Linx, since, hailing from a clone race, they looked almost identical. Roth, refused to be experimented on again and fled, but Styre immediately killed him with a blaster.
The Sontaran assessed Sarah's strengths and weaknesses. After noting she lacked military value, he decided to make her his seventh experiment- resistance to fear. Styre placed Sarah inside a force field, bound up with a device linked to her mind, which made her hallucinate her worst fears, such as snakes, the nearby rock cliffs caving in, and being swallowed up by mud. The Doctor found Sarah and disabled the torture device, but she had passed out from fright. Once Sarah was awake again, Harry, under the Doctor's instructions, removed the terullian diode bypass transformer from Styre's ship, which caused the energy Styre fed on in his ship to feed on Styre instead. The Doctor, Sarah and Harry attempted to return to Nerva Beacon using the transmat. (TV: The Sontaran Experiment)
The transmat was intercepted by a Time Lord, pulling the Doctor, Sarah and Harry to the planet Skaro in its distant past. On behalf of the Time Lord race, the messenger sent them on a mission to intervene in the creation of the Daleks, giving the Doctor a Time Ring that would send him and his companions back to the TARDIS when it was completed. The Doctor was either to prevent it or to induce the Daleks to develop into less dangerous creatures. Sarah was captured by the Thals and put to work in a labour camp, under conditions that were guaranteed to kill off the workers after a while by having them move dangerous materials without the protective equipment to protect them from deadly exposure, with the Thals having fought for so long they were running out of supplies and had none to spare for prisoners. She made friends with one of her fellow prisoners, Sevrin, a Muto, who aided her in her escape and against the Daleks.
The Doctor and Harry found and rescued Sarah. However, the Doctor had learnt that the mad Kaled scientist Davros turned traitor to his own people by selling out the location of the Kaled Dome to the Thals and would have them bombed by a neutronic missile, since they opposed his plans to guide their war weapon-induced mutations into the Dalek species, which they disapproved of. Sarah and Harry, along with Sevrin, ran off to warn the Kaleds, but the Dome was bombed while they were en route through the wilderness of Skaro.
The Doctor feared his companions had been killed until they managed to reunite with him and inform him of what happened. While trying to infiltrate the bunker beneath the ruined dome, Sarah, the Doctor and Harry were all captured and tortured by Davros, who wanted to know the Doctor's foreknowledge of the Daleks' defeats so he could plan against them. The Doctor complied and Davros released his companions, and was soon overpowered by the Doctor momentarily. He had an opportunity to destroy the embryonic Dalek mutants and prevent any Daleks from existing, but though Sarah urged him to go through with blowing them up, the Doctor saw how fear of the Daleks had brought worlds together under noble reasons which otherwise never would have united and chose to let the Daleks survive. Sarah and Harry instead helped him capture Nyder, Davros's assistant, to turn the tables against him.
Davros released the first batch of Daleks he created to wipe out the Thals and any remaining dissidents among the Kaleds who disagreed with his plans to mutate them into such creatures of pure hatred, but soon learned they refused to obey anyone who wasn't a Dalek because of the way he programmed them, and watched them kill Nyder when he tried to shut down their production. Davros was soon struck down by his own creations as everyone else in the bunker fled for their lives. Although the Doctor was morally unable to commit genocide by destroying the entire race, he delayed the Daleks' advancement for 10,000 years by helping the Thals bury them underground. Nearly losing the Time Ring that would let him leave Skaro, the Doctor finally managed to get himself, Sarah and Harry off the planet by using the ring. Sarah gave her best regards to Sevrin and the surviving Thals before leaving. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks)
According to one account, Sarah and friends landed later than they expected on Nerva. Shortly after arriving, Kellman tried to kill them in a crusher room. She helped Anitra to look after the plague patient but was infected by a cybermat. The Doctor managed to get a cure of the plague for the plague from the Cyberman. She wanted to use the Cybermats against the Cybermen and reprogrammed them to attack them. The Doctor asked her to use them to destroy the Cybermen whilst he got the Beacon on course. (AUDIO: Return of the Cybermen)
A different account said that after departing Skaro, the Doctor, Harry and Sarah ended up on Space Station Nerva when it orbited Jupiter. While waiting for the TARDIS to catch up with them, the Doctor was involved with stopping a Cyberman attack on Voga, the planet of gold, an element they were highly vulnerable to. He saved Sarah from the fatal bite of a Cybermat, which snuck up and attacked her. The Doctor managed to transmat Sarah to Voga, which filtered the Cybermat's poison out of her bloodstream. Kellman, a traitor to the Nerva crew, was trying to lure the Cybermen to Voga, where they would be attacked by a missile waiting for them.
Sarah escaped the wrath of the native Vogans who disapproved of outsiders invading their secluded lifestyle, having fled to the innermost depths of Voga to avoid further conflicts with the Cybermen after suffering repeated onslaughts by them in the past. She returned to Nerva, where she tried to spy on the Cybermen, but was caught and tied up on Nerva as the Cybermen tried to crash it into Voga. The Doctor stopped them from blowing up the station and the planet Voga and saved Sarah's life. The Vogan Vorus attempted a counterstrike with a missile, but the Doctor lured it away from Nerva and into the fleeing shuttle of the Cybermen. His TARDIS at last managed to hone in on Nerva and materialise, allowing the crew to go home to Earth, only to be greeted with a message from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart through the space-time telegraph the Doctor left him, indicating a grave emergency. (TV: Revenge of the Cybermen)
When the Doctor was called back to Earth, Sarah and Harry were reunited with the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton. The Zygons were trying to bring the legendary Loch Ness monster under their control. During their investigation of attacks on oil rigs by the monster, a Skarasen, a creature native from the Zygon homeworld, Harry was grazed in the head after the Duke of Forgill's gamekeeper, the Caber, shot at him for trespassing. When UNIT found him and had him hospitalised, Sarah was attacked by a Zygon posing as a nurse and imprisoned. When she was rescued by the Doctor, her holding cell was gassed, forcing him to place her in a temporary trance to survive without oxygen. Later, she was attacked again by Madra, impersonating Harry, who fled and dove into a barn while running away, where he transformed and attacked her with a pitchfork, but stumbled while trying to reach for her from atop a haystack, fell over, and impaled himself.
Sarah later did research in Forgill Castle and discovered a secret passage to a Zygon ship. There, she found Harry being held prisoner and freed him. They snuck back into the castle to reconvene with the Doctor and the Brigadier, who hatched a plan to free everyone held hostage on the Zygon ship and then caused it to explode. However, their leader, Broton, was elsewhere, luring the Skarasen to London with a trilanic activator, which it would destroy along with the target, the basement of Stanbridge House.
