Luke Smith (The Sarah Jane Adventures)

Template:Doctorwhocharacter Luke Smith is a fictional character played by Thomas Knight in the British children's science fiction television programme The Sarah Jane Adventures, a spin-off of the long-running series Doctor Who. He first appeared in the premiere episode, "Invasion of the Bane". Within the series' narrative, Luke is a "human archetype", created by an alien species from thousands of DNA samples, who comes to be adopted by the series' heroine, Sarah Jane Smith. Luke is something of a child prodigy, showcasing a remarkable degree of genius but also a level of social ineptitude owing to being born in adolescence and not raised amongst human beings.

Character history

Television

Introduced in the first episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the special episode "Invasion of the Bane", Luke is the adoptive son of Sarah Jane Smith and a creation of an alien species called the Bane. The Bane created Luke from thousands of samples of various people touring the Bubble Shock! factory so that they might run tests on him, the archetypal human. As a result of this, Luke is biologically an ordinary boy (apart from lacking a navel), but also consequently possesses a fantastic superhuman intelligence and exceptional eidetic memory. During one tour of the factory, an alert is set off when visitor Kelsey Harper's (Porsha Lawrence Mavour) mobile phone disrupts the alien Bane Mother. Luke is awakened, and proceeds to escape with visitor Maria Jackson (Yasmin Paige) and her investigative journalist neighbour, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen). After the Bane mother sends assassins to kill the group at their home, they return to confront the Bane mother. Luke himself saves the day by recalling an exceptionally long sequence of numbers necessary to trigger an explosion at the Bubble Shock! factory. In the episode's dénouement, Sarah Jane adopts Luke; her sentient supercomputer Mr Smith (voiced by Alexander Armstrong) forges and distributes all the necessary paperwork to make the adoption seamless. Sarah Jane explains to Luke and Maria that she is a former time traveller, a companion of the Doctor (John Pertwee and Tom Baker) and is vastly experienced in alien adventures and lives a dangerous life investigating alien invasions and schemes on the planet Earth.

Later, the broadcast of Revenge of the Slitheen acts as the first two episodes of series one, which depicts Luke's first day at school and his difficulties as to whether or not to refer to Sarah Jane as his "mum". Luke's troubles at school originate from his inability to lie or to master humour and his apparent genius-level intellect. At school however, he and neighbour Maria meet Clyde Langer (Daniel Anthony), who discovers Luke's unusual identity and his mother's role as a former time traveller and alien investigator. The faculty at Luke's school have been replaced by members of the alien Slitheen family from Raxacoricofallapatorius, and Luke unknowingly assists their plans for destroying Earth. The enemy at school Luke had made, an intelligent boy who envied Luke's effortless superiority, was revealed as a child Slitheen. In the two-part episode's closing, Luke tricks the Slitheen into resetting their machinery and the young Slitheen and his family are trapped in the school which is about to explode after being apprehended by Sarah Jane, and appear to die. Sarah Jane shows regret at not having offered them mercy.

Luke, Maria, Clyde and Sarah Jane later appear in the serials Eye of the Gorgon and Warriors of Kudlak. In the latter Luke and Clyde are noted for their exceptional combat ability (identified playing laser-tag) and are taken by the alien Uvodni for a distant intergalactic war. Sarah Jane manages to teleport on-board the Uvodni spaceship with Maria and attempts to rescue the boys. It is Luke who is able to expose that the Uvodni's war has been over for a decade. Rewarding him for his heroism, one of the other captured children, a girl named Jen, gives Luke his first kiss.

The first series' finale The Lost Boy sees a family alleging Luke is their son. Mr Smith verifies the accuracy of their evidence and contends that perhaps Luke was abducted and altered by the Bane and not grown. Luke is returned to his "parents" and is told his real name is Ashley; Sarah Jane is pronounced a child abductor but is released by UNIT, and outwardly appears resigned to Luke's disappearance despite being heartbroken. Luke's new parents are abusive, later reveal themselves as Slitheen loyal to the mysterious "Xylok" - revealed to be Sarah Jane's mysterious computer Mr Smith. Mr Smith recruited two Slitheen to capture Luke for the purpose of using his latent telekinetic ability to destroy the Earth and release his Xylok brethren. The child Slitheen from Revenge, having survived, has worked to develop a device which exposes telekinetic power, which Mr Smith has Sarah Jane steal under the pretence of analysing it, and uses it in conjunction with Luke to bring the Moon crashing towards Earth. However Clyde is able to get the message out that Mr Smith is evil, and Sarah Jane convinces Mr Smith's betrayed Slitheen conspirators to teleport her to her attic, where she confronts Mr Smith with her robot dog, K-9 (voiced by John Leeson), and uses a computer virus to give him a new benevolent raison d'être. Luke and Sarah Jane, along with Clyde and Maria, are happily reunited in the episode's closing moments.

In 2008, Luke Smith appeared in the penultimate episode and series finale of the fourth series of Doctor Who alongside Sarah Jane and Mr Smith, appearing in the episodes "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End". Bearing witness to a Dalek invasion of Earth, Luke's mother is one of several heroes recruited by former Prime Minister Harriet Jones (Penelope Wilton).

Alternate timelines

In the Sarah Jane Adventures two-parter Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, the timeline is changed by the malevolent Trickster so that Sarah Jane was killed as a child. Consequently, Luke appears to cease to exist in this reality where no one remembers Sarah Jane or Luke apart from Maria Jackson, who conspires to return the world to normal.

Luke is later mentioned in the 2008 Doctor Who episode "Turn Left", in which Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) is assaulted by a member of the "Trickster's Brigade" and consequently never meets the Doctor (David Tennant), resulting in a timeline where he died. In this new reality, Luke is said to have been killed along with Sarah Jane, Maria, Clyde and medical student Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) stopping the events of the episode "Smith and Jones" in place of the Doctor himself. The real timeline is eventually restored by Donna Noble due to the intervention of Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), a traveller from a parallel universe.