Fifty years in the past, Doctor Who’s eleventh season started with “The Time Warrior” and introduced with it a notable sea of modifications. It marked the debut of the present’s iconic “diamond” brand, which has now seen a return for the trendy period with Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. It added an instantly iconic creature to the present’s monster canon in the Sontarans. However its most lasting contribution, and its biggest, will perpetually be Sarah Jane Smith.
From the second we meet Sarah Jane within the first episode of “The Time Warrior,” she’s preventing for a spot in a world that doesn’t need her round. Utilizing her expertise as an investigative reporter—and her aunt’s credentials and identification—she slinks right into a secret lockdown of scientists by UNIT, trying right into a spate of disappearances. She instantly finds herself within the Physician’s orbit—and greater than a match to his dismissive angle, a lot to his personal delight, first when he instantly clocks her ruse, after which when he calls for she make the gathered males their espresso.
There’s a entice you possibly can fall in evangelizing Sarah Jane that she is the first “feminist” companion, and that the ladies that got here earlier than her have been simply there to shriek at monsters and be saved by the boys. However earlier than this, the Physician’s feminine allies—lecturers, scientists, explorers, and geniuses amongst them—have been characters that encompassed a spread and nuance not like many different sci-fi tales of their time, even when the collection did battle to successfully make the most of that selection. It additionally feels reductive of Sarah Jane herself, in a method, that she was outlined by being “not like these different women.” What made Sarah Jane really feel so completely different to the ladies that had come earlier than her was that she simply merely didn’t care what anybody considered her, and above all was allowed to by her tales: she was a girl on a mission, penalties be damned. If there was a narrative to be discovered, Sarah Jane Smith was going to seek out it.
“The Time Warrior” as an entire provides us an excellent encapsulation of Elisabeth Sladen’s vary with the character, one we’d see develop and increase over the subsequent three years of adventures. She will get to be fierce and impartial, thrown out of time as she finds herself stowed away within the TARDIS because the Physician hunts down the reason for the lacking scientists. She will get to be humorous, and charming, navigating being thrust into the Center Ages—utilizing her femininity to get to locations she “shouldn’t” belong, and utilizing that in opposition to her foes to assist save the day. She does certainly get to be a powerful feminist, together with her first villainous foils being characters like medieval tyrant Irongron and Commander Linx and his battle-obsessive machismo, and proves herself fully unwilling to buckle to their makes an attempt to look down on her. Sarah Jane nonetheless does a variety of the everyday issues a companion does—get captured and need assistance—however she’s simply as usually allowed to assist herself and work issues out on her personal phrases, and he or she’s allowed to be flawed alongside the way in which.
The Sarah Jane we meet in “The Time Warrior” instantly has that spark, not simply from Sladen’s magnetic efficiency—it’s nearly not possible to think about she was not the primary selection for the character, however a alternative for actress April Walker after Jon Pertwee bristled at not being consulted together with her casting—however as a result of she seems like, for the primary time, Physician Who has encapsulated a decade’s price of classes about its companions and distilled them right into a single character. It’s much less that Sarah Jane Smith is Physician Who’s first feminist companion, it’s that she’s the primary that simply seems like an actual, full girl, undefined by a singular trait or by her affiliation with the Physician.
It’s no surprise then that Sarah Jane and Sladen have been perpetually Physician Who’s level of name when it got here to imagining spinoffs from the present with out the Time Lord within the highlight. Within the ‘80s after all, we bought the failed try of Okay-9 and Firm, however ultimately these plans could be realized extra totally after Sarah Jane had been reforged within the crucible of Physician Who’s fashionable revival in 2006. “College Reunion” firmly displays on contrasting Sarah Jane with the sorts of companions her legacy within the traditional period went on to encourage by having her brush up in opposition to, after which bond, with Rose Tyler, but it surely additionally reminds us that, as a lot as she missed them in all their years aside, Sarah Jane by no means wanted the Physician to shine—and in her personal method, then bought to indicate that to a brand new era of youngsters in The Sarah Jane Adventures. It will’ve been simple to forged her in a quasi-Physician-ish position within the youngsters’s spinoff—that to be her truest self Sarah Jane simply grew to become an iteration of the Physician, the sage previous guardian to adventurous companions of her personal—however even a long time after the very fact SJA continually reminded us of the nuance and humanity Sladen delivered to the character, and allowed her the uncommon alternative to discover the life left unseen onscreen in spite of everything these years later.
What merciless destiny it’s that Sladen left us with so a lot of these adventures nonetheless left untold. Her death in 2011 broke the center of legions of Physician Who followers throughout generations, due to her return and renaissance within the fashionable period with The Sarah Jane Adventures. But it surely additionally clearly broke Physician Who’s coronary heart, too. For years after the collection was unwilling to simply accept a risk that Sarah Jane was not a part of its world anymore. We couldn’t see her, however she’s Sarah Jane Smith, god dammit—she was nonetheless on the market, nonetheless discovering the tales she craved, nonetheless being this outstanding, fantastic individual. She merely had to be. It took till 2020 for Physician Who to canonize Sladen’s passing alongside Sarah Jane’s, within the quick story “Farewell Sarah Jane,” but it surely took till only a few weeks ago for the present itself to understand it in only a single, heartbreaking line between Ncuti Gatwa’s fifteenth Physician, and his predecessor in David Tennant’s traumatized, weary 14th within the sixtieth anniversary particular “The Giggle”: “Sarah Jane has gone, are you able to imagine that for a second?”
Even in acknowledging it, it’s like Physician Who nonetheless can’t imagine it. Fifty years on from her debut, trying again it’s clear to see why the present would wish to think about that fantasy of a Sarah Jane Smith perpetually—to undo harsh actuality and easily hold the reminiscence of this complicated, loving, adventurous, fierce heroine going and going unseen. However few issues really feel extra becoming a tribute to Sarah Jane’s legacy to let her go, and see her inspiration sooner or later, and the legions of companions and allies that got here after. She made her mark, and we simply should hold coping with it, penalties be damned. How very Sarah Jane, certainly.
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