The Doctor found Broton and summoned UNIT soldiers to his aid. The Brigadier shot and killed Broton, and the Doctor fed the activator to the Skarasen, which then swam back to Loch Ness — the only home it knew. Sarah and Harry witnessed the creature rise from the River Thames before it fled and caused panic in the streets of London. After this incident and being shot, Harry decided not to board the TARDIS again when the Doctor insisted on giving everyone a ride back to London when he went back to a Scottish plantation to retrieve his ship. Sarah bid goodbye to Harry, who wished to return to UNIT, and continued her adventures with the Doctor while the Brigadier had arranged a lift for himself, Benton and the Duke of Forgill by train. (TV: Terror of the Zygons)
Sarah found they had landed on Zeta Minor instead of London. She immediately noticed the strange effects being there had on her person, comparing it to the soul being drawn from the body. Sarah and the Doctor were blamed by Controller Salamar for the deaths caused by the anti-matter creature and were close to being ejected into space when they were saved by Vishinsky, who seized control from the Controller. (TV: Planet of Evil)
After visiting London in 1666, Sarah Jane became a victim of the Black Death. However, the Doctor was able to save her. (PROSE: The Republican's Story)
While still trying to get back UNIT, Sarah encouraged the Doctor to resign from his position if he was getting tired of working for them. However, after landing in a priory in 1911 that would become the future site of UNIT headquarters, they ended up getting involved with stopping the Osiran Sutekh from escaping his prison in Egypt. Though unsuccessful in stopping Sutekh's servant Marcus Scarman from releasing Sutekh, the Doctor was able to delay Sutekh's trip through a time corridor to the priory by moving the corridor's threshold to the far future, thus effectively ageing him to death. Not realising his actions would cause the thermal balance to equalise, the Doctor accidentally set the priory on fire. (TV: Pyramids of Mars)
The Doctor then took Sarah to London in 1887 to see a Western show where she was abducted the Scryclops of Lady Emily Carstairs who had in her possession a three thousand year old statue cast in Sarah's likeness. Discovering that Carstairs sought to use an artefact called the Lamp of Chronos to time travel, Sarah offered the Doctor's aid before a botched rescue mission sent her and Professor Odysseus James back to Ancient Greece. Exploring a cavern with more stone statues, Sarah was quantum locked by the Medusa. Having already seen Sarah's future self at the house, the Doctor had no choice but to leave her petrified until the 19th century, later restoring her once he and Athena James had defeated the Medusa. Though the Doctor was ready to leave, Sarah forced him to stay and witness Athena's wedding to Albert Sullivan, Harry's great-grandfather. (COMIC: Gaze of the Medusa)
They landed in Devesham, a town in which Sarah had previously done interviews. However, they were not on Earth at all but Oseidon. The Kraals had replaced the populace with androids and were planning to take over Earth. With the help of UNIT, the aliens were stopped. (TV: The Android Invasion)
Shortly after the events surrounding the androids the Doctor and Sarah Jane returned to UNIT HQ and based themselves on Earth, The Doctor stayed at a cottage and resumed his use of Bessie, (COMIC: Death Flower, Return of the Daleks) while Sarah Jane continued working as an investigative reporter. (COMIC: The Hoaxers) Sarah Jane and the Doctor also frequently took trips in the TARDIS, and were often accompanied by Harry. (PROSE: A New Life, The Hospitality on Hankus)
By January Sarah had still not gotten used to the Doctor’s new face. Sarah Jane and the Doctor at one point in January drove Bessy out on a morning drive in the countryside. The Doctor refused to tell Sarah Jane Smith where they were going, they arrived at a factory which the Doctor noted was in a oddly “out of the way” place. Sarah became curious about why there was so much security and what they manufacture. Her and the Doctor were shown a extremely fast growing vegetable called a Sarricoid that offers double the nutrition of any known plant, but Sarah Jane did not like the look of the plants. They were shown how the vegetable is processed into a full meal and told that the vegetable is man-made. Sarah said that “They sound as creepy as they look” when commenting on their name. (COMIC: Death Flower)
The TARDIS brought the trio to a Scottish island where they had a picnic. They discovered villagers being transformed into living scarecrows and sheltered the remaining humans together in the church. Devising a plan to stop the scarecrows with evolved moths, the Doctor sent Sarah to fetch supplies from the TARDIS, however she was followed by a scarecrow. After a pursuit through the ship, including the Jigsaw room where Sarah caught glimpses of her past and future, Sarah lost the scarecrow in the workings of a bigger-on-the-inside grandfather clock and returned to the church. After the Doctor was forced to surrender to the scarecrows after the villagers turned on him, Sarah and Harry used his moths to rescue him on the beach. The scarecrows' masters, three Cybermen, and their benefactor, Scratchman, then revealed themselves to the trio. Scratchman took Sarah and Harry to his universe to force the Doctor to come. Sarah and Harry were reunited with the Doctor when Scratchman challenged him to a fight, being placed in a giant game of pinball. She helped the Doctor win by denying Scratchman the high score, however was horrified when Scratchman dropped Harry through a hole towards lava in response. After Harry's meddling cauded Scratchman's castle to fall from the sky Sarah saved the Doctor from falling in lava by grabbing his scarf with the aid of the Cyber-Leader. Reunited with Harry, she faced an army of scarecrows based off the Doctor's old foes with him whilst the Doctor confronted Scratchman. In the aftermath Sarah and Harry fell into quicksand but were rescued by the Cyber-Leader, and then found the Doctor. They escaped Scratchman's universe in the TARDIS and resumed their picnic. (PROSE: Scratchman)
Sarah aided the Doctor in a series of missions for the Time Lords, including liberating Dalek-occupied Ercos, (COMIC: The Dalek Revenge) halting spreading of a virus from a Bendriggan space station, (COMIC: Virus) and saving art from German occupiers in Italy in 1944. (COMIC: Treasure Trail) They then rested for a few days, until the Doctor learned on the impending excavation of Hubert's Folly and sought to stop it. (COMIC: Hubert's Folly)
The TARDIS was forced to land on Karn by the Time Lords. Sarah was temporarily blinded by the Sisterhood of Karn when they mistakenly accused the Doctor and her of being thieves sent to take the Elixir of Life. She helped the Doctor defeat the resurrected Time Lord Morbius and was allowed by the Sisterhood to give the Doctor some of the elixir to save his life in gratitude for having defeated Morbius. (TV: The Brain of Morbius)
On a trip to Rome, Sarah stumbled upon a conspiracy regarding the Bona Dea cult that was leaving wealthy women blind. As she investigated, she was brought to their temple where she discovered the cause of the blindness was the cultists' misuse of an alien machine before the Doctor arrived to rescue her, only for both to end up captured again. Using the machine, which was suspected to be some sort of memory harvester, Sarah showed the cultists' the Doctor's good intentions, and they were convinced to use it to instil more independence in later generations of women. (PROSE: Sarah Jane and the Temple of Eyes)
Holidaying at the ruins of Phaester Osiris, Sarah and the Doctor were kidnapped by archaeologist Edwin Carver, and stopped him and the cult of the Black Pyramid from awakening Horus. They destroyed the Black Pyramid afterwards to prevent Horus from ever returning. (PROSE: Scarab of Death)
Their next adventure had them battling the Krynoids, a plant-like species who planned to conquer Earth. (TV: The Seeds of Doom)
The Doctor and Sarah visited London to find that the Pescatons were invading Earth. He discovered their weakness to high-pitched noise and set a trap for their leader, Zor, killing him. When he died, all the other Pescatons died as well. (AUDIO: Doctor Who and the Pescatons)
Using coordinates the Doctor had obtained from the Grindian exploratory satellite, the Doctor and Sarah landed on the Guerner Transport Ship whose departure from Rimba had been witnessed by the Second Doctor, 23000000 years earlier. After the two time-travellers helped the Guerners avoid destruction at the hands of a Sto-cat, Sarah realised that the Great Sphinx of Giza on Earth was another Sto-cat, as yet dormant. (PROSE: The Sleeping Beast)
One adventure had them fighting the Mandragora Helix and its servants in Italy, 1492. They befriended Duke Giuliano and helped him keep his throne while his evil uncle was killed by the servants of the Helix, who had become energy beings. Draining them of their power, Sarah and the Doctor departed. (TV: The Masque of Mandragora)
Whilst Christmas shopping in New Zealand, Sarah and many other shoppers were kidnapped, along with a large percentage of turkeys. Investigating, the Doctor discovered the Hazoodians were using turkeys to make alcohol. Realising humans were being kidnapped by accident, the Doctor returned all the kidnapped humans to Earth. (PROSE: Autaia Pipipi Pia)
Sarah and the Doctor spent nine weeks travelling to the beaches of Geshtinanna. During this time, they became trapped inside a "ghost TARDIS" which was travelling on a parallel course to their TARDIS. (PROSE: Eternity)
The TARDIS' steering went out, causing the ship to go back in time forty-five hundred million years. The Doctor and Sarah observed Earth, at the time a mass of molten rock, develop into a world with an atmosphere and life. They also encountered Megron, a Lord of Chaos claiming to be ruler of Earth until the Doctor banished him. (AUDIO: Exploration Earth)
She and the Doctor once visited Hollywood. (COMIC: Unnatural Selection)
Sarah was possessed by the Kastrian Eldrad, who forced her to take his severed hand to a nuclear power station to regenerate into a form based on her. After taking the alien back to its home planet and tipping it into a pit when it planned to conquer Earth, Sarah and the Doctor returned to the TARDIS to continue travelling. However, she had become tired of how the Doctor barely paid attention to her emotional distress. (TV: The Hand of Fear)
Departure
After many trips with Sarah, the Fourth Doctor received a summons to return to Gallifrey, his home world, and told her he couldn't take her with him. Their final words to each other were pleas to not forget them. Standing in the street, watching the TARDIS dematerialise, Sarah realised that, in attempting to take her home, the Doctor had not only missed landing on Hill View Road, but had not landed in South Croydon at all. She remarked to a nearby dog, "He blew it," before walking off toward her new life. (TV: The Hand of Fear) Indeed, the Doctor had mistakenly left her in Aberdeen, Scotland. (TV: School Reunion)
However, seconds after she left the TARDIS, she was kidnapped by the Monk and taken to 21st century London where she met a future version of the Doctor, who had reverted to his fourth incarnation after being targeted by a degeneration weapon during the Time War. She also met the Brigadier's daughter Kate Stewart and UNIT scientist Petronella Osgood. There, they discovered that the Monk was allied with the Doctor and Sarah's old enemies, the Hyreth. After the Hyreth were defeated, she was returned home by the Monk at the Doctor's request. (AUDIO: Past Lives)
After the Doctor
Some time after her departure, Sarah wrote a letter that recounted her adventures with the Doctor. She closed the letter by expressing her belief she would see him again. (PROSE: A Short History of Everyone)
The 1970s
According to one account, Sarah encountered the Fourth Doctor again in 1979. (PROSE: Suitors, Inc.)
The 1980s
In 1978, the Doctor sent a crate to Sarah, in care of her Aunt Lavinia on Hill View Road, in South Croydon. Sarah had already moved out by that time and was travelling extensively, "never in one place long enough to lick a stamp," as Lavinia put it. Lavinia herself left the following year, and took the crate with the rest of her furnishings to the manor house she had purchased in Moreton Harwood, Gloucestershire, where it stayed in the attic for another two years.
On 18 December 1981, Sarah arrived for Christmas at Lavinia's new home, only to find that Lavinia had left early for her American lecture tour, leaving Sarah and Lavinia's new ward, Brendan Richards, to celebrate the holidays without her; Sarah had, in her own words, "been abroad for the last fortnight". The pair promptly opened the crate to discover K9 Mark III who explained that he was a gift from the Doctor, prompting Sarah to happily remark that he didn't forget. With the help of K9 and Brendan, Sarah uncovered and stopped Moreton Harwood's murderous cult of Hecate. (TV: A Girl's Best Friend)
After this happened, Sarah, Brendan, Lavinia and K9 continued to investigate and stop other cults and witchcraft covens present in Britain. (PROSE: Powerstone, The Shroud of Azaroth, Hound of Hell, The Monster of Loch Crag, Horror Hotel, The Curse of Kanbo-Ala)
After having a go at living in the Gloucestershire countryside, (TV: A Girl's Best Friend) Sarah and K9 soon moved to a semi-detached house in Camberwell. (PROSE: Harry Sullivan's War) Sarah appeared to allow K9 outdoors unattended, and their gate bore a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign. (TV: The Five Doctors) While having K9 help her write a book about her time with the Doctor, Sarah learnt that the Doctor was attempting to avert the heat death of universe, and was told by K9 that the Doctor was likely to have died saving the universe. (PROSE: Still Need a Title!)
In late 1982, Sarah Jane published Fighting for Humankind, the first book fully documenting UNIT for the public's interest. It was quickly banned in much of Europe for releasing sensitive information, but would continue to be available as an import from the United States of America for many years afterwards, similar to Peter Wright's Spycatcher. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
One morning, on her way out to catch a bus, circa 1983, Sarah dismissed K9's sense of danger and declined to either stay home or take him with her. She was quickly swept up by the Time Scoop which removed her to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. There, she took part in the Games of Rassilon and reunited with the Doctor's third incarnation, though at first was puzzled by how he could be there when she saw him regenerate, not realising from his perspective that that hadn't happened yet. She met the First, Second, and Fifth Doctors (though she was confused as to who the Fifth Doctor was, which the Third Doctor promised to explain later), and introduced herself to Tegan Jovanka. Sarah also had a reunion with the Brigadier and briefly met Susan Foreman and Vislor Turlough. Once the crisis had passed, Rassilon returned her to Earth. (TV: The Five Doctors) She did not appear to recognise Susan as the former teenager whom she had briefly seen at the junkyard twenty years earlier. (PROSE: Playtime)
In 1983, Lavinia Smith sent Sarah and K9 to Egypt, where they investigated an incursion by Silurians. (COMIC: City of Devils) Shortly after this, while investigating a story about the anti-bioweapons brigade in 1983, Sarah helped Harry Sullivan to clear his name and stop an anarchist revolution. (PROSE: Harry Sullivan's War)
1983 was also the year of Sarah Jane's first big success in her renewed career as a journalist as she published a series of article on the terrorist organisation COBRA concurrently with a six-nation crackdown on its activities in Western Europe, orchestrated by UNIT. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
One account claimed that, following the Cyberman invasion, (TV: The Tenth Planet) Sarah, as UNIT's official chronicler, phrased it as "the Aladdin's Lamp of applied technology," and wrote of it: "At one and the same time, the Cyberman invasion was both the greatest disaster and most astonishing blessing ever to have happened to the human race," since humans were able to salvage the abandoned Cyberships and make advances in space travel. (PROSE: The Power of the Daleks)
"A few years on" from her coverage of COBRA's undoing, Sarah Jane launched into a career as a writer; her books were obviously inspired by her experiences with the Doctor and UNIT, but were perceived as unusually realistic science fiction by her readers. They included World War Skaro as well as The Monster at the end of Space, with the latter making its way to The Times and the New York Times' best-seller lists. (PROSE: The Roving Reporter)
In 1987 Sarah made an article about Francis Augur for the Metropolitan magazine. She later said that this wasn't one of her best works. She spent too much time exploring his passion for protecting the environment rather than focusing on his work as a doctor. (AUDIO: The Glittering Storm)
The 1990s
By one account, Sarah accompanied the Doctor's seventh incarnation to a jazz concert in the Royal Albert Hall and defeated an invasion of Earth by rogue members of the insectoid Kalik species. (COMIC: Train-Flight)
In the early 1990s, Sarah, K9 and Mike Yates investigated a supposedly haunted house, and foiled a plot by the Master to kill the Doctor. (PROSE: Housewarming)
In 1995, Sarah worked with the Brigadier to defeat the Great Intelligence, which had possessed Victoria Waterfield, another of the Second Doctor's companions. (HOMEVID: Downtime)
In 1996, with the Eighth Doctor's companion Sam Jones, she fought human rights abuses and met Paul Morley, (PROSE: Interference - Book One) a potential future husband. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)
In 1997, she assisted the Doctor's seventh incarnation against the Cortez Project in Hong Kong and died. (PROSE: Bullet Time) The Council of Eight had altered history by having Sarah die well before she should have done. Her death was undone by the Eighth Doctor's eventual defeat of the Council. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
After Brendan returned from the University of Cambridge, (PROSE: Housewarming) he assisted Sarah and K9 in investigating a supposedly demonic pig spirit. When K9 became possessed by this spirit, Sarah worked out a way of exorcising it by electrocuting K9, defeating it. (PROSE: The Sow in Rut)
K9 began slowly breaking down and Sarah was not able to repair K9's future technology. She did not show him to anyone else out of fear that revealing his technology could rewrite human history. (TV: School Reunion; PROSE: Moving On) Having essentially given up on being able to repair him, she relegated him to a cardboard box in either her attic (PROSE: Moving On) or her lounge. (PROSE: A Dog's Life) K9 used the last of his emergency power stunning two burglars and calling the police. After K9 was back inside his box, Sarah spoke to an inspector, telling him that she had knocked out the burglars in the heat of the moment. (PROSE: A Dog's Life)
After K9 had completely broken down, Sarah began writing fiction based upon her adventures, and other companions she had met previously. (PROSE: Balloon Debate)
In 1998, Sarah was visited by her younger self, who was accompanied by the Fourth Doctor and Harry Sullivan. (PROSE: System Shock)
According to one account, by 1998 Sarah had married Paul Morley and taken his name. As "Sarah Jane Morley", she addressed the Nobel Academy in 1998. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet) By several other accounts, Sarah had never been married before she met Peter Dalton; she lamented that, after travelling with the Doctor, no other man was able to compare, and she had grown old alone. (TV: School Reunion, Invasion of the Bane, The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith)
Sarah lost another family member in 1998 when her aunt, Lavinia Smith, died, (PROSE: Millennium Shock; TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, AUDIO: Comeback) and sometime before this, Africana had passed away too. (PROSE: The Curse of Kanbo-Ala)
New Millennium
Over the years, Sarah had grown more pacifist, and she chose to help the Earth by quietly opposing those aliens hostile to it and welcoming those who would befriend it. Her philosophy of alien contact stood in contrast to UNIT and the Torchwood Institute, whom she believed tended go in "all guns blazing". (TV: Invasion of the Bane, Journey's End) Her inheritance from Aunt Lavinia afforded her considerable freedom and resources. (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith) She also decided to start going by "Sarah Jane" full-time, becoming mildly annoyed when someone addressed her as just "Sarah", (TV: The Day of the Clown) as that was something she allowed only the Doctor to do. (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith)
Ms. Winters' revenge
Sarah Jane continued to work as an investigative reporter after her departure from Planet 3 and her aunt's death. She posed as a cashier at a bank to investigate a potential fraud. She was caught up in a bank robbery. She was saved from being shot by Josh Townsend. When the manager of the bank was killed they both went to Cloots Coombe. Ellie Martin told her about the decomposing bodies. Following information about Rechauffe and the disappearances of Maude Fletcher's friends. (AUDIO: Comeback)
She got Natalie Redfern to find information on one of Ellie and Josh's friends. This led her to the Huang Ti Clinic in Yorkshire. She learnt more information about the spiritualism from Wong Chu, Taoism. She posed as a cleaner to get into the Clinic. She found rooms which contained a large amount of sleeping bodies. She had to rescue Josh from being one of the subjects. She managed to find examples about what was being administered to the clinics patients. (AUDIO: The Tao Connection)
She was sent a rat in a glass cage which contained a bio-weapon. It was sent with a warning message. After giving it to Claudia Coster, she was visited by James Carver who threatened her with some Sarin Gas. She was arrested for the murder of Coster, and the police didn't believe her story about how dangerous Carver was. She managed to stop Harris from detonating the bomb. (AUDIO: Test of Nerve)
Shortly afterwards, Sarah and Josh went to Romania to visit Yolande. She became spooked upon seeing something in her room. Upon looking around the local museum she became acquainted with Christian Abbotly. She felt the feeling again on the day which Candice McElroy died. She got Josh to set up monitoring equipment in her room to track to ghosts. She went to talk to Professor Vodancski about the murdered Physicist. She worked out that Abbotly was to blame for the hauntings. (AUDIO: Ghost Town)
She travelled to the Maldives following a tip from her old Planet 3 colleague, Wendy Jennings. She pretended to be writing a tourist article. Wendy informed her about a bio-engineering company and that Brandt was living there. She learnt about the experiments that were conducted in the 1940s. She told Natalie not be worried about her. Upon going to Scala she discovered that Hilda Winters was the CEO, who initiated a conspiracy to destroy her career. Hilda intended to commit a vicious bio-terrorist attack and frame Sarah for it, but Sarah and her companions thwarted this. (AUDIO: Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre)
Searching the web
In March 2005, Sarah Jane Smith posted on Clive Finch's conspiracy website Doctor Who?, asking anybody who had seen the Doctor to contact her at the Daily Mail as she was hoping to interview the Doctor for a story. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man?) Shortly prior to the 2006 London UFO crash, Sarah Jane Smith posted again to the site, now managed by Mickey Smith, stating that she always knew the Doctor would return. She admitted that she had seen "both of him" several times back in the late 1970s, "the older guy, then all teeth and curls". She added that she missed the Doctor. (PROSE: Rose sighting confirmed) During this period, Sarah drove a red Volkswagen Beetle she called "Ethel", until it was blown up by her enemies. (AUDIO: Comeback)
Targeted by the Crimson Chapter
By 2006, Sarah had become tired and morose, knowing she couldn't talk about her past with anyone and starting to think she'd imagined it. She also became involved in the machinations of the doomsday cult known as the Crimson Chapter of the Orbus Postramo, who believed in a four-hundred-year-old tome named the Book of Tomorrows, which claimed aliens would wipe out humanity in the year 2000 — and discovered that the tome made reference to her. She was attacked by Luca Parenti as an attempt to kill her to bring about the prophecy. (AUDIO: Buried Secrets)
After recovering, she took Will Sullivan's offer to come to Antarctica to see how Aunt Lavinia's money was being spent. Will warned her that the base's commander Gideon Munro was unstable. Shortly after arriving there was a storm. She was attacked on the base and went missing during the storm. When Josh and Will managed to get in contact with her, they diagnosed that she had hypothermia. It turned out that she had become Snow Blind. She was then kidnapped as an insurance policy for Jack. She theorised that Morgane Kaditch was part of the Crimson Chapter and wanted to sell the uranium under the base. (AUDIO: Snow Blind)
To her horror, she discovered the Chapter wanted to commit genocide so their prophecy would be fulfilled, and they believed she was the human herald of the alien apocalypse. While she prevented this, she was distraught to find out the Orbus Postramo and the Book of Tomorrows had been formed due to comments she'd made to Giuliano while travelling with the Doctor. (AUDIO: Fatal Consequences)
Following this and the discovery that her friend Josh was a cold-blooded killer for the rival White Chapter cult, she admitted she was lonely and wondered if the Doctor had left her on Earth for a specific task. Needing something to believe in again, she went on the world's first commercial spaceflight, which would pass a comet that the White Chapter had said would bring salvation, only for the flight to be sabotaged by the last Crimson Chapter acolyte, killing Josh and leaving Sarah with failing life support and a vision of something she felt she'd been searching for. NASA intended to launch a rescue mission to save her. (AUDIO: Dreamland)
Moving to Bannerman Road
At some time, Sarah moved to 13 Bannerman Road in Ealing, and established her home office in the attic. There, she hung photos of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Harry Sullivan, and herself with K9 Mark III. (TV: Invasion of the Bane) Also in the attic, she kept K9's remains in a cardboard box. (TV: School Reunion; PROSE: Moving On) Amongst the residents of Bannerman Road, she was viewed as a quiet and unsociable neighbour. Kelsey Hooper, though likely exaggerating, described her as a "mad woman". (TV: Invasion of the Bane)
A geologist friend gave Sarah a crystal that had been expelled from Krakatoa. Soon, she discovered that the crystal — actually a Xylok — could communicate with her laptop; she followed its plans and built for it a supercomputer in her attic wall, into which the Xylok was integrated. The resulting sentient computer took the name Mr Smith, and provided her with access to countless databases, communications systems, and functioned as a research laboratory. (TV: The Lost Boy, Invasion of the Bane) In honour of her parents, Sarah made the activation password "Mr. Smith, I need you"; it was a message Sarah's mother had written on the back of a photograph to her father. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith)
Sarah and Bernice Summerfield at some point met at a Starbucks and did some small talk about friends they used to have, until they realised they both spoke of the Doctor and did not need to hide the fact they had travelled in space and time. (PROSE: A Mutual Friend)
During Christmas 2006, Sarah witnessed the Sycorax invasion, in which she suspected the Doctor's involvement. (TV: School Reunion)
Reunion with the Tenth Doctor
In 2007, Sarah investigated strange goings-on at Deffry Vale High School. While investigating the school she crossed paths with substitute physics instructor "John Smith". Later that night as she investigated the school, she entered a room and was shocked to see the familiar police box shape of the Doctor's TARDIS. Exiting the room, she saw John Smith, who she correctly identified as the Doctor, now in his tenth incarnation. After a very brief catching up, he introduced her to his companion Rose Tyler and Rose's boyfriend, Mickey Smith. In return, Sarah led the Doctor outdoors and reunited him with the inoperative K9 Mark III. The pair reminisced at a coffee shop whilst the Doctor performed such repairs to K9 as he could, managing to restore basic functionality but with only limited power. Meanwhile, Rose felt threatened by Sarah and jealous of the attention the Doctor paid to her. Working together the next day, their mutual animosity and competition got the better of them until Sarah broke the tension by joking with Rose about the Doctor's eccentricities and his quasi-romantic behaviour toward the TARDIS, and they bonded.
Sarah, K9, Rose, Mickey, and the Doctor foiled the Krillitanes' attempts to crack the Skasis Paradigm using their mind-altering oil on the children. In the process, however, the newly reactivated K9 sacrificed his life by blowing up the school with the Krillitanes inside. Sarah came to terms with her inability to move on with her life and left the Doctor's company with resignation. She declined his offer to rejoin the TARDIS, but convinced the Doctor to take on Mickey Smith as a companion. The TARDIS dematerialised to reveal K9 Mark IV, a rebuilt version of Mark III with "new omniflexible hyperlink capabilities". Sarah happily departed with the newest iteration of her beloved robot dog. (TV: School Reunion) The Doctor created (PROSE: Super Sonic [+]Loading...{"page":"37","1":"Super Sonic (feature)"}) and gave her a sonic lipstick (PROSE: The Shining Man) at some point prior to her encounter with the Bane. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)
K9's unique abilities, however, forced their separation almost as soon as he arrived. He became involved in a long-term project to stabilise an artificial black hole. A space-time link in a safe in Sarah's attic allowed periodic contact between K9 and his mistress (TV: Invasion of the Bane) and brief teleportation of K9 back to the attic in emergencies. (TV: The Lost Boy, Journey's End, From Raxacoricofallapatorius with Love)
Sarah found it refreshing to learn about other former companions of the Doctor and their post-companionship lives. In doing so, she learnt that Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright had become professors at the University of Cambridge and had reportedly not aged since the 1960s, Ben Jackson and Polly Wright ran an orphanage in India, Harry Sullivan cured countless people with his vaccines before his death, Tegan Jovanka championed aboriginal rights in her native Australia, and "Dorothy" had founded a philanthropy, A Charitable Earth, with which she raised millions of pounds. (TV: Death of the Doctor)
Leading the Bannerman Road gang
Adventures With Maria, Luke and Clyde
The Bane invasion changed Sarah's life dramatically; its events exposed her secrets to her young neighbour, Maria Jackson, who had moved into 36 Bannerman Road. With "the archetype", a human boy artificially created by Bane technology, they defeated the Bane Mother. In the aftermath, Sarah adopted the boy, renaming him Luke, after suggesting Alistair and Harry as names. Sarah was no longer content to live alone and chose to include Maria and Luke in her adventures. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)
She enrolled Luke at Park Vale School, which Maria also attended. At Park Vale, Luke and Maria befriended the "joker" Clyde Langer. However, she soon found something was amiss in the school due to the rapid decay of the food there. She soon learned that a branch of the Slitheen had infiltrated the school to use a device they had tricked Luke into partially reworking to drain the sun. However, the device could not handle the power of the sun and exploded, taking some Slitheen with it while others escaped. Because Clyde had aided in the defeat of the Slitheen, Sarah allowed him to join her "gang". (TV: Revenge of the Slitheen)
Accompanied by Clyde and Luke, Sarah next investigated the sighting of a nun at a retirement home. There, she met Bea Nelson-Stanley, who she learnt had had encounters with Sontarans just like her. She was also hiding a key to a portal that allowed the parasitic Gorgons to invade. Though she was nearly made into its new host, Sarah succeeding in closing the portal and giving the key back to Bea as a memento of her deceased husband. (TV: Eye of the Gorgon)
When teenagers began vanishing during random storms, Sarah found that they were being kidnapped by General Kudlak to fight in their war against the Malakh Empire. However, the trouble was actually caused by the Mistress, a computer that lied to Kudlak about the war's end. After he returned the children he recently had taken back to Earth, Sarah allowed him to leave in peace and search for the other children he had sent away. (TV: Warriors of Kudlak)
When several people in Ealing were stealing gold Sarah started to investigate. She took Maria to the Auriga Clinic where some of the burglars were treated. There Maria was being injected with gold, while Sarah talked to Francis Augur. Sarah later found out that Maria was under the control of the Keratin, who controlled her through the gold injection. The Keratin used Maria to spy on Sarah. Sarah did not want to worry Maria and did not want to let the Kreatin know that she was onto them which could endanger Maria's life. Sarah told Clyde and Luke not to mention the Kreatin or Maria's nightly visit of the Auriga Clinic towards Maria. The next night Sarah and Luke followed Maria to the Auriga Clinic. Maria and the other people who were controlled by the Keratin wanted to take away the oceans of the planet Earth to get the gold of the ocean. The Keratin wanted to use the gold to be able to control the whole universe. Sarah later pressed a patch with lithium citrate on Maria's neck and Maria got free of the Keratin's mind control. The Keratin was ultimately killed by salt water. (AUDIO: The Glittering Storm)
Sarah accompanied Mr Bradbury's history class, which included Maria, Clyde and Luke, on a school trip to the Stone Whisperers. There the alien Ravage started to take control of Luke's mind. Sarah supported Luke when he fought a mental battle against Ravage and helped Luke expelling Ravage from his mind. (AUDIO: The Thirteenth Stone)
Her fate was later switched with Andrea Yates' own by the Trickster, making Earth vulnerable to an incoming meteor. However, when Andrea rejected the Trickster's offer and agreed to die as she had been supposed to, Sarah was able to save Earth from the meteor with Mr Smith's help. Maria's father, Alan, learnt of her secret life and offered his computer tech expertise when they needed assistance. (TV: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?)
When a news report showed Luke to be a missing boy belonging to a couple, Sarah was forced to give him up. However, it turned out it was a plot by the Slitheen, who were posing as the humans claiming to be Luke's parents, and Mr Smith, who wished to free his fellow Xyloks from inside the Earth. As the Slitheen were double-crossed by Mr Smith, they helped her and Mr Jackson get to Mr Smith and re-programme him with Sarah calling on her old friend K9 for help briefly as well. (TV: The Lost Boy)
Sarah was a witness to the ATMOS incident which saw the sky "burn". (TV: The Last Sontaran)
When the Daleks transported Earth to the Medusa Cascade, Sarah and Mr Smith answered the call of former Prime Minister Harriet Jones and, with Torchwood Three, worked to contact the Tenth Doctor by having Mr Smith make every telephone on Earth ring the Doctor's TARDIS. She reluctantly left her son behind in Mr Smith's care and was confronted by two Daleks. (TV: The Stolen Earth) She again met Mickey Smith and made the acquaintance of Jackie Tyler, who saved her from the Daleks, and was then transported to the Dalek base ship, the Crucible. In the heart of the Crucible, she once more met Davros and, working with Jack Harkness, threatened to destroy the Crucible with a warp star she owned. After the defeat of the Daleks, she co-ordinated with K9 and Mr Smith to transmit the vital codes to the TARDIS, whereupon she helped to pilot the TARDIS and tow the Earth back home. As she said another farewell to the Doctor, Sarah commented that, although he often spoke of being lonely, his wide range of companions gave him essentially the largest family on Earth. (TV: Journey's End)
Again with Luke, Clyde, and Maria, she saw off the Sontaran known as Kaagh (the last survivor of the Sontaran invasion of Earth) who wanted to take Sarah back to Sontar to stand trial in the Tenth Doctor's stead. During that adventure, Maria announced that her father had a job offer to move to America and she had decided to let him take it. Six weeks later, she moved out. (TV: The Last Sontaran)
Escapades with Rani, Luke and Clyde
Shortly afterwards, Rani Chandra, an aspiring teenage journalist, and her parents Gita and Haresh moved into Maria's former address and joined Luke and Clyde in defeating a child-stealing energy entity which had inspired the Pied Piper myth. Reluctantly, Sarah took Rani into the team. The entity thrived off of Sarah's fears of clowns which had started one night in childhood. She overcame her fear because of her love for Luke overpowering it when he was kidnapped by the entity. With Clyde's jokes weakening the entity, she forced it back into a piece of the meteor it came from. (TV: The Day of the Clown)
She later went to a show done by Martin Trueman, who correctly guessed her past with the Doctor. This made her curious as to how he knew this. The eventual realisation was that he had been chosen as the host for the Ancient Lights, a consciousness that came from the universe before this one, and wished to control this universe. She tried to save Trueman when the Lights were foiled, but he chose to be absorbed by them and leave Earth. (TV: Secrets of the Stars)
Rani, Clyde and Luke found Janksia's three artefacts, which made Janksia's space ship able to take off. They fell under the influence of the artefact and tried to protect it from non-Persopolisians. Luke hid himself with the black diamond of Earnfield inside a cupboard in the Natural History Museum, where he was doing his work experience. Dr Wendeline Minot called Sarah and asked her for help. Luke brought the diamond to Janksia who fell into a garbage compactor which crushed him to death. Luke was released of the diamond's control. Because the diamond was alien, Sarah told Mr Smith to make a replica of it and gave the duplicate to the museum. She also gave another alien artefact to the museum. In exchange, the staff would not tell anyone that Luke had taken the black diamond. (AUDIO: The Time Capsule)
In the same year the Victorian house of the Burden family swapped places with the O'Brain's house from the 2000s. Sarah helped to place the houses into correct time again. (AUDIO: The Ghost House)
She later went to search for an alien in hospital, leaving Mr Smith shut down and notes for her companions not to touch alien artefacts in her attic. It was during this time Rani found the Berserker pendant and left it there, only for Clyde's dad to take it and nearly turn into a berserker from using the pendant to get whatever he wanted. Sarah returned just in time as Clyde had been forced to forget Luke, Rani and his own mother. They returned Paul to normal and got rid of the pendant. (TV: The Mark of the Berserker)
Returning a boy to his home time through a time fissure, Sarah found the other side led to Foxgrove in 1951, the time of her infancy. She wished to meet her parents and did so, but disabled their car to prevent them from dying. However, once the Trickster appeared and revealed it had all been a part of his plan to manifest corporeally, Sarah repaired the car and sent her parents off, now feeling immensely proud of them. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith)
Later, Mrs Wormwood returned to Earth alongside the Sontaran Kaagh in an attempt to summon Horath, the immortal tyrant of the Dark Empire. With help from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and due to infighting between Kaagh and Mrs Wormwood, they were able to stop this apocalypse and trap the duo between dimensions. This was the last time Sarah Jane saw the Brigadier in person for a while. (TV: Enemy of the Bane)
Sarah and her friends fought Androvax, a Veil who possessed her body to gain access to nanobots to build a spaceship to leave Earth. However, thanks to Luke, Rani, and Clyde, as well as a Judoon, she got it back and learned the Judoon had "grounded" Rani and Clyde to Earth for impeding his search. (TV: Prisoner of the Judoon)
She and the gang also helped a lonely alien named Eve get back to her Ship and fly away with her friends. Ship absorbed the energy from the black hole K9 was guarding to take off, bringing him back to Sarah's side. She was also temporarily removed from existence by Ship, who was damaged and did not bother to correct its mistake, until Adam, Eve's son, reversed the damage in the future. (TV: The Mad Woman in the Attic)
When the Doctor had an errand to attend to off-planet, attempting to discover the truth behind a cosmic entity that was harassing him, he left his friends Gabby Gonzalez and Cindy Wu in Willesden, asking Sarah Jane to check in on them. When she arrived, Sarah found the two under assault by a localised time anomaly. Once the butterflies had been scared off, Sarah scanned the unconscious Gabby and introduced herself to Cindy. Once the former had been put to bed and food ordered, Sarah talked with Cindy, offering her comfort over the traumatic experiences that came with travelling with the Doctor, and bonding over their encounters with Sutekh. When Gabby later awoke, Sarah took both Americans on a tour of London.
Over the next few weeks, Sarah kept in close contact with the girls, serving as a mentor to Cindy and helping her realise that her feelings for Gabby were romantic, noting that she herself had lost her chance to romance the Doctor years ago, and encouraging Cindy to not repeat her mistake. When Sarah studied Gabby's drawings, they began to float. Recognising this as block transfer, Sarah drove Cindy to Gabby. When they arrived, Sarah gave the girl a device she'd cobbled together to make her time signature static. Though the device served its purpose for a brief while, the Butterfly arrived in London with the Doctor. As the Butterfly was a future version of Gabby, the Doctor reached out to the present Gabby, assuring her that he would always be there for her, erasing the Butterfly from existence. The next morning, the Doctor and Sarah shared another goodbye, Sarah making him promise to hold onto Cindy and Gabby before the two old friends had a laugh that she was now giving him the advice. (COMIC: Vortex Butterflies)
When Rani, Clyde and Luke missed the school-bus which would take them on a class trip to Snowdonia Sarah brought them there. As she couldn't return that day she planned to stay one night. In Snowdonia she suddenly saw Rani at two places at the same time. Sarah later found out that the second Rani was one of the Shadow People, an alien species who were created by the Shedagen to imitate and serve other creatures. The shadowy figure could only exist among other creatures. It was scared that if Sarah and her friends left it would stop existing so it didn't want to let them go. Sarah convinced the figure to let them drive away. Sarah waved goodbye to the figure before they left. (AUDIO: The Shadow People)
Sarah later met Peter Dalton and they got engaged, much to Luke, Rani and Clyde's surprise. At her wedding she had two very special, uninvited guests, her greatest ally and arch enemy. She was teleported to limbo by the Trickster and separated from her companions and the Doctor. She had to allow Peter to sacrifice himself to defeat the Trickster. She had genuinely been in love with Peter and when she and the others returned to Earth, she was left heartbroken. She was checked up on by Luke, Clyde, and Rani as well as the Doctor, who allowed Sarah's gang to have a look inside the TARDIS. She then bid another farewell to the Doctor in the manner of their original departure, both asking each other not to forget them. (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, The Hand of Fear)
Invited by Celeste Rivers to participate in a search for the ghosts of those taken by the spirit Erasmus Darkening, Sarah found that he was not a ghost, but an alien who had become trapped between dimensions due to Lord Marchwood damaging the machine he was using to try to get home. Sarah destroyed him and the machine, allowing those trapped by Darkening to finally pass on. (TV: The Eternity Trap)
The Mona Lisa came to life shortly after Sarah and Luke argued for the first time about typical teenage habits. Sarah was temporarily trapped in a painting by the Mona Lisa, but was freed after her companions tricked the painting and destroyed her "brother". (TV: Mona Lisa's Revenge)
Later Sarah attempted to thwart another Slitheen plot which threatened the Earth. Despite the best efforts of Luke, Rani, Clyde, K9, and her, the Slitheen could not be stopped. However, members of the Blathereen family arrived in time to stop the Slitheen. They tricked Sarah into accepting a gift: a Rakweed plant. It mutated overnight and began to spread across London, threatening to kill anyone infected by its spores. Luke was the first to inhale the spores and almost died. A way for Mr Smith to destroy the Rakweed was discovered, but Sarah was forced to kill the Blathereen, an act she immediately regretted. (TV: The Gift)
When other members of the Slitheen-Blathereen family kidnapped Sarah, Rani was forced to help to grow Rakweed so that Sarah would be released. (GAME: Plants) The Rakweed was later destroyed by Clyde. (GAME: Sound)
Sarah and Luke were informed by Mr Smith that a space ship crashed on Earth. They went to the crash site of the ship, saved the pilot of the ship and brought him to the attic. Soon after this the Krulius appeared and teleported himself, Sarah and the pilot to his space station. Sarah used her sonic lipstick to inform Mr Smith about her whereabouts. Mr Smith told the Judoon where the Krulius was hiding. The Judoon arrested the Krulius and brought Sarah back to Earth. (COMIC: Monster Hunt) After this, Rani was teleported to the Krulius space ship. She escaped and returned to the attic and told Sarah, Luke and Clyde about her experiences. Sarah said that they have to expect trouble since the Krulius had returned. (COMIC: Return of the Krulius) Meanwhile, the Krulius prepared for a war against Sarah and her gang. He came with an army of aliens to Bannerman Road and attacked Sarah's house. Sarah and her gang fought the Krulius and his army off. The army had to return to the space ship. (COMIC: Defending Bannerman Road)
When a story about Hank Carter and the Wraith Warriors was written, a journal with Psionic Paper and these figures began to appear in the real world. Sarah helped Rani Chandra and Gregory P. Wilkinson to defeat Hank Carter and the Wraith Warriors. (AUDIO: Wraith World) Later the Umorgus tried to invade Earth and were stopped by Sarah and Luke. (AUDIO: Deadly Download)
Luke told Sarah that he would be doing his A levels a year early whilst she was held captive by a Slitheen. Rani and Clyde quickly defeated the Slitheen with a bucket of vinegar and Sarah said Luke should go to university. (TV: The Nightmare Man)
After the incident with the Master Race, Sarah asked Mr Smith to create a cover story so that no one would suspect more alien activity, using a fake story of the wi-fi system suffering a major technical malfunction all around the world that caused everyone to have hallucinations. She was later told by Luke that the Doctor had arrived and saved his life. She watched as he waved goodbye before entering the TARDIS; having witnessed the upcoming events for the Doctor before, she smiled tearily, knowing that this would be the last time she would see the Doctor, at least in that incarnation. (TV: The End of Time)
After Luke
When the time came, Luke passed his A Levels with flying colours, as Sarah expected. Luke was then plagued by nightmares caused by the extra-dimensional Nightmare Man entity. (TV: The Nightmare Man) During that time Sarah and Martha Smith-Jones were occasionally meeting up for a coffee. They had become friends and Sarah had told Martha all about Luke. When Luke suffered from the nightmares and did not feel well, she wanted to call Martha. Sarah thought that, as a doctor, Martha might be able to help. However, Luke told Sarah that he was all right and Sarah didn't make the call. (PROSE: The Nightmare Man) Despite not being able to help, Sarah was amazed that Luke, Clyde, and Rani entered the same nightmare to be together and defeat him by overcoming their fears, trapping the Nightmare Man in Clyde's nightmare of an older version of herself bragging about Luke. Alive and well, Luke left for the University of Oxford in Sarah's old car, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, that she had given him after the repairs had been finished. She sent K9 with Luke to care for him. (TV: The Nightmare Man)
Although Luke and K9 were no longer with Sarah, Clyde and Rani stayed behind and the trio continued to have adventures in 2010. Androvax returned to Sarah and asked for her help. Along with the Men in Black, they saved Earth from hyperdimensional cataclysm, allowing Androvax to leave Earth without destroying it and find a new home planet for the remnants of the Veil species. (TV: The Vault of Secrets)
In the same year an old Nadloon circus comedy cruiser crashed in the Thames. Sarah and her friends recovered the cruiser from the Thames. (COMIC: Defending Bannerman Road)
Sarah, Rani and Clyde went to the Pharos Institute again to study a fossilised Silurian egg. (TV: SJAF 6)
She received word from UNIT that the Doctor had died and that they were taking charge of his funeral with the Shansheeth. However, Sarah was sceptical about this as she believed that she would feel something if the Doctor died. She also met her immediate predecessor as the Doctor's companion, Jo Jones, and bonded over memories of their travels with the Doctor; Jo was just as sceptical. When it was revealed the Shansheeth had lied about the Doctor's death, Sarah was shocked to come face to face with the Doctor in his newest body. She and Jo were soon captured by the Shansheeth so their memories could be used to create a new TARDIS key via a memory weave. With the help of the Doctor, the two women overloaded the machine and hid in a lead-lined coffin as it self-destructed. After this, she used "TARDIS" as a search word and learnt about other ex-companions working to help make Earth a better place. "With friends like us, he's never going to die, is he?" (TV: Death of the Doctor)
Sarah was teleported to a sub-dimension along with the rest of humanity by the Automatons. Clyde and Rani remained on Earth due to their grounding by the Judoon and they solved the mystery, returning alien king Gavin back home after he ordered the return of the human race. Sarah told Clyde and Rani how proud she was of them and after having Mr Smith fix the records that Gavin moved to Australia, got pizza for her young friends to celebrate their first successful adventure without her. (TV: The Empty Planet)
Soon after, the Bannerman Road gang investigated a shop owned by a mysterious shopkeeper who transported Sarah, Clyde, and Rani to three different moments in time to obtain pieces of chronosteel using a time window. Arriving in 1889, Sarah met a young woman named Emily Morris who was investigating a haunted house. They discovered the house was melding with its future self and saw two children locked in a room on fire. This was how Emily had lost her mother nine weeks earlier. Under Sarah's guidance, Emily used her fear to travel through time and open the door, saving the children and obtaining the chronosteel key. Sarah took the key and began to teleport back to 2010, but Emily wanted Sarah to stay with her and took the key, inadvertently sending Sarah back to the future empty handed. However, Emily passed the key down to her granddaughter, Angela Price, who gave it to the Shopkeeper. He stabilised the time window and teleported away, saying his parrot's work was done. Sarah then had a cup of tea and chat with Angela to learn more about Emily and Angela. (TV: Lost in Time)
The Eleventh Doctor visited Sarah again but remarked that he had to be careful of running into himself when he visited. He told her about his previous companion, Shivani, and asked her to give his fez to Clyde. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Horror of Coal Hill)
Sarah and the gang met Ruby White, a woman who supposedly defended the Earth like Sarah. Sarah thought she was getting too old to continue defending the planet and passed her duties on to Ruby. It turned out Ruby was a Qetesh, a member of a race that drained life force through emotion and excitement, and she had been draining Sarah whenever they met. Ruby handcuffed Sarah next to her stomach — a separate part of her being — and left her in a cellar to drain her life force directly. She was eventually set free by Clyde, Rani, Luke who had come back from university and K9 remotely to defeat Ruby, using her artificial intelligence to show every human on the planet a hologram of a meteor headed towards them, causing Ruby to absorb over 6 billion thrills. Ruby's stomach was destroyed and all of the life force she had stolen from Sarah returned. Sarah then used Ruby's teleport bracelet to warp the Qetesh back to her prison ship where she belonged. (TV: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith)
Adopting Sky and subsequent adventures
In 2011, a baby was left on Sarah's doorstep. She named the young girl Sky. The baby caused power fluctuations around Bannerman Road. Sarah and Rani investigated a crash site for a supposed meteor the previous night, where she met Professor Rivers again. When they found that Clyde and Sky had been taken to a power plant by Sky's mother, Miss Myers, she saw Sky's transformation from baby to a pre-teen. Rani and Clyde deactivated the core of the power station, foiling Miss Myers' plot to bring the entire Metalkind species to Earth that would have caused Sky to detonate and destroy them all, as per her purpose. When Miss Myers and the Metalkind had left Earth at supposedly the cost of Sky's electrical powers, the gang returned to Bannerman Road where Sarah decided to adopt her after learning that it was the Shopkeeper and Captain who left the child with her as the Shopkeeper explained in person. (TV: Sky)
Sarah enrolled Sky in Park Vale Comprehensive School the day it rained fish. Sarah, along with the other people important in Clyde's life, was put under Hetocumtek's curse making her turn against Clyde and tell him he was to stay away from her. The curse on her was later broken with the help of Sky, who urged her and Rani to remember what Clyde meant to them. She and the rest of the gang reunited with Clyde and together defeated Hetocumtek, lifting the curse. Sarah helped Clyde look for his new friend but they later learned that she had already left London on a haulage truck. (TV: The Curse of Clyde Langer)
As she was one of the top three journalists in the United Kingdom, Sarah was invited to the rehearsal of the launch of the SerfBoard by Joseph Serf. However, she found that Serf's assistant, John Harrison, was actually the one pulling the strings and Serf himself was a hologram controlled by enslaved Skullions. With the help of her two children and one of the former cleaning staff, Adriana, Sarah managed to sink John's plans by using the hologram's hypnotism on the audience to convince them that the computer was rubbish. After John was teleported away with the escaping Skullions, Sarah recommended Adriana join UNIT as her kind-heartedness towards friendly aliens was just what they needed; she said mentioning her name would ensure good pay. (TV: The Man Who Never Was)
Sarah, Clyde, Rani and Sky went to an antiques auction where Sarah found the head of the Difference Golem Adam. Adam was brought back to life. He escaped and tried to activate other Difference Golems. Sarah helped to find Adam and Adam's consciousness was then brought back to the future. (AUDIO: Children of Steel)
An alien ship landed at White Cross shopping mall. Sarah, Clyde, Rani and Sky went there to find out why the ship had landed there. They later found out that the Veritas were hunting the magician Zando, because they thought practising magic was like lying. Before the Veritas could find Zando, they realised that Sarah had lied a lot to keep the existence of aliens hidden in front of humans. They caught Sarah and showed her former lies. Then they wanted to punish Sarah for her lies. When the Veritas saw the chaos that was caused, as the humans in the shopping centre got to know about aliens they realised that Sarah only lied to protect the humans. Sarah convinced the aliens that Zando also wasn't lying and that his magic show was only a kind of entertainment. (AUDIO: Judgement Day)
Later life
Sarah and her gang continued to have adventures, defend Earth, and save countless lives. Statues were raised in their honour and they left behind a legacy that lasted forever. (PROSE: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, TV: The Man Who Never Was)
In 2013, the Eleventh Doctor fell into a Parallel universe where his life was a TV show. There he met Ally, who at one point referenced the death of Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah Jane in the show. This caused the Doctor to remark that Sarah Jane Smith was alive and well, and living in Ealing. He added that he knew what would become of Sarah. (COMIC: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who)
Sarah Jane pointed out to Luke that Sanjay was "looking at [him] in that way" and "told [him] to go and talk to him." Some time later, the couple subsequently married. (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane)
At some point between 2011 and 2059, occupation of Sarah's house at 13 Bannerman Road, Ealing, passed to Rani Chandra and her family, (TV: The Mad Woman in the Attic) though it had long been closed down before then, per the late Sarah Jane's instructions. (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane)
According to one account, Sarah had a daughter named Lauren and a grandchild called Lily. Sarah Jane moved to a cottage in a small village. She looked after Lily often, as her parents found it hard to cope with her Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Sarah herself found it hard to handle Lily's behaviour. She took Lily to musical concerts in the village. One Christmas, the Fifth Doctor visited her and joined them in a church service. On the walk home, the Doctor helped Sarah to bond with Lily. (PROSE: Lily)
At some point, an older Sarah Jane went on a TARDIS trip with the Tenth Doctor; by then, she had become separated from K9 Mark IV. Due to a universe-wide temporal crisis, the TARDIS made an emergency landing in the Dalek City on Skaro , where they received a message from the Thirteenth Doctor from K9 Mark IV, now fitted with a vortex manipulator circuit, advising them to collect vortex energy from the City to kickstart the TARDIS. After venturing out, they discovered that Daleks from the future had travelled back to this early version of Skaro to help their ancestors, only to become stranded there too as their Dalek Time Ship stopped working much like the TARDIS. At Sarah's suggestion, they let themselves be captured and bargained for their lives to help "fix" the Time Ship. They successfully made their escape, and K9 directed them to another Waypoint, the Panopticon on Gallifrey, where Sarah met Rose Tyler again. (GAME: Lost in Time)
Death
Another account claimed that she died five years after Luke's marriage to Sanjay, (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane) which was sometime after they met in 2011 (TV: Death of the Doctor) and before the death of Jo Grant in 2028. (PROSE: /Carpenter/Butterfly/Baronet) As her old gang were out of the English country when she died, Luke and Clyde believed she had waited "until they were out of sight to save them any pain" from her passing. Rani Chandra and Mr Smith did not believe she died and speculated she had actually been picked up by the Doctor at the last moment to go on more adventures forever.
Before she passed, Sarah Jane had left instruction for her home to be closed down, and Mr Smith "folded away", and the house "left waiting" for "the new owner", with the Bannerman Road gang to move on. Her funeral was attended by numerous companions of the Doctor, though no version of the Doctor themselves seemed to attend. Jo Grant speculated that was because the Doctor feared having both hearts broken from acknowledging her death. (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane) Sarah left Jo her sonic lipstick, (WC: Defenders of Earth!) while Ace adopted K9. (WC: Farewell, Sarah Jane)
Legacy
An issue of Doctor Who Adventures came with a mini-mag dedicated to Sarah. (PROSE: Hello, Time Travellers! 218)
Undated adventures
- At some point, Sarah Jane and Luke encountered the Pakhar journalist Ker'a'nol. During the incident, Keri was "possessed by the ancient spirit of the Kortha Gestalt", which prompted K9 to shoot her. Sarah Jane and Luke later related the incident to the Doctor, telling him that Keri wasn't best pleased at having been shot. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation)
- In her travels with the Doctor in her youth, Sarah Jane was exposed to mobile phones and wanted one of her own only for the Doctor to refuse, claiming such an act to be anachronistic. In her later years, Sarah would question that reasoning considering that he'd gifted her K9. (COMIC: Vortex Butterflies)
- On one of their tours of the TARDIS interior, Sarah asked the Doctor about the Jigsaw room. She later wrote a note documenting this interaction, which the Doctor included in his account of his encounter with Scratchman though Sarah had left his company by the time he compiled it. (PROSE: Scratchman)
Personality
As a companion, Sarah was confident, courageous, benevolent, jolly and inquisitive. She had a sharp mind and tongue. She was also something of a feminist; she was infuriated when the Third Doctor asked her to make coffee (TV: The Time Warrior) and she often sparred verbally with fellow companion Harry Sullivan over his old-fashioned and unintentionally patronising attitude towards her. Her feminism was more practical than fanatical and did not get in the way of close friendships with Harry and the Doctor himself. She once said that she loved Harry very dearly. (TV: Death of the Doctor)
Sarah shared a strong rapport with the Doctor. Her later life was shaped by her finding him a tough act to follow. She stopped short of saying she had fallen in love with him, though several of her exchanges with him after their reunion and the context of one of her conversations with Rose strongly implied she had developed deep feelings for him. (TV: School Reunion) However, her relationship with the Doctor was said to be more than a romance. (TV: Secrets of the Stars) Despite the passage of time, she maintained her can-do personality. After reuniting with the Doctor, she remained a close friend of his.
During her time defending Earth with her young friends, Sarah was a motherly and excellent leader. She was very protective of her young allies and blamed herself when they got into trouble. (TV: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith etc.) This made her rather cold and secretive to strangers but her gang helped her open up to others. (TV: Invasion of the Bane, The Mad Woman in the Attic) She adored her young friends, considering them her family. (TV: The Lost Boy etc.) She was essentially to them what the Doctor was to her: an older, wiser mentor.
Sarah was extremely proud of Luke and loved him, calling him the most important thing in the universe. (TV: The Gift etc.) When she met Jo Jones, they became very fond of each other. They hugged and even high-fived. (TV: Death of the Doctor) She didn't think babies cute but rather rubbery. (TV: Sky) She considered the lives of homeless people to be the most alien of all and was saddened that many people turned a blind eye to them. (TV: The Curse of Clyde Langer)
Sarah also loved K9 deeply, due to him being the nearest thing to a family she had for over twenty years, and was devastated at the prospects of losing him. (TV: School Reunion, The Nightmare Man) She also treated Mr. Smith as an equal instead of a mere computer. (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, Mona Lisa's Revenge) She also felt compassion for the K1 Robot and treated it as a person instead of a machine, and was saddened by its death (TV: Robot)
In contrast to her periodic and proficient use of firearms in her twenties, Sarah grew fiercely opposed to violence and killing, and showed sympathy to her enemies such as Martin Truman, the Slitheen-Blathereen and even Androvax, (TV: Secrets of the Stars, The Gift, The Vault of Secrets) as they simply did these things, not because they were bad, but because they were hurt or felt inferior. This went hand in hand with her strong mind. However, this pacifistic nature caused her enemies to frequently consider her naive, most notably Miss Myers and John Harrison. (TV: Sky, The Man Who Never Was) She grew to object to the military, including UNIT and Torchwood, but remained a friend of the Brigadier and felt that her gang could not defeat a Sontaran or the Dark Hoard but knew UNIT could. (TV: The Last Sontaran, Enemy of the Bane, Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith) She hated the Trickster, considering him to be the most malevolent enemy she had as he had tried using her friends and family against her to try manifesting. (TV: Sarah Jane's Alien Files episode 1)
By the time of her motherhood of Luke, Sarah Jane could hide her feelings when she was feeling angry or conflicted, though to those who knew her it was obvious when she was doing so as Luke once pointed out that "[Sarah Jane]'s not good at hiding how she feels]", using the fact that a radio presenter she always complained about - Steve Wright - came on the radio and played song she also disliked -The Hoosiers - and Sarah Jane failed to say a word; he later told Sarah Jane that she was "very, very unconvincing" when trying to hide it. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith)
Rani once pointed out to the Tenth Doctor that Sarah didn't like being called just "Sarah", though he replied, "She does by me". (TV: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith) Indeed, during her years travelling in the TARDIS, the Doctor, along with a few other individuals such as Harry and Mike Yates, referred to her many times simply as "Sarah".
Appearance
In her youth, Sarah was an attractive, slim, dark-haired girl. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, PROSE: Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars)
She was 5' 4" tall. (TV: The Masque of Mandragora)
Skills
Despite her later dislike of violence, Sarah was an excellent shot with firearms (TV: Pyramids of Mars) and knew Venusian karate. (TV: A Girl's Best Friend)
She was resistant to hypnosis, even if it was more powerful alien technology rather than simple methods, (TV: The Man Who Never Was) due to having already been put through it several times in her youth while journeying with the Doctor. (TV: Planet of the Spiders, The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear) Sarah could also whistle. (TV: Revenge of the Cybermen)
Sarah was one of Britain's top journalists. Just three of the country's very top journalists have been invited to watch the presentation of the SerfBoard. Sarah was one of them. (TV: The Man Who Never Was) She also wrote her own book UNIT Fighting for Humankind. (TV: Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?)
Aliases and nicknames
| Name | When used/given | Story | Etymology |
|---|---|---|---|
| Young Smithson | As a woman in trousers was not an understandable concept in the 19th century, the Fourth Doctor introduced Sarah as a young lad named Smithson to Sir Adrian Stapleford. | The Emperor's Spy | |
| Sarah Lou / Sally Anne / Suzie Q / Mary Jane | Variously given by Chrissie Jackson, who struggled to remember Sarah Jane's name. | Invasion of the Bane, Revenge of the Slitheen | |
| Bunty Mansfield | An alias used by Sarah Jane, displayed on a business card for Plush-Press News Agency. | Eye of the Gorgon | |
| Victoria Williams | An alias used by Sarah Jane, displayed on a business card for a press agency. | Eye of the Gorgon | |
| Felicity Barnes | An alias used by Sarah Jane to gain entry to St Agnes Abbey. Sarah stated she was doing a story for The Times on religion in the 21st century. | Eye of the Gorgon | |
| Victoria Beckham | An alias used by Sarah Jane, when meeting her parents in Foxgrove, 1951 | The Temptation Of Sarah Jane Smith |
Behind the scenes
Popularity and significance
Sarah Jane Smith is, arguably, one of the most popular of the Doctor's companions. Apart from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, no other individual has maintained a higher profile as a Doctor Who companion. On-screen, she has appeared with the Third, Fourth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, as well as with First, Second, and Fifth Doctors in The Five Doctors. Accordingly, she and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart are the only companions to have each appeared on-screen alongside at least seven incarnations of the Doctor. The two characters' actors, Elisabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney, sadly died within weeks of each other in 2011; she was honoured with an "In memory of" dedication at the start of the 2011 series première The Impossible Astronaut, followed by a half-hour retrospective TV special airing immediately after that episode, while Courtney was eulogised on-screen (using Lethbridge-Stewart as his in-universe proxy) in the 2011 series finale The Wedding of River Song; and each was memorialised with retrospective pages on the BBC's Doctor Who website.
On-screen, Sarah has met the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Ice Warriors, the Slitheen, the Judoon, the Master (in The Five Doctors) and Davros. She is the only companion to have met Davros in two different stories: his début serial Genesis of the Daleks and the 2008 episode Journey's End, more than 33 years later. Her début story, The Time Warrior, introduced the Sontarans. She, K9 and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart are the only classic era companions to have appeared on Doctor Who in the revived era, aside from archival footage, and she did so in four episodes. Her iconic farewell scenes with the Fourth Doctor in The Hand of Fear were reenacted with the Tenth Doctor in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and School Reunion.
She is one of three classic series companions to appear in the 50th anniversary trailer.
Casting
Elisabeth Sladen was not the original actress cast to play Sarah. The role originally went to April Walker. She was fully contracted for the whole of season 11, but Barry Letts discovered that she had no real chemistry with Jon Pertwee. She was quietly paid off for her entire contract and Elisabeth Sladen was brought in to replace her. (INFO: Invasion of the Dinosaurs) Though it was known for years that there had been "another Sarah Jane", Letts and Sladen went to their graves without revealing her identity. Walker's name was discovered only when the DVD info text writer chanced across her name while doing research into Dinosaurs.
Sarah spin-offs
Sarah has appeared in two television spin-offs, K9 and Company, introducing and co-starring K9 Mark III, (which never got beyond the pilot episode, A Girl's Best Friend) and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Starting in 2002, she appeared in two seasons of an audio series, Sarah Jane Smith. The K9 Annual gives some idea of how the K9 and Company series might have progressed if it had gone to a full series.
Her spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, hosted the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, along with classic era companions Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Jo Grant, K9 and herself. The first use of classic era archival footage in the revived era occurred in the opening pan of her series' pilot, Invasion of the Bane, and the first reference to the UNIT dating controversy occurred in The Lost Boy, before either aired on Doctor Who.
The Sarah Jane Adventures was to have featured additional classic era stars, until cancelled by the death of Elisabeth Sladen. Russell T Davies revealed in issue 445 of Doctor Who Magazine, as confirmed by Sophie Aldred in an interview, that Aldred was to have returned as Ace, both in present-day and flashback sequences which potentially might also have included Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor.
Sarah Jane Smith special
The Doctor Who Magazine special for Holiday 1992 concentrated on Sarah Jane Smith. The article The Roving Reporter details her life from an in-universe perspective, establishing several of the "facts" later corroborated by The Sarah Jane Adventures, except that it uses the "near future" version of UNIT dating.
Continuity
Sarah Jane Smith's return to television in School Reunion contradicts several non-televised stories, as well as the 1983 television story The Five Doctors. Sarah (after returning to Earth and being gifted K9 Mark III) meets the Third Doctor in The Five Doctors. In the Doctor Who Magazine comic Train-Flight, she shared an adventure with the Seventh Doctor. The novels Interference - Book One and Interference - Book Two portray her meeting with the Eighth Doctor and inviting Sam Jones to stay with her. Terrance Dicks' short story Farewells also shows a reconciliation with the Fourth Doctor. School Reunion strongly implies that the Doctor and Sarah never met again after their parting in The Hand of Fear. However The Tenth Doctor stated that he had regenerated "Half a dozen times" since they had last met which, when taking the War Doctor into account, allows for her to have met the Fifth Doctor at some point.
Lawrence Miles' novel Christmas on a Rational Planet refers to Sarah under the name "Sarah Jane Morley" in 1998. The same author's Interference — Books One and Two, set partly in 1997, has the 1997 version of Sarah seeing her future self marrying a man named Paul Morley a few years in her future. This is contradicted by The Sarah Jane Adventures television story The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, in which Sarah has explicitly never been married before her wedding to Peter Dalton.
The short story Lily by Jackie Marshall shows the Fifth Doctor meeting with an older Sarah, who has a granddaughter.
The Sarah Jane Adventures uses background from the The Roving Reporter article, with the change of pushing her birthdate back a few years to fit in better with the idea that the UNIT stories took place in approximately the years of broadcast.
The Big Finish Productions Sarah Jane Smith audio drama series released its final episode only a few weeks before School Reunion was broadcast. Its continuity is not necessarily overridden by the new series, and in fact the absence of K9 from the audio stories is explained in School Reunion, which also establishes that Sarah Jane is still an active investigator, as profiled by Big Finish.
Spelling
Though rendered "Sarah Jane" in closing credits on television and in the bodies of most text-based narratives, Smith's forenames were consistently hyphenated by the letterers of Polystyle Publications, Ltd. Every TV Comic story held that she was "Sarah-Jane".
Other matters
- Sarah's long tenure with the Doctor earned her multiple playable characters in the Doctor Who: Legacy mobile game, including "Young Sarah Jane Smith" intended to represent Sarah as seen in the original run of the show.
- She was originally supposed to depart in The Lost Legion, which would have seen her killed in a crossfire and the Doctor burning her body on a funeral pyre. This concept was abandoned when Elisabeth Sladen was insistent that she didn't want to see her character either married off or killed off.
- She was supposed to return to help the Doctor find The Key to Time. When Elisabeth Sladen refused, Romana was created.
- An early plan for Logopolis had Sarah Jane Smith returning, but this never came to pass. Instead, John Nathan Turner decided that the new companion should be Australian, a character which eventually became Tegan Jovanka.[1]
- In Secrets of the Stars, Martin Trueman says Sarah Jane is a Taurus, making her birthday sometime between 20/21 April and 20/21 May. This is backed up by the fact she said she was three months old when her parents died in August 1951. (TV: The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith) When reading Sarah Jane's zodiac birth chart, Trueman mentions Neptune is in her fifth house. However, a Taurus born in 1951 would have Neptune in their third house (or fourth house, if born before 24 April). Actually, in the fifth house would be Chiron, and potentially the Moon (if born on 24, 25, or 26 April).
- Provided one includes the spin-offs K-9 and Company and The Sarah Jane Adventures, Sarah has the most on-screen appearances of any full-time companion, at 140 episodes.
- After the death of Elisabeth Sladen, another companion, Clara Oswald, was likely named after her, Sladen's middle name being Clara. This may have been referenced in the 50 year trailer for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, where Sarah, looking at the Third Doctor in a glass ball, transitioned into Clara, with Sarah's reflection still in the ball.
Footnotes
External links
- Sarah Jane Smith at Doctor Who
- Sarah Jane Smith on the Doctor Who website
- Sarah Jane Smith at the Doctor Who Legacy wiki
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